I feel the same. As with so many things in life, I am much more willing to put myself through hell if I know how and when it’s going to end. Like if I get a brutal assignment at work, I’m more likely to take it on if I know it has an end date with some down time afterwards. 2 years in I am now struggling to see the COVID endgame. For a long time the vaccine was the end game. Now a year after mass vaccinations started it’s just… shrug? Everyone 5 and older can get the vax. I don’t know the amount of people who have legitimate medical exemptions but I know it’s incredibly small. I feel bad for them, but I am not sure what the right long term solution is, but I know it’s not complete restrictions on public gatherings.
I guess it’s just a lot tougher this time around because what’s the endgame? It seems variants are going to ebb and flow. The delta wave came and went. Omicron is coming but will go away as well. Knowing this, what’s our endgame here? Rolling lockdowns based on the randomness of variants? That’s going to be tough to swallow. Wait on the next new and improved round of vaccines? Will that work? I just don’t know, and I understand that viruses are unpredictable, but I feel like there has to be at least some plan to get to a point where life stabilizes again.
Better than the upcoming US platform, which is going to be intentionally defunding public health and all basic vaccine requirements in a number of locales.
I don’t think life can be “normal” with no healthcare system, which is unfortunately where we are heading without changes. Hopefully better treatment and better vaxxes help, but also should be making long-term investments in ventilation and normalizing good masks as a ticket for more freedom/activities.
This is 100 percent more mentally taxing with no endpoint, which makes leaderships take a shot and we get back to normal approach/messaging of the past year so destructive.
Life is proceeding mostly normal here. We had a game watch for the wife’s Bearcats last night. The bar was only 1/3ish full and pretty “airy”. But I did make the joke we were going get the ‘Rona.
It’s still a mysterious think. Daughters FIL had symptoms Sunday and poz test Monday. So far no one else at their xmas has pozzed (just got baby’s net pcr back!!). Daughter had symptoms but fine now
I’d love to just get it over with. I have tentative euro travel late in January. Once I get that scheduled I’ll have to lock down so a poz doesn’t disrupt my ability to earn.
Oh and I had some extra allergy stuff this week, but I always have some. No sore throat. Any cough just from a bit of nasal drip.
I’ve shared these animations before, these are updated for full-year 2021. This was the year Covid was supposed to fade away and the first half of the year actually looks pretty promising.
For cases, a red spike of Delta appears in about Missouri, travels down the Mississippi to Louisiana and then explodes from there. You can practically see Biden’s presidency exploding at the same time. Things slowly clear up a bit again, then the omicron wave hits after Thanksgiving. The last week of the year seems like an absolute tsunami, especially in the eastern half of the country.
This is county-level data from Johns Hopkins, all the usual caveats apply. We are totally at the mercy of the way individual states collect, manage, and release their data. Some obvious flaws, missing data, data dumps etc. but still a valuable holistic picture of what happened over the course of the year.
Wow, absolutely no Covid deaths in Florida in the second half of the year. Impressive!
The state of the UK is pretty good at tracking this, Emily.
Admissions ‘with’ and ‘for’ Covid both rising
BBC head of statistics
The total number of people in Covid beds in acute trusts in England stood at just over 8,300 on 28 December, with about two-thirds of those people being treated primarily for their Covid.
The total number has risen by more than by more than 2,400 since the end of November - and most of that rise has come in the last week.
Before Omicron, we would have expected any growth to be split roughly along historical lines - that is mainly in people being treated for their Covid.
That is not happening – the growth has been roughly evenly split by people being treated for Covid (up by 1,262) and people being treated for something else but who have coronavirus (up by 1,191).
So “with Covid” beds are taking up a larger and larger proportion of the total: up from about 25% at the end of November to 33% at the end of December.
This is what would be expected for an infection that is generally milder but more infectious.
Doctors stress that someone “with Covid” still presents treatment challenges: they could be in for a broken leg that has nothing to do with Covid, but still require isolation to prevent outbreaks.
Or they could be someone whose stroke was brought on or made worse by Covid and whose treatment becomes more complicated because of it too.
Note the rise in the red (for covid) recently, presumably due to Omicron.
