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this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2024
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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.
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.
It is true...we track death rates from the variants and it's going down.
Read the links. The theory that diseases just get weaker over time is false, whatever your intuition is. Just because some diseases happen to have gotten less lethal over time doesn't mean that's how diseases work in general. Others have gotten more lethal.
And it's not true that COVID has gotten weaker over time. Most of us have better immune responses now that they've gone through many rounds of vaccines and/or infections, but the disease isn't itself weaker.
Until it doesn't.
Of course people are dying. And getting long covid. And other organ failures
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.