COVID lulls aren't being earned by policy; they're being bought with infections and deaths
Celebrating a COVID lull years into the Biden Administration's utter abandonment is woefully out of touch with the science
Cases are low right now for one simple reason: most people have recently had COVID. If not during the massive winter JN.1 surge, which infected an estimated 100 million people, then in the previous variant-soup wave of late summer 2023. COVID infections confer a temporary immunity, meaning that after a big surge- when tens of millions of people are infected in a matter of months- the public has a transient “wall” of immunity that lowers transmission in the short-term. Celebrating lulls that were “bought” with a surge is celebrating the successful mass infection of the public, thousands of new Long COVID cases, overall worsened health of the public, and tens of thousands of dead people. That’s the cost of every lull that wasn’t earned with policy. [...]
75,603 deaths in one year makes COVID the infectious disease killing the most people in the US by far, and likely to remain so. [...]
There are a bunch of modern tools that could easily and quickly reduce infectious disease burden in the US, of both COVID and other airborne viruses (which, it turns out, is many of them). We could upgrade indoor ventilation and filtration standards, introduce Far UVC, provide guaranteed paid sick leave, adopt a new OSHA standard that penalizes employers for failing to mitigate airborne disease in indoor spaces, educate the public about which masks prevent airborne transmission most effectively, provide those masks and tests for free, stop stigmatizing masking and framing it as weird or crazy, help people understand why boosters are critical, stop privatizing tools like the vaccines and tests, push for higher durability vaccines and more accurate RATs, the list goes on.
Instead, we’re doing just one thing: telling people to get vaccinated, with a poor success rate.