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More people are dying with Covid now than were dying most of the previous two years, minus 4 peaks of various waves. I'm happy we're returning to normalcy, but

More people are dying with Covid now than were dying most of the previous two years, minus 4 peaks of various waves. I'm happy we're returning to normalcy, but it just makes me wonder "why now?" It's like the government and big business just decided overnight to declare "mission accomplished" when nothing substantial has changed. Last summer, for example, could have been the reopening, and we'd have better data and "science" to support it.

basisword 5y ago
>> More people are dying with Covid now than were dying most of the previous two years, minus 4 peaks of various waves. You can’t just exclude the data that disproves your point. The peaks were the original variant, Alpha(?), Delta and now Omicron. Deaths in this wave are extremely lower than in any other wave due to severity, immunity and vaccinations. Hospital stays are reduced and shorter. The original point of avoiding covid en masse was to prevent the healthcare system from being overwhelmed. Although it varies from place to place the healthcare systems in highly vaccinated countries are no longer seeing that kind of pressure even with high case numbers (still lots of pressure but not enough to risk overwhelming the system entirely).
- katabatic 5y ago
  Deaths are currently at around 2,000 PER DAY in the United States. That is not in any way, shape, or form "extremely lower" than earlier waves. The Omicron wave was equal to the initial wave in severity, and we're still not out of it.
  - basisword 5y ago
    Interesting. Deaths in the US are still a lot higher than I realised. I was basing my thoughts on UK data which I’m more familiar with and I thought would be relatively similar to the US but surprisingly not.
    - dboreham 5y ago
      No politicians and news channels in the UK telling people not to get vaccinated.
  - nojito 5y ago
    Deaths from COVID is different from Deaths with COVID.
    - Lascaille 5y ago
      If they're not dying from COVID then why are they dying in such excessive numbers? Because whether you believe it's COVID or not, you're stacking up ~1500 more bodies per day than you were three years ago. What's the cause?
- jb1991 5y ago
- kemayo 5y ago
  I think you're both right, but sort-of arguing different issues. Here's two points: * Covid deaths per-day are at-or-near their highest ever levels * the current wave is less dangerous These sound contradictory, but aren't: deaths are high, death rates aren't -- if you catch Covid you're more likely to survive than ever before, but you're also more likely to catch Covid. This is because we're (currently) in a wave of a high-infection low-mortality variant.
gtirloni 5y ago
> More people are dying with Covid now than were dying most of the previous two years That's surprising. Do you have a source?
- nostromo 5y ago
  https://i.imgur.com/aO5zJwL.png https://i.imgur.com/aO5zJwL.png
  - hn_version_0023 5y ago
    Is a random image on imgur really a source? Really?
    - aaronbrethorst 5y ago
      It's from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- jb1991 5y ago
  That stat has been widely reported, in the U.S. at least. There are more deaths from Covid occurring currently in the U.S. on an average daily basis that at any prior time in the pandemic. https://edition.cnn.com/2022/02/24/health/covid-deaths-now-younger-unvaccinated/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2022/02/24/health/covid-deaths-now-y... NY Times, Washington Post, and other media have similar stories.
  - quickthrowman 5y ago
    From Covid != With Covid
  - nradov 5y ago
    That is misinformation. The current US daily death rate is significantly lower than the January 2021 peak. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/#graph-deaths-daily https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/#graph-...
deleted 5y ago
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throwaway6734 5y ago
The only thing that matters is death rate for those that are vaccinated.
- kaczordon 5y ago
  I remember when we used to care about hospitals overflowing.
  - GoodJokes 5y ago
  - nradov 5y ago
    We didn't care about hospitals being overwhelmed by influenza in 2018. https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patients/ https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie...
  - standardUser 5y ago
    There is hardly any threat of that at this point. At least not in areas with high vaccination rates.
  - diogenescynic 5y ago
    I feel like that was always BS and just a scam to rationalize our poorly resourced yet highly paid hospitals. Wait times at ER were always bad, the pandemic just made it slightly more bad. The underlying problem was always there.
- lokar 5y ago
  What about the death rate for people who can't be vaccinated?
  - Lascaille 5y ago
    Not everyone survives. That's life. You can't expect society to shut down to protect the tiny percentage of people who can't be vaccinated or are immunocompromised. That's never been an expectation of society before so why would it be one now?
kemayo 5y ago
My understanding (which could be wrong!) is that the current absolute death amounts are high, but the actual rate of deaths per-infection is low. This is because the trend in variants has (so far) been towards more-infectious but less-fatal, along with improved knowledge of treatments... so we have a vast number of people infected but they're mostly-surviving. Said deaths are also extremely focused in unvaccinated people, meaning that outside of the immunocompromised (whose situation sucks here), it's at least mostly people who chose the risk.
gdulli 5y ago
Deaths and cases are both dropping sharply, and since deaths lag cases, the deaths should be expected to continue to drop steadily for a few more weeks. Something substantial has definitely changed. That's not the same as knowing there won't be future variants or spikes. But if there's ever a time to get back to normal, now would be it. It's not total victory and may never be, but at some point we either declare that we can live with this while having normal lives, or we're tacitly declaring that we never intend to.
- xienze 5y ago
  > Something substantial has definitely changed. Yeah, it's called midterm elections are coming up and the Democrats are staring down the barrel of getting absolutely crushed if they continue on with mask and vaccine mandate policies.
  - gdulli 5y ago
    That's nonsense. Mandates are going away because (1) mid-January was the predictable post-holiday travel and gathering spike, (2) several weeks later the numbers were predictably down, and then (3) lawmakers needed several more weeks to feel safe enough about the trend to act on it. Lifting mandates now leaves enough time for another spike (followed by more restrictions) to arise before the elections. By your thinking that timing would be a disaster. Lifting mandates 6-7 months from now would maximize the impact on the election and minimize the risk that restrictions will have to be rolled back before the election. Everything is obviously political, but the conclusion that lifting mandates right now is strategically tied to elections in 8 months is so far from logical that I can't imagine arriving at it, only starting with it. The covid numbers provide a simple, logical explanation.
    - infamouscow 5y ago
      What peer-reviewed research is being used to inform policymakers on this recent shift? And I'm referring to COVID-19 reports, not political ones.
  - criddell 5y ago
WithinReason 5y ago
> More people are dying with Covid now than were dying most of the previous two years, minus 4 peaks of various waves. There is a huge difference between "dying with COVID" and "dying from COVID".
- colinplamondon 5y ago
  That was true from the beginning. Legacy bureaucracies like the CDC are just recognizing what was clear in 2020.
  - space_fountain 5y ago
    Well, excess mortality was high earlier and is now low. The current Covid strain is both more infectious and less deadly so we should expect this change
  - WithinReason 5y ago
    The last wave amplified the difference. In the UK for example the last wave doesn't show up in the ICU patients chart [1], while it's clearly seen in the death chart [2]. The last wave seems to simultaneously correspond to a sudden spike in death statistics [2] and a sudden drop in excess mortality [3]. Point being, "deaths with COVID" doesn't mean a causal relationship any more, you need to look at other statistics to see how many people are dying as a result of COVID. [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?facet=none&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Color+by+test+positivity=false&country=GBR&Metric=ICU+patients https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor... [2]: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?facet=none&Metric=Confirmed+deaths&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Color+by+test+positivity=false&country=~GBR https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor... [3]: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?facet=none&Metric=Excess+mortality+%28%25%29&Interval=Weekly&Relative+to+Population=true&Color+by+test+positivity=false&country=~GBR https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
  - majormajor 5y ago
    It's quantitatively much different now.[0] There's been a crowd pushing the idea that the hospitalization numbers are highly misleading for two years now, and they're trying to claim that they were right all along based on numbers that are only happening after a year or vaccination campaigns and a less-lung-oriented strain emerging. "About 7% of L.A. County’s total staffed ICU beds are taken up by COVID-19 patients, compared with 15% during the summer Delta wave and more than 50% last winter. " "In early November — before Omicron swept around the world, and Delta was still dominant — 75% of coronavirus-positive patients countywide were in the hospital for COVID-related medical issues, Ferrer said. By late December, the same was true for 45% of coronavirus-positive hospitalized patients, Ferrer estimated." "During last winter’s COVID-19 surge, about 80% of coronavirus-positive patients in the emergency department at L.A. County-USC Medical Center were being admitted to the hospital, and nearly half of those went to the ICU, Spellberg said. Now, about a third of coronavirus-positive patients are admitted, and 20% to 25% are going to the ICU." [0] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-01-07/fewer-coronavirus-positive-people-are-severely-ill-in-l-a-county https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-01-07/fewer-co...
throwaway743 5y ago
Who knows if the next variant will be milder (common talking point about how viruses evolve to be more contagious/less deadly) or worst (the unknown and media fear mongering... not to mean theyre equivalent), but if the trend points to anything it's that things peak twice a year. Around January/February and August/September. Not to mention, America is in an election year and the economy is tetering, so everything is about optics and giving people some feeling of autonomy over their lives at the very least :/
nradov 5y ago
Why not now? We have to return to normalcy eventually so what do we gain by waiting? Everyone is going to be exposed to the virus occasionally so whether that happens in an office or somewhere else hardly matters.
- guelo 5y ago
  I refuse to get infected no matter how much political people seem to want me to
  - gdulli 5y ago
    I could refuse to get into any car accidents. But refusing to drive or be a passenger or pedestrian near cars isn't a way I can live my life. So, ultimately, I've decided that I don't refuse to get into any car accidents.
  - Lascaille 5y ago
    >I refuse to get infected Avoiding COVID just isn't possible unless you're prepared to curtail social interactions to the point at which you're barely living. I leave my apartment about once a week (yay depression) yet I still got Omicron. You're deluding yourself if you think it's avoidable.
gfodor 5y ago
It’s not like they just decided - they did, they actually just decided. The change in cloth mask guidance proves it: no new data, we always knew they were ineffective.
- veilrap 5y ago
  Cloth masks are estimated to be in the 50-60% effectiveness range. To me, that's quite effective, not ineffective. Especially when applied across an entire population.
  - krona 5y ago
    I think you're off by an order of magnitude (5-6%) if you're referring to the risk of infection vs not wearing a basic, correctly worn surgical mask. And this is pre-omicron; omicron is far more transmissible. Happy to be corrected.
    - bduerst 5y ago
      You're both right - by the time Omnicron rolled around it was evident that cloth masks were not as effective at preventing transmission. That said, cloth masks were always recommended for gen pop given the low availability of N95 surgical masks. They're still better than nothing, and we're still learning more about this disease so it's subject to change even further as more observations are made.
  - infamouscow 5y ago
    Estimated effectiveness is not empirical evidence. There's nothing scientific about just guessing random numbers.
  - m0llusk 5y ago
    That 50% plus number is highly contested. The study cited for that does not necessarily support that conclusion.
  - gfodor 5y ago
    No. Cloth masks are understudied and probably don’t do much. What does do a lot, probably, is a dynamic where millions of people wearing ineffective masks thinking they are effective, and making bad choices entirely due to that bad assumption, like not wearing an N95, closing distance with people, or going indoors when it could have been avoided. https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/mask-studies-reach-a-new-scientific?s=r https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/mask-studies-reach-a...
lazide 5y ago
[flagged]
chadash 5y ago
Deaths tend to lag behind peaks of cases and we recently passed the peak of our biggest wave by far (official numbers for this peak are around 800k/day in the US, vs 250k for previous peak in jan 2021, but this doesn't account for the likelihood that many cases didn't get reported due to widely available at-home testing and other factors). Deaths going forward for people who catch it now will probably be far lower.
newsbinator 5y ago
I didn't use death rate for supporting closing and I won't use death rate for supporting opening. Covid's main threats for most people are: * Filling up hospitals to the point they stop functioning (that's been true here in Canada). * Putting 10% ~ 20% of workers everywhere, including hospitals, out of commission for weeks at a time while they're acutely sick with Covid or infectious to others. * Disabling some large % of people temporarily or permanently due to lingering symptoms of the virus. The death rate for covid is significant but not substantial enough in itself to cause the world to lock down. The points above though, are.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  > The death rate for covid is significant but not substantial enough in itself to cause the world to lock down. The points above though, are. For USA the death rate is still higher than times when we were not RTO.
  - 30367286 5y ago
    The people dying of COVID and the people working from home are different cohorts. We have a vaccine, anti-virals, and natural immunity. Will the WFH cohort see an increase in deaths due to RTO? Certainly. We’ll also see more car accidents. The world has never been free of risk, and we are now emerging from the pandemic with a newly integrated risk model for this disease. It’s going to be touch and go for a while — years — but it’s important to remember that flattening the curve was always the goal. COVID Zero was never in play.
    - endisneigh 5y ago
      > The people dying of COVID and the people working from home are different cohorts. We have a vaccine, anti-virals, and natural immunity Well, yes. The people dying were always generally unvaccinated.
- majormajor 5y ago
  > * Putting 10% ~ 20% of workers everywhere, including hospitals, out of commission for weeks at a time while they're acutely sick with Covid or infectious to others. This one seems like a dubious point to me, services during the early-2020 lockdowns were much more impacted than they were during the Omicron spike which saw much less enforced lockdown but much more "shit, all our employees are sick" closures. Completely agree with the hospitalization concerns, and I would add that the calculations also changed a lot re: protecting others after widespread vaccine availability.
endisneigh 5y ago
RTO should’ve begun the minute it was shown that vaccines stop deaths. given that you have to be vaccines to rto at Apple it didn’t really make sense to wait this long anyway
- lokar 5y ago
  And do you have to RTO if you have an immunocompromised family member at home?
  - mikestew 5y ago
    You should probably ask your employer rather than some random on the internet.
throwaway1777 5y ago
Politics plain and simple. COVID protocols are very unpopular at this point and not every effective. Florida and Texas are having big inflows, california and New York huge outflows. Whatever your viewpoint this is the fact politicians see. And yes taxes and cost of living are a huge driving force not only COVID, but as long as remote work goes on people will keep moving to low cost of living and low tax states.
- gedy 5y ago
  Elections coming up as well
  - tharne 5y ago
    > Elections coming up as well This is the big one. Ever since the upset in the Virginia governor's race, the Democrats have been very eager to end COVID restrictions no matter what. The Republicans have never cared about COVID so, at the moment there's a rare bipartisan unity on this issue.
    - birken 5y ago
      So for example, you consider the 3 Democratic Governors of California, Oregon and Washington ending their state's various mask mandates 4+ months after the VA election to be "eager to end COVID restrictions no matter what". Do you think the Omicron wave might have had more to do with the COVID restrictions than the VA governor's race?
      - tharne 5y ago
        > Do you think the Omicron wave might have had more to do with the COVID restrictions than the VA governor's race? I don't. The case numbers in many, if not most areas, are still higher than they were during the delta wave in the Summer and Fall that led to the lockdowns and restrictions being implemented in the first place. If this were truly just about the data then you'd expect the restrictions to lift once the case counts returned to pre-delta numbers. Edit/Clarification: I say this as someone is/was generally been in favor of a very cautious response to COVID.
miked85 5y ago
The midterm elections is the only reason.
aimor 5y ago
I have the same questions. We've seen government and businesses try to be aggressive on relaxing lockdown policy in the past, and then quickly re-implement restrictions when the next wave of infections hit. Multiple times I've seen schools, government, offices set terms that had to be met before moving to the next 'phase' and every time those terms avoided their expectations they just declared that it was a bad plan to begin with, scrapped it, and moved on to implement whatever policy they wanted regardless of the current status. I check https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html to track how things are going. I don't like that, with ~2,000 people dying each day and Spring Break around the corner, the strongest push to reopen is happening now. "Why now?" Just speculation, but: Because midterm elections are this year, because consumer spending is up and inflation is rising and the government wants to encourage the economy to remain strong, because businesses are seeing lower performance from employees especially regarding sensitive work, because ICUs have capacity and vaccines are readily available.
jjulius 5y ago
>More people are dying with Covid now than were dying most of the previous two years, minus 4 peaks of various waves. And these people are overwhelmingly unvaccinated. At this point, it's been a year that vaccines have been available. You're not going to change their minds, and the rest of us - heartless as this sounds - shouldn't continue to be held back just because of other people's stubbornness. They made the decision not to get it, they should live with whatever consequences may result from that choice. Edit: I realize that some people can't get it for various medical reasons, and I empathize with them. It's everyone else I'm referring to.
mylons 5y ago
not in the united states. the early 2021 was the peak, and was never surpassed in the recent uptick.
rhino369 5y ago
It's not "mission accomplished." It's more like our withdraw from Afghanistan--admission of defeat. Omicron was like the Taliban taking Kabul in 2 weeks. We just lost to Covid--at least for now. Essentially everyone has an immune response to covid now--either by vaccination or because you already had. That is why case number are cratering. The immune response effectiveness will fade, but all evidence points to long lasting protection against severe infections. Last summer was the re-opening a la "mission accomplished." Then omicron evaded previous immune responses. Why won't that happen again? It might, but less of the population is vulnerable b/c Omicron spread to more of the population. There was a big group of unvaccined protected by heard immunity. Post Omicron how many people haven't gotten a vaccine or covid? Probably less than 10% of the public.
jmull 5y ago
The death rate is a trailing indicator so it's not the right thing to look at when considering what you should do in the future.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  I find the ‘cases going up’ and ‘cases going down’ indicators quite compelling.
  - astrange 5y ago
    Wastewater surveillance is even better than that.
    - Aeolun 5y ago
      Apparently, yeah, but we don’t have that indicator in Japan (as far as I know).
m0llusk 5y ago
Numbers of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths are all way down and still dropping. Vaccinations have turned out to be highly effective both against severe disease and long COVID. The Omicron variant is far less deadly than the Delta variant and has almost completely replaced the Delta variant.
nrmitchi 5y ago
> More people are dying with Covid now than were dying most of the previous two years, minus 4 peaks of various waves. I'm not disagreeing with your point, however IIRC this is heavily concentrated among unvaccinated individuals, and I believe that Apple/Google/etc employees are overwhelmingly vaccinated. I would be shocked if these companies didn't have accommodation processes in place for individuals who are still at high risk. I'm not disagreeing with your overall point, but there's no guarantee that the same trends/statistics exist in this sub-population.
giarc 5y ago
Likely vaccination rate.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
furyofantares 5y ago
A lot has changed in the last year? Loads of people have been vaccinated that weren't a year ago (even if they were eligible then). Kids became eligible to be vaccinated only a few months ago, which even if it wasn't actually risky to them it was a major concern for many parents. Right about that time, the omicron wave hit, and ever since late december we've known it was very likely we'd peak and then crash on cases. So we didn't return to normal last summer because loads of people weren't vaccinated yet, and kids weren't eligible. We didn't return once kids became eligible because omicron was looming. And we didn't return during omicron peak because hospitals were overwhelmed.
- theoldlove 5y ago
  Under 5s still aren’t eligible.
pmarreck 5y ago
but it’s all rural Trumpist counties at this point; ostensibly, the people lying in the bed they made for themselves don’t typically work for Apple
- tanseydavid 5y ago
  >> it’s all rural Trumpist counties at this point Do you have any idea how parochial you sound when you make generalizations in this manner?
  - pmarreck 5y ago
    You’re right, a 3 times higher infection and death rate in Trump-voting counties may be insufficiently absolute for a broad generalization
briandear 5y ago
Midterm elections coming up. The (political) science has changed.
icedchai 5y ago
Yes, deaths are higher than they were the same time a year ago. Cases are still very high. Things only look better relative to the January peak. Everyone just decided they had enough.
s9w 5y ago
GoodJokes 5y ago
[dead]
8note 5y ago
Deaths lag hospitalizations which lag infections. Policy is operating on what the expected amount of deaths in 3+weeks will be, not the current amount There are also differences now in how many people are either vaccinated, or have recovered from covid vs a year ago
mherdeg 5y ago
Something I read[1] that resonated a few months ago: > Dying from Covid is more or less optional at this point. If you want to remove the risk of dying, get the vaccine. If you want to take the risk, don’t. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29561158 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29561158 This is a bit reductive -- people in some countries may not have easy access to the vaccine, people whose immune systems don't respond to the vaccine may need still-scarce antiviral treatment to maintain a mortality rate on par with the vaccinated, and in the US there may still be people who genuinely cannot logistically manage getting the vaccine. But this is something I've been thinking about a bit lately: when will be the "tipping point" after which more than 50% of all US covid deaths will have been a personal choice? We're at about 950k deaths now. The "everyone will be eligible to schedule an appointment" date was in April 2021 (at about 570k deaths). So maybe another 3 months?
- lamontcg 5y ago
  Every wave now is also very likely to be less of a strain on the health care system than the last. The virulence of the virus isn't changing that much, the biggest effect is that most people have gained immunity. The fact that 90% of the people in hospitals are unvaccinated though while vaccination rates are at least >60% everywhere is a sign though that the unvaccinated population still has failed to achieve a level of immunity equal to vaccination. They're going to just accumulate immunity the hard way though with more human casualties and death. There isn't a lot to be done about that though. Eventually the rates of unvaccinated in the hospital with each wave will start reflecting the population rate of unvaccinated and we'll be at pretty much 100% seroprevalence finally.
sharken 5y ago
Some numbers to back up that claim would be nice. Make sure to discern between cases where COVID is the primary reason for dying and where it is not. As a data point, Denmark have been without restrictions since first of February 2022. There are still 20.000 infections daily, but most with very mild symptoms. There are 1.600 hospitalized, which is considerable more than December, where there were about 600. So number wise it doesn't make a lot of sense to remove restrictions, but I'm personally very happy having the old normal back.
throwawaymanbot 5y ago
JeremyNT 5y ago
> Last summer, for example, could have been the reopening, and we'd have better data and "science" to support it. Things trended well last summer, but 1) everybody expects a lull in warm weather and 2) vaccination numbers were still low. It was reasonable at the time to hold onto precautions hoping the unvaccinated people would come around before fall. And good thing too, because delta proved to be a real pickle before being displaced by omicron. At some point, it becomes obvious that a large number of people just won't bother getting vaccinated, and you can't realistically keep asking the entire country to go out of their way to protect the people who won't protect themselves. We'll see another wave in the fall, either omicron or some new variant, and hopefully our vaccines will stay ahead of it.
fundad 5y ago
It seems like a crucial thing to deal with surges is to dramatically increase hospital capacity. Making health care universal would fund it. What blocks any expensive investments in US standard of living is the cost. The costs is so high, it's almost as much as the cost of inaction and that's too damn much. See also climate change.
seanp2k2 5y ago
agree; when I look at https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2022/03/friday-february-employment-report.html https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2022/03/friday-february-e... I don’t come to the conclusion that now is the best time.
waah 5y ago
As hospital occupancy goes down, the major public health reason for restrictions goes down as well.
lasereyes136 5y ago
The pandemic is over because we as a society have decided it is over and most people accept the number of covid deaths as part of being in society. Numbers and science matter less than what we are willing to live with. People that don't agree will continue to protect themselves as much as possible.
closeparen 5y ago
The difference is now almost everyone dying is unvaccinated, and almost everyone unvaccinated (in the Western industrialized world) is that way by choice. We cannot force these people to vaccinate for their own good, but neither can we be held hostage by them.
standardUser 5y ago
The threat to hospitals is essentially gone now that immunity is widespread thanks to vaccines and recoveries. All that most restrictions were ever intended to do was to stop everyone getting sick at once, which would have resulted in mass casualties from lack of healthcare resources.
adrianmonk 5y ago
> makes me wonder "why now?" Today's episode of the Scientific American's podcast "COVID Quickly" (https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/the-push-to-move-past-the-pandemic-covid-quickly-episode-25/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/the-push-...) had an interview with Flu pandemic historian John Barry. (The interview is the second half of the episode.) They asked him how he'd define when a pandemic is over, and he said there's a science aspect to it, but it's largely when "people stop paying attention to it". They also said the 1918 flu pandemic had 4 waves, and most of the US put restrictions in for wave 2. For wave 3, some areas did and some didn't. By wave 4, which was approximately as severe, NO cities put restrictions in place. Some histories of the flu pandemic don't even mention the 4th wave. We seem to be following a very similar pattern now. Maybe 2 years (and/or 4 waves) is roughly society's attention span for a pandemic.
- graeme 5y ago
  That’s contingent on the number of waves being four and the number of years being two though. I have no expectation covid is done. At a certain point you have to pay attention if it’s bad enough.
- graeme 5y ago
  That’s contingent on the number of waves being four and the number of years being two though. I have no expectation covid is done. At a certain point you have to pay attention if it’s bad enough. (It isn’t now)
  - tialaramex 5y ago
    That influenza virus didn't go anywhere, it's still with us, but people stopped caring after the worst of the pandemic. COVID-19 will now do the same. That's a bad but predictable outcome of short term thinking.
    - dntrkv 5y ago
      Hasn't influenza been around for like 1000+ years?
dehrmann 5y ago
> More people are dying with Covid now than were dying most of the previous two years Assuming you meant "from," not "with," this is clearly not the case in Santa Clara county, the location of Apple's HQ. The current daily average is 5 per day. It briefly peaked at 10, but the non-surge average is around 2. As others have said, deaths lag, so they'll likely be back to ~3 by April.
nickm12 5y ago
There are reasons to believe "this time is different". Omicron was a huge wave through the population that had the potential to consume all the "fuel" (non-immune people), making future waves much more difficult to get started. I don't think anyone thinks covid is going away, but moving to an endemic stage.

basisword 5y ago

>> More people are dying with Covid now than were dying most of the previous two years, minus 4 peaks of various waves. You can’t just exclude the data that disproves your point. The peaks were the original variant, Alpha(?), Delta and now Omicron. Deaths in this wave are extremely lower than in any other wave due to severity, immunity and vaccinations. Hospital stays are reduced and shorter. The original point of avoiding covid en masse was to prevent the healthcare system from being overwhelmed. Although it varies from place to place the healthcare systems in highly vaccinated countries are no longer seeing that kind of pressure even with high case numbers (still lots of pressure but not enough to risk overwhelming the system entirely).

katabatic 5y ago
Deaths are currently at around 2,000 PER DAY in the United States. That is not in any way, shape, or form "extremely lower" than earlier waves. The Omicron wave was equal to the initial wave in severity, and we're still not out of it.
- basisword 5y ago
  Interesting. Deaths in the US are still a lot higher than I realised. I was basing my thoughts on UK data which I’m more familiar with and I thought would be relatively similar to the US but surprisingly not.
  - dboreham 5y ago
    No politicians and news channels in the UK telling people not to get vaccinated.
- nojito 5y ago
  Deaths from COVID is different from Deaths with COVID.
  - Lascaille 5y ago
    If they're not dying from COVID then why are they dying in such excessive numbers? Because whether you believe it's COVID or not, you're stacking up ~1500 more bodies per day than you were three years ago. What's the cause?
jb1991 5y ago
kemayo 5y ago
I think you're both right, but sort-of arguing different issues. Here's two points: * Covid deaths per-day are at-or-near their highest ever levels * the current wave is less dangerous These sound contradictory, but aren't: deaths are high, death rates aren't -- if you catch Covid you're more likely to survive than ever before, but you're also more likely to catch Covid. This is because we're (currently) in a wave of a high-infection low-mortality variant.

gtirloni 5y ago

> More people are dying with Covid now than were dying most of the previous two years That's surprising. Do you have a source?

nostromo 5y ago
https://i.imgur.com/aO5zJwL.png https://i.imgur.com/aO5zJwL.png
- hn_version_0023 5y ago
  Is a random image on imgur really a source? Really?
  - aaronbrethorst 5y ago
    It's from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
jb1991 5y ago
That stat has been widely reported, in the U.S. at least. There are more deaths from Covid occurring currently in the U.S. on an average daily basis that at any prior time in the pandemic. https://edition.cnn.com/2022/02/24/health/covid-deaths-now-younger-unvaccinated/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2022/02/24/health/covid-deaths-now-y... NY Times, Washington Post, and other media have similar stories.
- quickthrowman 5y ago
  From Covid != With Covid
- nradov 5y ago
  That is misinformation. The current US daily death rate is significantly lower than the January 2021 peak. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/#graph-deaths-daily https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/#graph-...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

throwaway6734 5y ago

The only thing that matters is death rate for those that are vaccinated.

kaczordon 5y ago
I remember when we used to care about hospitals overflowing.
- GoodJokes 5y ago
- nradov 5y ago
  We didn't care about hospitals being overwhelmed by influenza in 2018. https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patients/ https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie...
- standardUser 5y ago
  There is hardly any threat of that at this point. At least not in areas with high vaccination rates.
- diogenescynic 5y ago
  I feel like that was always BS and just a scam to rationalize our poorly resourced yet highly paid hospitals. Wait times at ER were always bad, the pandemic just made it slightly more bad. The underlying problem was always there.
lokar 5y ago
What about the death rate for people who can't be vaccinated?
- Lascaille 5y ago
  Not everyone survives. That's life. You can't expect society to shut down to protect the tiny percentage of people who can't be vaccinated or are immunocompromised. That's never been an expectation of society before so why would it be one now?

kemayo 5y ago

My understanding (which could be wrong!) is that the current absolute death amounts are high, but the actual rate of deaths per-infection is low. This is because the trend in variants has (so far) been towards more-infectious but less-fatal, along with improved knowledge of treatments... so we have a vast number of people infected but they're mostly-surviving. Said deaths are also extremely focused in unvaccinated people, meaning that outside of the immunocompromised (whose situation sucks here), it's at least mostly people who chose the risk.

gdulli 5y ago

Deaths and cases are both dropping sharply, and since deaths lag cases, the deaths should be expected to continue to drop steadily for a few more weeks. Something substantial has definitely changed. That's not the same as knowing there won't be future variants or spikes. But if there's ever a time to get back to normal, now would be it. It's not total victory and may never be, but at some point we either declare that we can live with this while having normal lives, or we're tacitly declaring that we never intend to.

xienze 5y ago
> Something substantial has definitely changed. Yeah, it's called midterm elections are coming up and the Democrats are staring down the barrel of getting absolutely crushed if they continue on with mask and vaccine mandate policies.
- gdulli 5y ago
  That's nonsense. Mandates are going away because (1) mid-January was the predictable post-holiday travel and gathering spike, (2) several weeks later the numbers were predictably down, and then (3) lawmakers needed several more weeks to feel safe enough about the trend to act on it. Lifting mandates now leaves enough time for another spike (followed by more restrictions) to arise before the elections. By your thinking that timing would be a disaster. Lifting mandates 6-7 months from now would maximize the impact on the election and minimize the risk that restrictions will have to be rolled back before the election. Everything is obviously political, but the conclusion that lifting mandates right now is strategically tied to elections in 8 months is so far from logical that I can't imagine arriving at it, only starting with it. The covid numbers provide a simple, logical explanation.
  - infamouscow 5y ago
    What peer-reviewed research is being used to inform policymakers on this recent shift? And I'm referring to COVID-19 reports, not political ones.
- criddell 5y ago

WithinReason 5y ago

> More people are dying with Covid now than were dying most of the previous two years, minus 4 peaks of various waves. There is a huge difference between "dying with COVID" and "dying from COVID".

colinplamondon 5y ago
That was true from the beginning. Legacy bureaucracies like the CDC are just recognizing what was clear in 2020.
- space_fountain 5y ago
  Well, excess mortality was high earlier and is now low. The current Covid strain is both more infectious and less deadly so we should expect this change
- WithinReason 5y ago
  The last wave amplified the difference. In the UK for example the last wave doesn't show up in the ICU patients chart [1], while it's clearly seen in the death chart [2]. The last wave seems to simultaneously correspond to a sudden spike in death statistics [2] and a sudden drop in excess mortality [3]. Point being, "deaths with COVID" doesn't mean a causal relationship any more, you need to look at other statistics to see how many people are dying as a result of COVID. [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?facet=none&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Color+by+test+positivity=false&country=GBR&Metric=ICU+patients https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor... [2]: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?facet=none&Metric=Confirmed+deaths&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Color+by+test+positivity=false&country=~GBR https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor... [3]: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?facet=none&Metric=Excess+mortality+%28%25%29&Interval=Weekly&Relative+to+Population=true&Color+by+test+positivity=false&country=~GBR https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
- majormajor 5y ago
  It's quantitatively much different now.[0] There's been a crowd pushing the idea that the hospitalization numbers are highly misleading for two years now, and they're trying to claim that they were right all along based on numbers that are only happening after a year or vaccination campaigns and a less-lung-oriented strain emerging. "About 7% of L.A. County’s total staffed ICU beds are taken up by COVID-19 patients, compared with 15% during the summer Delta wave and more than 50% last winter. " "In early November — before Omicron swept around the world, and Delta was still dominant — 75% of coronavirus-positive patients countywide were in the hospital for COVID-related medical issues, Ferrer said. By late December, the same was true for 45% of coronavirus-positive hospitalized patients, Ferrer estimated." "During last winter’s COVID-19 surge, about 80% of coronavirus-positive patients in the emergency department at L.A. County-USC Medical Center were being admitted to the hospital, and nearly half of those went to the ICU, Spellberg said. Now, about a third of coronavirus-positive patients are admitted, and 20% to 25% are going to the ICU." [0] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-01-07/fewer-coronavirus-positive-people-are-severely-ill-in-l-a-county https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-01-07/fewer-co...

throwaway743 5y ago

Who knows if the next variant will be milder (common talking point about how viruses evolve to be more contagious/less deadly) or worst (the unknown and media fear mongering... not to mean theyre equivalent), but if the trend points to anything it's that things peak twice a year. Around January/February and August/September. Not to mention, America is in an election year and the economy is tetering, so everything is about optics and giving people some feeling of autonomy over their lives at the very least :/

nradov 5y ago

Why not now? We have to return to normalcy eventually so what do we gain by waiting? Everyone is going to be exposed to the virus occasionally so whether that happens in an office or somewhere else hardly matters.

guelo 5y ago
I refuse to get infected no matter how much political people seem to want me to
- gdulli 5y ago
  I could refuse to get into any car accidents. But refusing to drive or be a passenger or pedestrian near cars isn't a way I can live my life. So, ultimately, I've decided that I don't refuse to get into any car accidents.
- Lascaille 5y ago
  >I refuse to get infected Avoiding COVID just isn't possible unless you're prepared to curtail social interactions to the point at which you're barely living. I leave my apartment about once a week (yay depression) yet I still got Omicron. You're deluding yourself if you think it's avoidable.

gfodor 5y ago

It’s not like they just decided - they did, they actually just decided. The change in cloth mask guidance proves it: no new data, we always knew they were ineffective.

veilrap 5y ago
Cloth masks are estimated to be in the 50-60% effectiveness range. To me, that's quite effective, not ineffective. Especially when applied across an entire population.
- krona 5y ago
  I think you're off by an order of magnitude (5-6%) if you're referring to the risk of infection vs not wearing a basic, correctly worn surgical mask. And this is pre-omicron; omicron is far more transmissible. Happy to be corrected.
  - bduerst 5y ago
    You're both right - by the time Omnicron rolled around it was evident that cloth masks were not as effective at preventing transmission. That said, cloth masks were always recommended for gen pop given the low availability of N95 surgical masks. They're still better than nothing, and we're still learning more about this disease so it's subject to change even further as more observations are made.
- infamouscow 5y ago
  Estimated effectiveness is not empirical evidence. There's nothing scientific about just guessing random numbers.
- m0llusk 5y ago
  That 50% plus number is highly contested. The study cited for that does not necessarily support that conclusion.
- gfodor 5y ago
  No. Cloth masks are understudied and probably don’t do much. What does do a lot, probably, is a dynamic where millions of people wearing ineffective masks thinking they are effective, and making bad choices entirely due to that bad assumption, like not wearing an N95, closing distance with people, or going indoors when it could have been avoided. https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/mask-studies-reach-a-new-scientific?s=r https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/mask-studies-reach-a...

lazide 5y ago

[flagged]

chadash 5y ago

Deaths tend to lag behind peaks of cases and we recently passed the peak of our biggest wave by far (official numbers for this peak are around 800k/day in the US, vs 250k for previous peak in jan 2021, but this doesn't account for the likelihood that many cases didn't get reported due to widely available at-home testing and other factors). Deaths going forward for people who catch it now will probably be far lower.

newsbinator 5y ago

I didn't use death rate for supporting closing and I won't use death rate for supporting opening. Covid's main threats for most people are: * Filling up hospitals to the point they stop functioning (that's been true here in Canada). * Putting 10% ~ 20% of workers everywhere, including hospitals, out of commission for weeks at a time while they're acutely sick with Covid or infectious to others. * Disabling some large % of people temporarily or permanently due to lingering symptoms of the virus. The death rate for covid is significant but not substantial enough in itself to cause the world to lock down. The points above though, are.

endisneigh 5y ago
> The death rate for covid is significant but not substantial enough in itself to cause the world to lock down. The points above though, are. For USA the death rate is still higher than times when we were not RTO.
- 30367286 5y ago
  The people dying of COVID and the people working from home are different cohorts. We have a vaccine, anti-virals, and natural immunity. Will the WFH cohort see an increase in deaths due to RTO? Certainly. We’ll also see more car accidents. The world has never been free of risk, and we are now emerging from the pandemic with a newly integrated risk model for this disease. It’s going to be touch and go for a while — years — but it’s important to remember that flattening the curve was always the goal. COVID Zero was never in play.
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    > The people dying of COVID and the people working from home are different cohorts. We have a vaccine, anti-virals, and natural immunity Well, yes. The people dying were always generally unvaccinated.
majormajor 5y ago
> * Putting 10% ~ 20% of workers everywhere, including hospitals, out of commission for weeks at a time while they're acutely sick with Covid or infectious to others. This one seems like a dubious point to me, services during the early-2020 lockdowns were much more impacted than they were during the Omicron spike which saw much less enforced lockdown but much more "shit, all our employees are sick" closures. Completely agree with the hospitalization concerns, and I would add that the calculations also changed a lot re: protecting others after widespread vaccine availability.

endisneigh 5y ago

RTO should’ve begun the minute it was shown that vaccines stop deaths. given that you have to be vaccines to rto at Apple it didn’t really make sense to wait this long anyway

lokar 5y ago
And do you have to RTO if you have an immunocompromised family member at home?
- mikestew 5y ago
  You should probably ask your employer rather than some random on the internet.

throwaway1777 5y ago

Politics plain and simple. COVID protocols are very unpopular at this point and not every effective. Florida and Texas are having big inflows, california and New York huge outflows. Whatever your viewpoint this is the fact politicians see. And yes taxes and cost of living are a huge driving force not only COVID, but as long as remote work goes on people will keep moving to low cost of living and low tax states.

gedy 5y ago
Elections coming up as well
- tharne 5y ago
  > Elections coming up as well This is the big one. Ever since the upset in the Virginia governor's race, the Democrats have been very eager to end COVID restrictions no matter what. The Republicans have never cared about COVID so, at the moment there's a rare bipartisan unity on this issue.
  - birken 5y ago
    So for example, you consider the 3 Democratic Governors of California, Oregon and Washington ending their state's various mask mandates 4+ months after the VA election to be "eager to end COVID restrictions no matter what". Do you think the Omicron wave might have had more to do with the COVID restrictions than the VA governor's race?
    - tharne 5y ago
      > Do you think the Omicron wave might have had more to do with the COVID restrictions than the VA governor's race? I don't. The case numbers in many, if not most areas, are still higher than they were during the delta wave in the Summer and Fall that led to the lockdowns and restrictions being implemented in the first place. If this were truly just about the data then you'd expect the restrictions to lift once the case counts returned to pre-delta numbers. Edit/Clarification: I say this as someone is/was generally been in favor of a very cautious response to COVID.

miked85 5y ago

The midterm elections is the only reason.

aimor 5y ago

I have the same questions. We've seen government and businesses try to be aggressive on relaxing lockdown policy in the past, and then quickly re-implement restrictions when the next wave of infections hit. Multiple times I've seen schools, government, offices set terms that had to be met before moving to the next 'phase' and every time those terms avoided their expectations they just declared that it was a bad plan to begin with, scrapped it, and moved on to implement whatever policy they wanted regardless of the current status. I check https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html to track how things are going. I don't like that, with ~2,000 people dying each day and Spring Break around the corner, the strongest push to reopen is happening now. "Why now?" Just speculation, but: Because midterm elections are this year, because consumer spending is up and inflation is rising and the government wants to encourage the economy to remain strong, because businesses are seeing lower performance from employees especially regarding sensitive work, because ICUs have capacity and vaccines are readily available.

jjulius 5y ago

>More people are dying with Covid now than were dying most of the previous two years, minus 4 peaks of various waves. And these people are overwhelmingly unvaccinated. At this point, it's been a year that vaccines have been available. You're not going to change their minds, and the rest of us - heartless as this sounds - shouldn't continue to be held back just because of other people's stubbornness. They made the decision not to get it, they should live with whatever consequences may result from that choice. Edit: I realize that some people can't get it for various medical reasons, and I empathize with them. It's everyone else I'm referring to.

mylons 5y ago

not in the united states. the early 2021 was the peak, and was never surpassed in the recent uptick.

rhino369 5y ago

It's not "mission accomplished." It's more like our withdraw from Afghanistan--admission of defeat. Omicron was like the Taliban taking Kabul in 2 weeks. We just lost to Covid--at least for now. Essentially everyone has an immune response to covid now--either by vaccination or because you already had. That is why case number are cratering. The immune response effectiveness will fade, but all evidence points to long lasting protection against severe infections. Last summer was the re-opening a la "mission accomplished." Then omicron evaded previous immune responses. Why won't that happen again? It might, but less of the population is vulnerable b/c Omicron spread to more of the population. There was a big group of unvaccined protected by heard immunity. Post Omicron how many people haven't gotten a vaccine or covid? Probably less than 10% of the public.

jmull 5y ago

The death rate is a trailing indicator so it's not the right thing to look at when considering what you should do in the future.

Aeolun 5y ago
I find the ‘cases going up’ and ‘cases going down’ indicators quite compelling.
- astrange 5y ago
  Wastewater surveillance is even better than that.
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    Apparently, yeah, but we don’t have that indicator in Japan (as far as I know).

m0llusk 5y ago

Numbers of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths are all way down and still dropping. Vaccinations have turned out to be highly effective both against severe disease and long COVID. The Omicron variant is far less deadly than the Delta variant and has almost completely replaced the Delta variant.

nrmitchi 5y ago

> More people are dying with Covid now than were dying most of the previous two years, minus 4 peaks of various waves. I'm not disagreeing with your point, however IIRC this is heavily concentrated among unvaccinated individuals, and I believe that Apple/Google/etc employees are overwhelmingly vaccinated. I would be shocked if these companies didn't have accommodation processes in place for individuals who are still at high risk. I'm not disagreeing with your overall point, but there's no guarantee that the same trends/statistics exist in this sub-population.

giarc 5y ago

Likely vaccination rate.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

furyofantares 5y ago

A lot has changed in the last year? Loads of people have been vaccinated that weren't a year ago (even if they were eligible then). Kids became eligible to be vaccinated only a few months ago, which even if it wasn't actually risky to them it was a major concern for many parents. Right about that time, the omicron wave hit, and ever since late december we've known it was very likely we'd peak and then crash on cases. So we didn't return to normal last summer because loads of people weren't vaccinated yet, and kids weren't eligible. We didn't return once kids became eligible because omicron was looming. And we didn't return during omicron peak because hospitals were overwhelmed.

theoldlove 5y ago
Under 5s still aren’t eligible.

pmarreck 5y ago

but it’s all rural Trumpist counties at this point; ostensibly, the people lying in the bed they made for themselves don’t typically work for Apple

tanseydavid 5y ago
>> it’s all rural Trumpist counties at this point Do you have any idea how parochial you sound when you make generalizations in this manner?
- pmarreck 5y ago
  You’re right, a 3 times higher infection and death rate in Trump-voting counties may be insufficiently absolute for a broad generalization

briandear 5y ago

Midterm elections coming up. The (political) science has changed.

icedchai 5y ago

Yes, deaths are higher than they were the same time a year ago. Cases are still very high. Things only look better relative to the January peak. Everyone just decided they had enough.

s9w 5y ago

GoodJokes 5y ago

[dead]

8note 5y ago

Deaths lag hospitalizations which lag infections. Policy is operating on what the expected amount of deaths in 3+weeks will be, not the current amount There are also differences now in how many people are either vaccinated, or have recovered from covid vs a year ago

mherdeg 5y ago

Something I read[1] that resonated a few months ago: > Dying from Covid is more or less optional at this point. If you want to remove the risk of dying, get the vaccine. If you want to take the risk, don’t. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29561158 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29561158 This is a bit reductive -- people in some countries may not have easy access to the vaccine, people whose immune systems don't respond to the vaccine may need still-scarce antiviral treatment to maintain a mortality rate on par with the vaccinated, and in the US there may still be people who genuinely cannot logistically manage getting the vaccine. But this is something I've been thinking about a bit lately: when will be the "tipping point" after which more than 50% of all US covid deaths will have been a personal choice? We're at about 950k deaths now. The "everyone will be eligible to schedule an appointment" date was in April 2021 (at about 570k deaths). So maybe another 3 months?

lamontcg 5y ago
Every wave now is also very likely to be less of a strain on the health care system than the last. The virulence of the virus isn't changing that much, the biggest effect is that most people have gained immunity. The fact that 90% of the people in hospitals are unvaccinated though while vaccination rates are at least >60% everywhere is a sign though that the unvaccinated population still has failed to achieve a level of immunity equal to vaccination. They're going to just accumulate immunity the hard way though with more human casualties and death. There isn't a lot to be done about that though. Eventually the rates of unvaccinated in the hospital with each wave will start reflecting the population rate of unvaccinated and we'll be at pretty much 100% seroprevalence finally.

sharken 5y ago

Some numbers to back up that claim would be nice. Make sure to discern between cases where COVID is the primary reason for dying and where it is not. As a data point, Denmark have been without restrictions since first of February 2022. There are still 20.000 infections daily, but most with very mild symptoms. There are 1.600 hospitalized, which is considerable more than December, where there were about 600. So number wise it doesn't make a lot of sense to remove restrictions, but I'm personally very happy having the old normal back.

throwawaymanbot 5y ago

JeremyNT 5y ago

> Last summer, for example, could have been the reopening, and we'd have better data and "science" to support it. Things trended well last summer, but 1) everybody expects a lull in warm weather and 2) vaccination numbers were still low. It was reasonable at the time to hold onto precautions hoping the unvaccinated people would come around before fall. And good thing too, because delta proved to be a real pickle before being displaced by omicron. At some point, it becomes obvious that a large number of people just won't bother getting vaccinated, and you can't realistically keep asking the entire country to go out of their way to protect the people who won't protect themselves. We'll see another wave in the fall, either omicron or some new variant, and hopefully our vaccines will stay ahead of it.

fundad 5y ago

It seems like a crucial thing to deal with surges is to dramatically increase hospital capacity. Making health care universal would fund it. What blocks any expensive investments in US standard of living is the cost. The costs is so high, it's almost as much as the cost of inaction and that's too damn much. See also climate change.

seanp2k2 5y ago

agree; when I look at https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2022/03/friday-february-employment-report.html https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2022/03/friday-february-e... I don’t come to the conclusion that now is the best time.

waah 5y ago

As hospital occupancy goes down, the major public health reason for restrictions goes down as well.

lasereyes136 5y ago

The pandemic is over because we as a society have decided it is over and most people accept the number of covid deaths as part of being in society. Numbers and science matter less than what we are willing to live with. People that don't agree will continue to protect themselves as much as possible.

closeparen 5y ago

The difference is now almost everyone dying is unvaccinated, and almost everyone unvaccinated (in the Western industrialized world) is that way by choice. We cannot force these people to vaccinate for their own good, but neither can we be held hostage by them.

standardUser 5y ago

The threat to hospitals is essentially gone now that immunity is widespread thanks to vaccines and recoveries. All that most restrictions were ever intended to do was to stop everyone getting sick at once, which would have resulted in mass casualties from lack of healthcare resources.

adrianmonk 5y ago

> makes me wonder "why now?" Today's episode of the Scientific American's podcast "COVID Quickly" (https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/the-push-to-move-past-the-pandemic-covid-quickly-episode-25/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/the-push-...) had an interview with Flu pandemic historian John Barry. (The interview is the second half of the episode.) They asked him how he'd define when a pandemic is over, and he said there's a science aspect to it, but it's largely when "people stop paying attention to it". They also said the 1918 flu pandemic had 4 waves, and most of the US put restrictions in for wave 2. For wave 3, some areas did and some didn't. By wave 4, which was approximately as severe, NO cities put restrictions in place. Some histories of the flu pandemic don't even mention the 4th wave. We seem to be following a very similar pattern now. Maybe 2 years (and/or 4 waves) is roughly society's attention span for a pandemic.

graeme 5y ago
That’s contingent on the number of waves being four and the number of years being two though. I have no expectation covid is done. At a certain point you have to pay attention if it’s bad enough.
graeme 5y ago
That’s contingent on the number of waves being four and the number of years being two though. I have no expectation covid is done. At a certain point you have to pay attention if it’s bad enough. (It isn’t now)
- tialaramex 5y ago
  That influenza virus didn't go anywhere, it's still with us, but people stopped caring after the worst of the pandemic. COVID-19 will now do the same. That's a bad but predictable outcome of short term thinking.
  - dntrkv 5y ago
    Hasn't influenza been around for like 1000+ years?

dehrmann 5y ago

> More people are dying with Covid now than were dying most of the previous two years Assuming you meant "from," not "with," this is clearly not the case in Santa Clara county, the location of Apple's HQ. The current daily average is 5 per day. It briefly peaked at 10, but the non-surge average is around 2. As others have said, deaths lag, so they'll likely be back to ~3 by April.

nickm12 5y ago

There are reasons to believe "this time is different". Omicron was a huge wave through the population that had the potential to consume all the "fuel" (non-immune people), making future waves much more difficult to get started. I don't think anyone thinks covid is going away, but moving to an endemic stage.