Is Covid-19 pandemic over already?
- Thread starter Saint
- Start date
Jennifer Burns
Registered Member
The pandemic maybe over but the virus is still there lurking.
Perhaps, but opportunistically using it for political agendas (whether leftangelical or rightangelical) may have simply relocated to the long-term effects of COVID, etc. Just giving COV-ploitation a superficially different window dressing.
There are still plenty of COVID related papers being printed in science journals, albeit they might be fewer.
Milking various ideologically profitable _X_'s can be prolonged indefinitely, just like outrages dating to from one to three centuries ago are. Just keeping reinventing or refining the templates of one's particular faction and lowering the standards for suffering, tyranny, distress, alarm, etc -- as well as discriminating new human-related territories ripe for intellectual plundering.
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Yazata
Valued Senior Member
How are covid "cases" being defined? By hospitalization? A positive covid test? Given that a majority of covid infections appear to be asymptomatic, a great deal depends on how one defines these things.
Again, how are covid deaths defined? Deaths that are directly attributable to covid illness? Or deaths of people with multiple comorbities like heart disease or cancer who happened to test positive but were dying anyway for different reasons?
I suspect that a big reason it's "over" is that those in power started to see their own people turning against them and their assumption of draconian emergency powers. They also saw the effects that those emergency restrictions were having on their own countries economies. So they felt that they had to dial it back.
The reason it's over is that pandemics do this naturally. Once most people are immune, it stops spreading rapidly, and it stops killing so many.
It's not over, though. The WHO still consider it a pandemic, which they will do while the case rate remains unpredicatble (which is how they distinguish from an endemic). They still believe the virus could result in significant outbreaks, so it's too early, for them, to consider it endemic. They do, however, no longer consider it a significant global health threat.
In the UK we treat this now pretty much the same as flu, in that we give the vulnerable their regular booster but otherwise noone really mentions it. It's just something we deal with when someone gets it. If you catch it, stay at home, don't mingle, especially among the vulnerable, that sort of thing. Same with flu. Personally I'd consider this to mean that it has reached endemic status (at least within the UK) but even here I think it's still considered a pandemic, as the case rates are still not predictable. When the ONS stopped updating figures on it March this year, the trend was still that of waves of diminishing severity, not the steady-state an endemic has.
In Canada our governments have decided that the pandemic is over at least for now and public safety regulations like mandatory social distancing and masking are no longer required. I try to practice that stuff anyway but virtually no one else here is anymore, however when it was mandatory we had a large minority of the population openly disregarding the law and spreading the disease like wildfire; those people should have lost both every COVID benefit received up to that point and all future benefits, as well as access to the free public healthcare system itself, since they were the ones causing it to nearly break down while getting high and drunk and beating their unwanted kids at the expense of ordinary taxpayers.
Zero Point Native
Registered Member
I didn't know it was a pandemic.
Zero Point Native
Registered Member
No. However, if I didn't get so much entertainment observing human behavior throughout today's global society, especially the U.S. society, I'm sure living under a rock would be preferable.
Oh, and thanks.
