Caving In To COVID

At an excellent article at Time magazine, Martha Lincoln and Nate Holdren state that "Our Third COVID Winter Is Coming. America Isn't Ready."  

They write, "The CDC has issued no updated guidelines to the public. Though new bivalent boosters are available, uptake so far has been shockingly low. Even more seriously, recent federal funding cuts have ended programs providing free COVID tests, vaccines, and treatments—all crucial for protecting American communities and, particularly, vulnerable groups. Because of these cuts, COVID testing labs and manufacturers are reducing their operations. In mid-October, with little warning, the CDC announced the end of its program providing free N95 masks to the public. As the end of the year approaches, it is highly likely that Americans are about to be blindsided by another wave. Without renewed funding to cover these basic necessities, the U.S. could be facing another very dark pandemic winter.

"At the same time, many of our political leaders—having capitulated to their sense that the pandemic is a lost cause—are defaulting to toothless and self-defeating messages. In May 2022, the CDC introduced its new 'Community Levels' metric in a not-so-subtle effort to downplay the reality of continued high national levels of COVID transmission, generating reassuring maps colored mostly mint green. Since July 2021, Biden has repeatedly stated that 'COVID no longer controls our lives'—at this point, a claim that is nearly Kafkaesque, given our enormous national death toll and high rates of reported Long COVID. In September, New York state produced a public service announcement for the Metropolitan Transit Authority showing face masks being worn incorrectly, accompanied by the message 'you do you.'

"The administration has had many opportunities to improve its COVID messaging over the past two years, but there is little sign that they’ve learned anything."

It's really frightening that Americans have simply given up, and that nobody seems to care about elderly people dying and others suffering for years from Long COVID. The gaslighting and minimizing has got to stop before these new variants take control.