Wake Up: COVID's Still Here

From David Axe at The Daily Beast: "COVID Is Ramping Up for a Year of Deadly Surges"

Here's an excerpt:

"COVID is back. But then, it never really left. And the respiratory disease’s late-summer resurgence might be a preview of an even bigger surge this winter.

"Experts say the latest bump in infections, hospitalizations, and deaths in the United States and other countries, in the fourth year of the novel coronavirus pandemic, was inevitable three years ago—when anti-science extremists all over the world began politicizing the then-brand-new vaccines.

"Vaccines that, with wide enough uptake, could’ve strangled COVID and ended the pandemic as early as 2021. Instead, vaccination rates in most countries stalled out well below the 90-percent threshold necessary to produce population-level immunity.

"Disinformation-fueled politics kept us from ending the pandemic two years ago. And it’s still preventing us from ending it today. 'We’re on an absolute collision course once again between public health messaging and politics,' said Irwin Redlener, the founding director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University and an adjunct professor of pediatrics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx.

"That has left the planet with so-called 'hybrid immunity:' a blend of vaccine-induced antibodies and natural antibodies from past infection that’s got a fundamental flaw. Antibodies from vaccines fade fast. And as vax-rates continue to slide, bigger and bigger gaps open in humanity’s hybrid immunity. 'It is because this immunity also decays that we are observing resurgences,' said Edwin Michael, an epidemiologist at the Center for Global Health Infectious Disease Research at the University of South Florida who runs a complex simulation of COVID.

"It’s these gaps COVID has exploited these past couple of years—and will continue to exploit for at least another year, according to experts. 'The above pattern is also expected in 2024,'  Michael said. Meaning the recent surge in infections almost certainly won’t be the last.

"Many U.S. states don’t track COVID cases anymore, eliminating a major source of data that experts use to track trends as the disease spreads and evolves. But wastewater surveillance—basically, sampling sewage in order to measure the concentration of the virus—indicates the summer surge in the United States began in mid-July.

"Over the next six weeks, the average concentration of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in American sewage spiked from 165 copies to 638—a fourfold increase. The spread has plateaued in recent weeks, hinting at a slowdown in transmission of the disease.

"But hospitalizations lag behind infections, as it can take days or weeks for an infection to become life-threatening. The first week of September, weekly COVID hospitalizations spiked to 20,500 in the U.S.—a threefold increase over the most recent low, back in mid-June. COVID deaths in the U.S. likewise spiked in early September, peaking at more than a thousand per week. That’s double the June death rate."

--------

And despite all this, and what we've already endured, there are fewer people now taking precautions. I am seeing fewer masks -- and fewer "Masks required" signs -- even  in medical offices.  Fewer people are getting vaccinated and boosted.  It looks to me as if people have just stopped caring about COVID.