On Covid

I&#x27;ve seen a few posts like this recently and I have to confess: I don&#x27;t get it. What does &quot;it is time to stop obsessing about Covid&quot; mean? I have small children so I&#x27;m still living in some kind of COVID purgatory but for the majority of the population COVID hasn&#x27;t really been an obsession for quite a while. People are dining indoors, they&#x27;re traveling, socializing... life more or less <i>is</i> back to normal. Schools are shutting down from time to time but that&#x27;s because teachers are getting sick with COVID, hardly because of some irrational &quot;obsession&quot;. If anything it shows we maybe stopped caring too early.<p>Of course, a lot more people are still working remotely, something I consider to be a plus but that I suspect venture capitalists like the author do not. So when I see someone like that advocating “unlearning many of the behaviors we’ve learned in the last two years” I&#x27;m immediately suspicious.<p>&gt; We’ve got other pressing matters to deal with. [...] We have other health care challenges to tackle.<p>One of the most pressing issues with healthcare today is the sheer number of COVID patients overwhelming the ability for a hospital to do anything other than treat COVID. Yes, even with the milder Omicron variant. Again: if anything this suggests that this lack of obsession has come too early, not too late.<p>And has any call to &quot;stop politicizing&quot; something <i>ever</i> worked? That&#x27;s simply not the world we&#x27;re living in (these days, at least). The vaccine is politicized. Masks are politicized. You can’t just wish that away.

&gt; It is time to stop obsessing about Covid. It is time to stop politicizing Covid. It is time to stop tweeting about Covid. It is time to stop reading about Covid. It is time to start healing and it is time to start moving on.<p>Is it?<p>I mean, I’d like that to be true too.<p>…but are things not still a bit too screwed up to be pretending everything is fine quite yet?<p>&gt; The current 7-day moving average of new deaths (1,749) has decreased 0.3% compared with the previous 7-day moving average (1,754). As of January 19, 2022, a total of 856,288 COVID-19 deaths have been reported in the United States.<p>(<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cdc.gov&#x2F;coronavirus&#x2F;2019-ncov&#x2F;covid-data&#x2F;covidview&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cdc.gov&#x2F;coronavirus&#x2F;2019-ncov&#x2F;covid-data&#x2F;covidvi...</a>)

&quot;It is time to stop politicizing Covid.&quot; but their argument amounts to &quot;you need to just stop fighting me and give me what I want&quot;.<p>What exactly do we unlearn when he quotes, &quot;unlearn many of the behaviors we’ve learned in the last two years&quot;? What hardships are we going to go through if we continue to wear masks a little longer than necessary? Do I really need to shake your hand when we greet? Believe it or not people don&#x27;t want to stay at home, not be able to work and they definitely don&#x27;t like being sick and dying. Know when we&#x27;ll go back to normal? When people stop dying so much.<p>This is going to have massive long term effects and I&#x27;m not talking about anything from having worn a mask. I&#x27;m talking about the long term effects of the virus. I&#x27;m positive you&#x27;ll be seeing advertisements for the next 40 years for &quot;Covid treatment centers of America&quot;.<p>If this person really wants to get back to normal maybe we should start by passing legislation now to deny Mediare benefits to anyone suffering from Covid complications who refused to be vaccinated. I&#x27;d be happy to support conservatives in saying, &quot;Why should I be taxed to pay for the results of your decision?&quot; or allow covid complications be be considered a preexisting condition for unvaccinated. Why should I have to pay through my insurance premiums for your ER visit?

Thousands of Americans are losing their lives every day to Covid. New cases are MUCH higher than they were at any point in 2020 or 2021 (though it looks like we may finally have crossed the peak of this wave).<p>I&#x27;m sorry, but it isn&#x27;t over yet. I wish it was. However wishing it or asserting it doesn&#x27;t make it true. This was a sensible argument to make in July 2021 when vaccines were more effective and cases were literally 1&#x2F;10th as prevalent.<p>I encourage the &quot;over it&quot; crowd to talk to the parents of young children, a cancer patient, or literally anyone who works at a hospital.

&gt; It is time to stop obsessing about Covid. It is time to stop politicizing Covid. It is time to stop tweeting about Covid. It is time to stop reading about Covid. It is time to start healing and it is time to start moving on.<p>2,000+ (and increasing) Americans are dying every day from this disease—as bad as the bad old days of Spring 2020. Why is this attitude so pervasive? It doesn&#x27;t seem to be backed by anything aside from boredom of dealing with living in a pandemic.<p>&gt; We have vaccines if you want them. We will have anti-virals if you need them.<p>&gt; And you can wear masks if you are uncomfortable on the plane or the subway.<p>This is the individualistic thinking that&#x27;s caused us so much friction. It&#x27;s no different than &quot;if you want to be a safe driver, don&#x27;t drink and drive!&quot;. The drunk-driver and the unvacced&#x2F;unmasked put all of us at risk. It&#x27;s selfish behavior, and should be treated as such, instead of described as &quot;personal freedom&quot;.<p>&gt; We’ve normalized mask-wearing in the US now and that is a good thing.<p>Have we, though? Across the country, people will harass and threaten you, for no reason other than they&#x27;ve seen you wearing a face mask. I&#x27;ve been mocked in NYC—the bastion of progressivism in the US. What do you think it&#x27;s like wearing a mask in Kansas?

I’ve never met Fred but I’ve read his articles, particularly the Ives mba series ones multiple times.<p>Like any intellectual, they push to grow their knowledge and sometimes venture outside their area of competence. They don’t realize they’re living in a relatively healthy area of society surrounded by people with easy access to medical care and without comorbidities.<p>omnicron is less lethal than the other variants but it still threatens significant lives, takes icu beds and takes an enormous toll on the nurses working with a still steady stream of dying patients.<p>We all want to move on, and Omnicron looks to be peaking soon— the nature of the beast is omnicron has only affected half the people it will.<p>I guess I agree there’s reason to be optimistic. But I don’t think now is the time we stop talking about it.

I don’t think it’s fair to say we ‘have antivirals’ yet, the supply is so low and is not expected to really ever be enough for worldwide demand on the current ramp plans<p>We really need another warp speed project to produce these antivirals<p>Things look good now because omicron is mild, but no guarantee that all of the next variants will be mild . If one of them is severe we will really wish we had warp speeded the antivirals

I feel like I&#x27;m being gaslit. By blog posts, the media, Twitter, social media, my work - everyone.<p>I keep up to date with the latest studies on Covid. Sars-Cov-2 is not a respiratory virus; it&#x27;s a circulatory virus. And its long term effects on the body are not widely understood.<p>Everyone is acting like because Omicron doesn&#x27;t make you cough that Covid is over. But scientists are finding deeply concerning long term effects - neurological effects, telomere and biological aging effects, autoimmune activation, long Covid, micro blood clotting - in a non-trivial percentage of Covid cases. Even asymptomatic and vaccinated individuals.<p>It&#x27;s becoming increasingly apparent that having Covid will result in a lifelong disability for at least some percentage of survivors.<p>But we just ignore that so we can go back to normal? Because Covid is &quot;endemic?&quot; Endemicity was the failure state - it means we gave up. Covid should have never gotten to that point.

&gt; First, we have less severe variants now.<p>Please don&#x27;t assume that future variants will be less and less severe. It&#x27;s what we all want to hear, but this &quot;covid is over&quot; mentality is what will help produce the next, possibly really nasty, variant.

* I am not a doctor, this comment is for entertainment purposes only *<p>I do think it&#x27;s time to start thinking about what the end of the pandemic looks like:<p>1. Sars-Cov-2 will be around forever. People will continue to get sick and die from it.<p>2. There will be more peaks on the infection and death charts. These are real people with real families. It will suck for them.<p>3. At some point one of the peaks will be the highest. 6 months or so after the highest peak is reached, the pandemic will be over. We&#x27;ll only see this in hindsight. It may take a year to tell that the last peak was the highest. The disease won&#x27;t be over, but it won&#x27;t be the single most important thing in everyone&#x27;s life. It will drop from the #1 or #2 cause of death down to #10 or #20, eventually. This may be different around the world. Countries that have had low numbers of infections and deaths may have huge spikes of infection and deaths.<p>4. There will be more variants, and they are not guaranteed to be milder, especially to individual infected people. There may be variants that affect children more. I personally don&#x27;t think that is likely, but there are no guarantees.<p>5. Early in the pandemic, there was a lot of judgment on people who got sick. We&#x27;ll have to let go of this. Speaking down to people doesn&#x27;t help. Judging people doesn&#x27;t help.<p>6. Some people will continue to wear masks for a long time. Some people won&#x27;t feel comfortable in groups. Give them time. Don&#x27;t force the issue. Give them space. I will probably wear a mask in crowded public places for a long time (grocery stores, airports, public transport).<p>7. We&#x27;ll be learning about this disease for a long time. Hopefully government bodies learn how to plan and communicate better. Hopefully we step up our disease vector surveillance and tracking efforts<p>8. We won&#x27;t get common understanding back unless people work for it. Dividing people with moralistic and righteousness-based messages is currently a winning strategy. I won&#x27;t call this a &quot;both sides&quot; thing, I call it a &quot;human nature&quot; thing. I don&#x27;t really understand why some people are standing on &quot;their rights&quot; - I guess it plays better than saying &quot;I&#x27;m scared&quot;

A)wasn’t hard to see covid coming, no insider info was needed. 2 years ago I, an insurance adjuster with no inside info, was freaking out about what was happening in China. B)The unwinding of the covid trade has nothing to do with the current stock market implosion. Peloton and Netflix aren’t down because covid is ending. All stocks were inflated because of a decade of quantitative easing and 0% interest rates. Some were further inflated more due to covid. But the money printer has stopped going brrrr and interest rates are going to rise soon which is being priced into the market. Buckle up, we are heading for recession. Also not hard to see if you are paying attention.

&gt; <i>And you can wear masks if you are uncomfortable on the plane or the subway. We’ve normalized mask-wearing in the US now and that is a good thing.</i><p>I really hope he&#x27;s right and it&#x27;s normalized, but I do fear that many people will go back to not staying at home and not wearing masks when they feel sick. And people who do wear masks, will do so catching lampooning gazes from others.

&gt;Covid was terrible, we are scarred from it, but we cannot let it divide us and we cannot let it drive us crazy. There are more important things facing us and let’s go deal with them now.<p>C-19 is still very fresh in our minds. Let&#x27;s use that to drive action to learn from it and try to ensure the next one is less catastrophic. If we turn our attention away too quickly, this won&#x27;t happen.<p>Even as we speak, we have school districts in the US closed indefinitely* and many nations around the world without testing, vaccines, antivirals or proper healthcare. The future may be here (let&#x27;s hope that this is the beginning of the end while being healthfully paranoid that it may not be), but it is definitely not evenly distributed.<p>* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;detroit.cbslocal.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;01&#x2F;21&#x2F;flint-public-schools-staying-virtual-indefinitely-due-to-large-amount-of-positive-covid-19-cases&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;detroit.cbslocal.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;01&#x2F;21&#x2F;flint-public-schools...</a>

There&#x27;s one interesting thought in the article: that financial markets could be correctly predicting the end of the Covid pandemic phase.<p>The unwinding of the Covid trade doesn&#x27;t necessarily correlate with that, but it&#x27;s a reasonable proposition.<p>Most of the other stuff is opinions and I agree with the sentiment of many of the other commenters: You might be right, and I certainly would like you to be right, but there&#x27;s little hard evidence that you are, and June 2021 was a nice cautionary tale that you very well might not be.

What worries me more is the next time, when there&#x27;s multiple different viruses and the death rate is much higher.<p>Given that there are two possible scenarios for the origin of COVID; natural transmission or lab origin, I find the former to be a far more terrifying prospect. If it were a lab outbreak, that&#x27;s a protocol problem that can be addressed to prevent it in the future. If it was natural transmission, why hasn&#x27;t this happened before? Why isn&#x27;t it happening again right now? Why isn&#x27;t there 10 different viruses at once, that are much more deadly? What happens when that occurs? If this happened naturally, it <i>will</i> happen again. And I just pray that we are prepared.

&quot;The current death rate of COVID in the US is about what a bad flu season would be.&quot;<p>Currently 2000 people a day are dying in the U.S. from COVID. That&#x27;s an annualized rate of 730,000 deaths per year. The CDC estimates that the worst flu season in the last 10 years was 2017-2018 and that Flu caused 52,000 deaths.<p>That puts the current death rate of COVID at 14x where a bad flu season would be.<p>Perhaps it is his judgment that the level of attention COVID is getting is still not warranted, but one must start with the basic facts correct in order to make this judgment.

It really doesn&#x27;t seem we have other &#x27;pressing matters&#x27; , unless those matters are manufactured somehow. Can the world return to its habits of consuming recklessly, traveling like there&#x27;s no tomorrow, office routine every day, low tech schooling and ignore the fact that it&#x27;s largely unprepared for a new pandemic? Maybe, but it would seem more like reckless yoloers than future-thinking people.

Most of the discussion in the threads is around whether covid is over as a pandemic.<p>I think this post gets something else wrong.. The economic story. The claim in the post is &quot;covid is over, so everything will reset to precovid levels.&quot; I think there&#x27;s a much bigger correction happening potentially that will be worse than &quot;we&#x27;re right back where we started&quot;.

People have come to realize a few important things:<p>- Omicron is comparable to a really bad cold for most people<p>- The vaccines reduce the risk of death for only a very short time, then the effect wears off, and they have unknown long-term sequelae<p>- Living like it&#x27;s 2020 is not sustainable

Maybe he’s right. Hopefully he’s right. But personally, I feel like this is just more shortsightedness. I’ve lost track of the number of times my employer thought it was time to get back to the office - only for restrictions to be increased a month later as cases rise. This cycle repeats and people seem to not learn. They get overly optimistic and then kicked in the teeth. Yes, things are better than they’ve been but 4 months ago we also thought it was over until Omicron arrived. How long until another more serious variant comes along that escapes vaccines? Predicting the end of Covid when the world is in the middle&#x2F;late stage of a huge wave seems super shortsighted.