Turns out in fact this pandemic is not in fact "over".
Eventually the population will thin enough that the waves may be smaller and shorter. :this-is-fine:
If they give it a Greek letter they might be expected to actually do something though
Are all these new variants still as infectious as measels, the most infectious disease ever in the history of diseases?
I heard rumours that an upcoming BA.3.0.0 variant will break compatibility with the existing vaccines
Honestly still waiting on that eventually nerf on transmissibility they say is gonna drop any day now...
Capital is like a damn cordycepts fungus puppeting a nation to its doom to reproduce itself
This is towards humoral immunity which is done via people getting naturally infected versus vaccinated, so vaccination is still the best method to reduce covid severity (hoping we eventually get some research indicating it reduces long covid severity as well). Still though this is gonna kill so many damn unvaccinated people (and remember there are folks that wanna get vaccinated but medically cannot so it sucks that we can't stop community spread).
Not to make too much light of it, but it really is unfortunate how we have Covid patch notes now
Yeah I'm thankful I live in a section of the city with a majority of immigrants that all wear their masks in public, I couldn't imagine living in some bumfuck area of Wisconsin with raging :lmayo: threatening to kill some random person cuss they walked into a store wearing a mask.
Right? You feeling the non white people wearing masks better too? It feels like :cracker: are the fucking worst.
Mayos making the great replacement real but self inflicted is always cosmically funny to me
Swear to god it's like some 'They Live' shit walking around some areas and I'm like "mfers do you wanna slowly suffer lung/heart/brain rot after multiple infections?"
:this-is-fine: everyone around me is acting like covid is over
However the spike proteins of the variants show convergent evolution cause of the evolutionary pressure we (or parts of we) put on them. So while it isn't over the strains we see now are either more easily to handle by future immunization/vaccination or are easy to handle by your own body.
So basically what was suspected by some and showed starting 2021 is quite clear cut now. Though new variants might not optimize for that convergent local optimum, but it is rather unlikely.
So while it isn’t over the strains we see now are either more easily to handle by future immunization/vaccination or are easy to handle by your own body.
Last i checked excess morbidity is still pretty much keeping track with last year though, right?
Depends on the location :hero-of-socialist-labor: , but yeah excess morbidity even with "mild" variants is still higher than without. It remains an infection that is not to be taken lightly.
To add to my points about convergent evolution above, when the pandemic began and a year in it was having a field day with the global human host population (except for some countries like Cuba, Vietnam, China, Singapore): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867421010503
That changed. Sadly I don't find the articles I read about it (and honestly I mostly trust the MDs and experts I interact with). Another thing one of them noted was that there are some Covid holdouts in some patient bodies which our own immune system sometimes doesn't handle. It seems there are now promising ways to deal with that and make it so that a few people who had chronic Covid infections will be cured proper. I think the long and post covid research and treatment will be something that will go on till 2030.
Thing is since this impairs humoral immunity it means that as people slowly start doing their due diligence to keep getting vaccinated this is gonna snowball. There is literally no way to functionally vacinate out of this pandemic due to how fucked the governmental response is.
I got my first covid infection like two weeks ago and I never want to go through that shit ever again, ended up in the hospital and I'm triple vaccinated (not that it matters with the new variants). They didn't even fucking test me, so I don't know which variant I got, they don't even care at this point. I'm still congested AF.
Problem is I can't avoid it. They got rid of the mask mandate in schools where my little one goes five days a week, so it's only a matter of time :agony-consuming:
Hopefully they manage to develop a vaccine that covers both covid classic, covid premium, and covid xxxtra-plus but that will probably take years, and who knows if that will ever happen.
