The Ghost Pandemic and Your Health
We’re forced to rely more and more on our own initiative to stay safe.
Isn't it great that we beat Covid-19? We ended the public health emergency and declared victory. Nobody's getting sick. Nobody's going to the hospital. Nobody's dying. Isn't it fantastic? Except that …
Here in the real world, COVID-19 cases are on the rise again. “Amid signs of a COVID uptick,” the New York Times says, “researchers brace for the new normal” — which isn’t really normal at all. Nationwide, about 9,000 people were hospitalized for COVID last week. That's about a 12% increase over the week before. And this is happening before the expected fall and winter surge in cases. There’s also a new variant called EG5 which makes up about 17 percent of the cases in this country. (Every new variant has the potential to become more deadly and/or infectious.)
The ghost of this pandemic walks.
If you have heart problems or respiratory conditions, or if you're over 60, you need to stay vigilant. That means using the information that’s still available to you, including the trends for reported cases and the presence of the virus in wastewater for your area. (Scientists consider wastewater an excellent source of information on the disease’s spread.) You need to protect yourself accordingly, even if it means a sense of mild embarrassment if you’re the only one wearing a mask.
When people talk about “the new normal,” they’re talking about a status quo of ongoing illness. They’re saying that Covid and its ongoing mutations are now a permanent part of the country’s public health. But we can still influence its spread and its lethality.
A phrase like “the new normal” encourages passivity — which may be the point.
The CDC no longer reports Covid deaths the way it used to. It doesn’t provide an aggregate number anymore. It’s very hard to track down total fatalities, even for experts. Deaths are broken down by different subgroups in different datasets, but they are never added up. Why the change? And why is there so little ongoing discussion of long COVID, including on what studies suggest may be its effect on children?
Democrats were outraged that Republicans wanted to end the lockdown for political and economic reasons, but it seems the Democrats have done the same thing. Doesn’t a decision like that warrant transparency and a national conversation?
Whatever the reason, we’re forced to rely more and more on our own initiative to stay safe.
The CDC has stopped reporting ongoing deaths, but it does tell us how many total Covid-19 deaths there have been in the United States. That number was 1,136,473 as of last week. That's a lot of people dead in a society that seems to have forgotten that we ever had a pandemic, with a government that is showing little interest in nailing down the ongoing problems and getting ahead of any future pandemics. So it's a frightening situation. I don't know how else to put it.
There are groups there trying to track it, like the People's CDC. But it still astonishes me that the United States of America has already lost more than a million people — more than the states of Wyoming and Vermont put together — and no longer bats an eye about it. Our nation may believe that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, but when it comes to survival you’re apparently on your own.