Given the known incidence of Long COVID, the current levels of transmission are generating an estimated 200,000 new cases of Long COVID per week.
Holy fuck, it’s making us dumber. That explains a lot!
O RLY?
Fox News has a Coronavirus Category with 5 new stories this month
If you’re going to be an alarmist asshole you might as well avoid adding a bunch of lies to your headlines in addition to it.
although i agree with the post title being a bit incorrect, and your comment of “alarmist asshole” not really called for, its not front page news and that’s because people are over COVID and could care less while people who are at risk from severe infection are getting it and dying still. People are just going to get super sick and say “yeah its a flu covid is over so it cant be that”
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But that’s not the issue, the public is being misinformed from their own cognitive dissonance. They think that since the news is not reporting it anymore or that everyone else is not wearing masks, that it must be over so following rules to prevent the spread of COVID (and, in my perspective, general viruses) that don’t interrupt daily life, like washing hands thoroughly, wearing a mask at places that have large gatherings like the subway during rush hour or the bus, or grocery shopping. During COVID there were mostly people who followed this and some who ate the rabbit of tiktok, but now that the full propaganda machine from russia/china is in full swing, nobody trusts anything their government in the west says unless its a hot button issue like immigrants or expensive goods.
AKA many in the West only believe their governments when they say what they want to hear.
That’s far from the truth
The American Republican Party and CDC would like to have a word with you about that.
i misread your comment. i agree
Given how silo’ed everyone’s media consumption is now a days I find it entirely too plausible that someone could avoid any new COVID news.
I only get my news here!
… is that bad?
“it’s totally silent if i plug my ears and totally dark if i close my eyes”!
thank you for your service. this is the type of post i wish would get downvoted to the floor. if we can’t get basic googleable facts right in !news@lemmy.world how can we have any hope for accuracy in reporting on climate catastrophe and genocide? hawt damb
Definitely everyone should be wearing masks inside in public this time of year.
“If we don’t talk about it anymore, stop testing, stop taking statistics, it’s almost like it doesn’t exist and we can just focus on growth” —Corperate media funders, probably
Getting a flu + covid shot is free or nearly free for every American that has health insurance. It may be less convenient, but there are places to get a free flu and covid vaccines, if Americans do not have health insurance. Anecdote: This year, I had zero side effects from the shots besides a sore arm!
I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t realize the importance of getting a flu shot prior to living through the COVID pandemic. I do my best these days to inform people my age that getting vaccinated is about protecting others who might not fare against the virus as well as you might.
Zero side effects from my last flu + COVID booster. Get it done, even if you’re not personally worried about getting sick.
Getting a flu + covid shot is free or nearly free for every American that has health insurance
that is a lot of conditions for the accessibility in a country notorious for people having no health insurance.
I went to a CVS and received both for free. I wasn’t even asked about insurance.
What?! I went to CVS for my flu shot and had to pay $70 - the Covid booster was $120 or something like that so I ended up skipping it (I’m also uninsured).
Did I just get unlucky?
Really? Dang, I don’t live in a blue state even. I’m sorry you had to do that 🙁 I do live in a particularly red area, in the past I have gotten the covid vaccine earlier than I was supposed to for my age group because nobody was going and they needed to use it.
I live in New York, so that’s probably why. Shame :( enjoy the covid protection!
Did they likely have your insurance on file? I know that when I hit the pharmacy they never need to ask. Even for doctors offices, I’ve found different offices being different levels of worried. Some want to see my card every time, some once a year, and some seem content to try to file and only bother me if that fails later.
I’m not sure. The last time I believe I showed any insurance info at a CVS was a few years ago with a different policy # but same provider and plan. Based on what you stated, they may well have been able to chase my current info down despite some gaps in coverage.
My grocery store(Safeway) even gives 20 percent off groceries if you get your shot with them.
What about masks?
I keep forgetting to get mine, but last year, when I went to schedule mine, they had open appointments starting a half an hour from then. I could’ve practically walked in and gotten a shot right then and there.
This year I made my appointment for my double shot and misread the confirmation/showed up a week early. They just let me get it as a walk in when I showed up.
I was at a pharmacy recently that had a sign saying walk-ins welcome for flu shot. Especially this late in the season.
- It’s less deadly
- It doesn’t sell stories
- People aren’t interested
- People are vaccinated
But it can cause long-term and permanent damage to certain organs, and that is a pretty big reason to care. Unfortunately that fact doesn’t seem to clear the hurdle of point 3 on your list for many people.
Yeah, but so can alcohol, smoking, microplastics, and red meat. Heart disease is back to being the #1 killer of Americans, and humans still prioritize fear over serial killers and Bird Flu rather than heart disease and car accidents.
Humans are notoriously bad at assessing risk. It’s a lot of work to overcome our cognitive biases.
Wonder why heart disease is number one killer of Americans, so hard to figure out /s
You really don’t see the difference between vices that a person chooses to ingest, and people spreading a potentially deadly/debilitating virus to a person unwittingly?
Really?
Yes, I understand the difference between communicable and noncommunicable disease.
The point is that media also rarely talk about these things, and people are not great at taking steps to mitigate their risk. Lots of things we can prevent, or not, still cause us lasting harm. But because those things are mundane, they are not clickbait-y enough to warrant regular coverage.
They’re silent because nobody, except for a handful of terminally online pandemic cosplayers care about it anymore, the rest of us have been living our lives normally for ~4 years now, despite your best efforts to drag us and the economy down by keeping us in pandemic mode for eternity.
Yeah, I wish they’d stop talking about cancer because nobody, except for a handful of terminally online chemotherapy cosplayers care about it anymore, the rest of us have been living our lives normally for ~4 years now, despite your best efforts to drag us and the economy down by keeping us in cancer fearing mode for eternity.
What a lame take.
What an ablest word to use
Yeah definitely not. Language evolves, and words can have several different meanings. It’s clear, from context, which definition I was using.
But keep clutching those pearls and feigning outrage
Will you sacrifice your grandparents for the economy?
Copying from my comment when you posted this on another community:
The issue is that it’s less severe, partially because people have immunity and partially because the virus is weaker (this happens with new illnesses - they get less fatal and spread more).
But wastewater isn’t newsworthy. It never has been. It’s disingenuous to say the media isn’t covering this when ERs are NOT having issues and people aren’t dying.
Many doesn’t the media have mass coverage of the common cold? Why don’t they cover norovirus? Endemic shit that doesn’t kill people isn’t really newsworthy.
Of course people are dying. And getting long covid. And other organ failures
because the virus is weaker (this happens with new illnesses - they get less fatal and spread more).
This isn’t true. It’s a debunked theory from the 1800s. Viruses evolve chaotically, sometimes strengthening sometimes weakening. There’s no general rule that they get weaker and COVID’s reduction in lethality is due to other factors.
That’s slightly disingenuous in that COVID is still very dangerous. The last time I checked the fatalities, which I believe had been those of the first week of November, there were somewhere around 400 deaths from COVID that week and 13 from the flu in that 7 day period.
I remember reading reports about the strains going around at the beginning of last year (Jan of 2023), and those were actually more dangerous and more infectious than the original strains were. But there were nowhere near the casualty rates because the vaccines work. But not everybody can get vaccinated, and every infection still has about a 20% chance of causing Long COVID despite the vaccine, which can be so crippling that it can put you on permanent disability or cause infertility (COVID is also stored in the balls, along with the pee).
The reason that we see the wastewater reports is because that’s the only way that they’re legally allowed to report infection rates. The government mandated that the CDC stop recording other rates sometime during the height of the pandemic, around the time that companies started pushing for an end to lockdowns and for grandparents to die for the economy because their grandkids would thank them for it. Also around the time that DeSantis tried to make the person running the COVID tracking website for Florida fake the numbers so that he could say that COVID was over.
Flu and COVID will peak at different times in given communities comparing apples to oranges if the epitome of disingenuous
As is downplaying the risk and severity of what is very much still a dangerous virus - something that the US government is complicit in doing. Those numbers were national numbers for the US that week. Regardless of what part of the year they peak in, they’re both dangerous, but the CDC is only mandated to be unable to report on cases in any other way except by wastewater for one of them. And that means it’s impossible to get a proper comparison, but I’d say that it’s still a safe bet to guess that COVID peaks during the Christmas season and into the new year when people are inside more. Besides, the facts remain that not only is COVID still killing plenty of people - especially amongst those with medical issues that prevent them from getting vaccinated themselves or leave them immunocompromised - but every infection, regardless of severity, has a high chance of causing permanent damage to any organ. COVID has been found in every single organ in the body, from the brain to the testicles, and many long-term debilitating symptoms have been attributed to COVID infection. Things like brain fog, chronic exhaustion, sleep disorders, infertility, and many more.
Right. Except it does kill people, just like the flu kills people. Large numbers, not nearly as large as several years ago but still large. And the effects of Long COVID look rather bad, too.
So it is newsworthy, by your standards. Meh.
Also, there’s been a January spike every January since 2021. It’s practically clockwork. Which also makes it not really newsworthy, especially as the disease becomes less deadly.
https://www.mwra.com/biobot/biobotdata.htm
On the other hand, I saw plenty of news stories about bad travel this holiday. Which is really, really not newsworthy. But we get those every year.
A virus that kills its host looses a vector to spread. It’s an evolutionary advantage to not kill your host, just leach off them to spread. Look at how well the common cold does.
yes. why would they care? since we have vaccines, covid is just a flu, and it, like a flu, spikes in the winter.
Except the flu doesn’t give you long covid.
It’s crazy how short people’s memories are. And this site, you would think, tends to have higher than average educated users. And they’re still going with the “it’s just the flu” shit (completely ignoring that flus can be horrific and deadly).
This current, modern iteration of Homo Sapiens sapiens deserves extinction.
I think at this point “just a flu” means it’s endemic and the hospitals aren’t overflowing.
That doesnt make it a flu then and makes your point and this statement sound even worse
What point do you think I made?
It’s not literally influenza, but it is a communicable respiratory disease that is endemic at this point and while it can seriously mess you up, the chances are that it’s going to have you laid up for ~a week and you’ll eventually recover.
Still doest make it the flu
It can give you long flu. https://www.health.com/condition/flu/flu-long-term-effects
What doesn’t kill you mutates and tries again.
you could also say the same about flu. why don’t you post about flu suddenly spiking in winter (surprisingly) and nobody caring about it?
- COVID-19 spreads more quickly - it is more contagious and is contagious for longer than the flu.
- Severe illness is more frequent than the flu.
- Long-term effects are far more prevalent and far more severe with COVID.
- The ability for a coronavirus to mutate into a variant that is far more contagious and/or far more severe is much higher.
- The death rate for the flu is dramatically lower - 1.8 / 100k population than COVID with around a 240-300 deaths per 100k population. More than 1 million people have died from COVID in the US alone vs around 4-6000 per year from the Flu.
- People do in fact care about the flu spiking in winter. That’s why vaccines are promoted as much as they are.
is 4 backed by actual research?
isn’t 5 because of the antivaxx things?
and, about 6, yes. people care about the flu, but nobody ever says ‘flu is spiking and corporations don’t care’
You sound like someone who doesn’t really have a point but needs to argue for the sake of arguing. Maybe you can yell at yourself in a mirror - I’m sure it will be more entertaining.
Edit: And to be clear… I wrote something in my prior comment that most people would interpret as wrong without some qualification or context. I decided to leave it partly out of laziness and partly to see if you would catch it and how. But instead of digging in you are just being confrontational.
yes, I kinda like debating. But, i also think i have a point though. Sorry if it seemed like i was some kind of troll.
also, was it point 5? it seems kinda wrong to compare yearly deaths to total.
until tweedle dee and tweedle dumbfuck come in and ban vaccines.
I think the government has a good handle on COVID-19 now with more-or-less mass vaccination, so it’s not going to cause mass deaths and disabilities.
I’m more worried about H5N1 bird flu, more currently the affect it’s having on milk and egg prices (over USD$12/doz. yikes!) and the potential to mutate to direct human-to-human transmission.
From https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/22401-bird-flu dated 12/5/2024
What’s the mortality rate of bird flu?
Overall, the mortality (death) rate for bird flu in humans is high — historically, about half of all people with known infections have died. But most recent cases in the U.S. have been mild.
Except it is causing mass deaths. Have you read the 2024 numbers? Much lower than a few years ago but much higher than zero.
Sure, I’ll bite:
In 2024 up to week 50, there have been 45,447 deaths involving COVID-19. This is compared to 159,940 deaths involving flu or pneumonia and 2,892,661 deaths from all causes in the same time frame.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm
For comparisons sake, traffic accident deaths in the first three quarters of 2024 were 29,135.
Fortunately you can just not eat eggs and not consume milk.
You can’t not breathe air.
Overall, the mortality (death) rate for bird flu in humans is high — historically, about half of all people with known infections have died. But most recent cases in the U.S. have been mild.
This is a good thing in immunology, actually. Diseases with extremely high severity rates tend to not spread through a population because it incapacitates their host too quickly- Ebola is a classic example. Fucking insane severity, but bad to the point where it hasn’t ever spread to epidemic proportions because it’s super easy to recognize then isolate. Ebola outbreaks have been (mostly, sans 2014) limited to small geographic areas of small populations.
This only matters if it incapacitates the host quickly enough that they don’t spread it, which isn’t necessarily closely related to its deadliness. In the 1980s, AIDS was a death sentence, but that didn’t make HIV less transmissible.
$12? Maybe at 711 or some shit, but Aldi by me still has eggs under $3
Depends where you shop and where they source them from. Once that source gets hit and they have to cull their entire flock, you’ll see the price increase.
Easy way to avoid high egg/dairy prices, drastically or completely eliminate your chance of getting it, and reduce the spread of it overall: just don’t eat 'em. Consider making some chili instead.
There is someone out there right now with a family recipe who is incensed at your implication that you can’t put eggs in chili.
I think you mean “for now” rather than “now.” Less than a month from now will likely be a very different story.
Because its taboo, and some viewers/readers will scream about it (or at least disengage) just like they do for global warming.
It makes my skin crawl whenever I see our (Florida) weathermen bite their tongues when looking at, say, a graph of ocean heat content, and thats an order of magnitude worse on big, national, corporate media. COVID is no different.
Then turn that off and switch to a news source that tells the news
What’s a million deaths anyway when you have corporate earnings to pump.
US politicos brag about our economic recovery after COVID lockdowns like it’s not just one point along the optimization curve between “economy” and “deaths”. We had a strong recovery because we sacrificed (and continue to sacrifice) people.
The line goes up.
This is from December 19 but has some interesting info that I hadn’t seen before. It would be more readable if separated from the class war stuff.
“Your corporate media is lying to you because they literally don’t care whether you live or die”
“You right. What’s this about, is it global warming? Trump’s very real plans to literally kill or imprison any American who stands in his way? Health care which reaps a bountiful harvest of corpses every month in the name of profit? PFAS? Microplastic? Good old particulate emissions which are still giving out asthma, COPD, lung cancer, and other forms of disability and early death? The global rise of authoritarianism which they are gradually warming to, more or less explicitly, instead of making even a lukewarm attempt at reporting on honestly? The death of education and the daily misery of every public school teacher, nurse, delivery driver, or anyone else who actually does all the work to keep it all going? Insects dying? Amphibians? Methane? Death of the oceans? TikTok and YouTube and the mental destruction they cause in babies and toddlers too young to resist the harm it causes them?”
“Wastewater Covid is going up.”
“Oh. Well, you’re not even wrong, really. Put it on the pile.”
Look, they don’t make money by curing things. They make money when you have to take lifelong treatments to prevent the disease. The public isn’t directly paying for COVID shots, except they are by paying taxes.
The pharma companies don’t want people to be educated and taking preventative measures, they need more people to get COVID so that they can inspire others to fear getting it just enough to get the vaccine. Pharma pushes more units and the line goes up.
There’s no money to be made in completely eliminating the disease, so they won’t do that.
