The day we surrendered to COVID

This new CDC guidance as of Feb 25, 2022, just gives up any attempt at “public health”

Now let’s consider the morality of the CDC’s new guidance, whether it’s based on science, whether it’s dangerous to the public, and its effect on masking as a public health tool.

Short answers, no, yes, poor…

Ed Yong  discusses why American society seems to be accepting of inevitability of thousands of additional COVID deaths.

many aspects of the pandemic work against a social reckoning. The threat—a virus—is invisible, and the damage it inflicts is hidden from public view. With no lapping floodwaters or smoking buildings, the tragedy becomes contestable to a degree that a natural disaster or terrorist attack cannot be. Meanwhile, many of those who witnessed COVID’s ruin are in no position to discuss it.

March 8 from Eric Topol

The Epidemic of Covid Complacency

Isn’t it great? The pandemic is over. We don’t need masks. The virus is contained. Forget about vaccines since they don’t work. The vulnerable are protected. Future variants will be benign. 

The only problem is that none of this is true. Any proclamation that the pandemic is over ignores the potential recrudescence of a new variant with high transmission and immune escape. We will still benefit from using masks for many situations including protecting immunocompromised and vulnerable people, which also includes nearly 100 million Americans who haven’t been vaccinated, many without infection-acquired immunity. We are still averaging nearly 50,000 confirmed new cases a day, at a time when rapid tests are increasingly being used and not factored in. This is more than 3-fold the level of new cases, and 2-fold the number of Covid hospitalizations, than in June 2021. The metrics do not lend any support to the mission of containment accomplished.

Revisiting Paul Farmer’s prediction

That we will just resign ourselves 

Last month, Paul Farmer died…. 

In public health, we have what we call the social determinants of health, that drive sickness and death—forces and policies that create the health disparities we know all too well in the US and around the globe.

Paul borrowed the term “structural violence” from the Swedish sociologist Johan Galtung to define these determinants in an altogether different manner, as “social arrangements that put individuals and populations in harm’s way. The arrangements are structural because they are embedded in the political and economic organization of our social world; they are violent because they cause injury to people (typically, not those responsible for perpetuating such inequalities).

April of last year:

Those whose lives are rarely touched by structural violence are uniquely prone to recommend resignation as a response to it.… Since the beginning of this pandemic, we’ve been mired in a sort of magical thinking about how it will end. Just because smallpox and bubonic plague no longer terrify us, this new pandemic too is sure to blow over and disappear without us exerting ourselves in new ways beyond the development of new vaccines.… But in settings in which all of us are at risk, as is sometimes true of contagion shared through the air we breathe, we must also contemplate containment nihilism—the attitude that preventing contagion simply isn’t worth it. There are a myriad of ways in which structural violence is entrenched, and these forms of resignation had devastating effects on the United States…

There is no “we”…. otherwise I might say that we are totally screwed.  But it’s everyone for himself.  And other people can put us at risk without our consent.