[ITB]

COVID is never going to be over. So at some point it becomes your decision to move on with your life. And if you decide to continue being protective of a vulnerable loved one, then it’s not the pandemic— it’s the burden of caring for a loved one that many others have to deal with outside of COVID. This is not to disavow your personal difficulties. It’s just that I struggle to understand what else we can do as a society to fight a pandemic that is now endemic. I don’t think there is anything else left.

[jcpst]

Still a pandemic, not an endemic. No scientific body has declared we have moved past the pandemic.

Now our health care systems are at the edge of their breaking point, people disregard spreading it through the community. We’re likely hitting another wave soon. Not good.

In the US, we have had a sustained 400-500 dying a day. The 4th leading cause of death, on average. That’s a huge deal for something that didn’t exist a few years ago, but no one cares.

Then there’s an economy that is being hit hard by millions of people with long covid symptoms that can’t work anymore. We don’t have an answer for that yet. But who cares.

But the sad part is I think you’re probably right. At least in the US, we are rugged individualists. Public health takes a back seat to that, because it would mean changing one’s one behavior for the good of many. So yeah, what else is there to do as a society.

[_gabe_]

> In the US, we have had a sustained 400-500 dying a day.

Are you saying this is still currently happening? If so, I'm curious where you're getting this number from. The CDC says the current 21 day rolling average is 358 deaths[0].

Edit: I just wanted to add, if this is the case then the deaths per 100,000 is approximately 358/300,000,000*100,000 = 0.1193 over that 21 day period. If I did those calculations correctly and the statistics don't fail if I try to calculate a deaths per 100K based off a rolling average, then this means you're about 100 times more likely to die from a car crash[1] then covid right now.

[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidvi...

[1]: https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

[jcpst]

Sorry, I’m not seeing how you figured that.

Ok, so 2566 weekly deaths from covid: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home

That’s 366 per day currently. The crash stats you linked to say 36,096 deaths from crashes in 2019.

366 x 365 = 133,798

So what I see is there’s currently 3.7 times as many people dying from covid in US that from crashes.

[wizofaus]

You can even just ask Google how many road deaths a day there are in the US, and it responds with a sentence from wikipedia including the phrase "an average of 102 per day".

[jcpst]

Not sure why this was downvoted, besides it being an unpopular perspective. If you’re curious, pay attention to what epidemiologists are saying- they are society’s experts on the topic.