> Steering public attention away from the total number of infections and toward serious cases only -- as some Biden advisers have encouraged -- could prove a ch

> Steering public attention away from the total number of infections and toward serious cases only -- as some Biden advisers have encouraged -- could prove a challenge after nearly two years of intense focus on the pandemic's every up and down. At some point this definitely needs to happen. I don't know whether now is that time. But at some point, this thing is going endemic. Reporting purely on case numbers ad infinitum is just going to cause warning fatigue, and people are going to stop listening. Again, I'm not saying I think now is the time to make this transition. But I recall watching a nightly news report over Thanksgiving saying that in vaccinated adults, the rate of hospitalization with Delta-variant breakthrough infections at that point was... 0.0 in 10,000. That's not to say no one is going to the hospital; obviously that's not true. But we run the very real risk of making people stop listening to the warnings. It's like those who live in hurricane regions; after years of hearing "better put your SSN on your arm so we can identify your body," and then evacuating - and coming back with nothing amiss because the storm missed you by 100 miles - they stop listening. And when the big storm does hit, they don't evac because they just roll their eyes and think "Oh, not this again." Obviously you can't stop warning people about incoming hurricanes. And just like in COVID, there are serious complications with hurricane forecasting that cause overwarning to be necessary to some extent. But if there's a serious COVID variant that is actually a ruthless killer that arises, we will need people to listen. I was reading yesterday that the Omicron wave appears to have already peaked in South Africa, just 3 weeks after its identification, and they expect it to peak here by end of January. That is significantly shorter than Delta. On top of that, they are finding the Omicron cases much milder than Delta. They seem to believe that Omicron has migrated out of the lungs and into the upper respiratory tract, where it is less dangerous but better able to spread. A researcher quoted in the article called it a "best-case scenario." Yet we are still having warnings as if the apocalypse is about to come. Again, I don't know what the right timing is for this, and until we figure it out I'm 100% on board with listening to the CDC. But - we don't report on the daily number of cold cases because the cold is part of life. And if/when COVID becomes something that is a mild upper respiratory infection for the near-entirety of non-immuno-compromised people, I think continuing to report daily on how many thousands of new cases we have serves no purpose other than continuing to stoke fear.* And because this is important context for some sorts of people, I am an extremely progressive liberal who is steadfastly continuing to wear masks in public, and have been booster-ed for 2 weeks now. *(This is a concern of mine because, as we know from 9/11 and the terror alert warning system that we now know was totally bogus, but had to deal with on the nightly news for years, there are elements in this country who are happy to take advantage of tragedies to stoke fear.)