My mom was hospitalized with covid pneumonia as recently as May of this year. And an anti-vaxxer buddy of mine who was in his early 50s with two high school aged kids died from it in late 2021. I mention these not to elicit sympathy, but to highlight that I'm well aware of the damage it has wrought. That said, I'm actually more upbeat about the future than you (haha, big surprise, right?). There are two main reasons I think that covid will fade into the background as time goes on. First, our best recent comparator is the Spanish flu. We think of it as the 1918 flu, but it was actually killing people from 1917 to 1923 (maybe it was 1922...anyway it was a hell of a long time). Eventually it just disappeared. We've seen this movie before. It's an ugly movie to be sure, but eventually the credits roll. Hopefully it won't be six years, but maybe??? The other reason is that the closest scientific comparator we have are the other coronavirus pandemics that have occurred in recorded history. There are at least 2 of the common cold viruses that started as high-death-rate pandemics. The viruses never went away, but either mutated or we just got inured to them or some combination thereof. Again, horror fades to background noise. That's pretty fucking cold comfort for the families of the dead or the people suffering with long term or even permanent lung injuries. In fact it's no kind of comfort. It's just a reminder that no matter how shitty things are, they always get better. This will too. The CDC squandered the best opportunity any has ever had to show how effective government can be when the situation is dire. Their leadership should all be ashamed. Not once in the entire pandemic did I hear an official statement from CDC that said, "This is what we currently believe, but the situation is evolving and we will update you all AND OUR RECOMMENDED POLICIES as facts on the ground change. Bear with us, because we're in the dark and doing our best with limited information." What a shit show. And they'll never be trusted again as long as there is living memory of 2020.
I would argue Russian flu Richard Preston made the case 30 years ago that a successful pathogen is one that increases your participation in its vectors without slowing you down. Evolutionarily speaking, a virus that gives you a runny nose and a cough but doesn't make you skip work is a winner. A virus that kills you and all your friends? Yeah, that's a dead end. And yeah. The CDC is now FEMA but worse. All the hand sanitizer. All the clorox wipes. All the bullshit. One of the cook groups was literally giving away four truckloads of hand sanitizer to anyone who would haul it off because of course they were. Imagine what the past 4 years would have been like with an actual pandemic response team in place.First, our best recent comparator is the Spanish flu.
Totally agree, but I specifically didn’t mention the Russian flu, because it is highly suspected that the Russian flu was actually a Corona virus that may now live on as a cause of the cold. I went Spanish flu because it’s more recent and we know beyond doubt that it was a flu, so it was a good compare/contrast case in my mind. Flu pandemics shaped the initial covid response and lo and behold, we basically wiped out flu in the winter of 2020-2021. Sadly, we weren’t dealing with a droplet but an aerosol transmission, so standing 6 ft apart does fuckall if you’re sharing air. The data were there is February and March, but the CDC had made their choices and there was no trove of data that we’re going to convince them to follow the evidence.