When Portland resident Jessica Rogers-Hall came down with COVID last month – her third time – she followed the Oregon Health Authority’s advice.
She isolated when she truly felt sick. And after a day, when she began to feel better, she donned a mask and returned to her job as a life coach for people experiencing homelessness.
Others in her circle of friends and associates, including a restaurant worker and an airline pilot, who tested positive around the same time, also followed Oregon’s recommendations: Those with fevers or other debilitating symptoms stayed home for a couple days, but returned to work after that.
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But Oregon’s policy went unnoticed by many until last month, when California followed suit and a much more public national debate erupted among epidemiologists and regular folks alike. Many are pondering the question: Is COVID so mild for most that the public needn’t stay home when they still might be contagious? And further, should public health officials give their blessing for residents to return to their daily lives – to work, school, public transit, the gym, stores, social gatherings and the like?
This week, The Washington Post reported that the CDC may follow Oregon’s and California’s lead by revising its guidelines in coming months – possibly airing the idea for public feedback in April. The move would be what’s seen as a more practical approach toward what people are willing to do, in an era when COVID doesn’t pose a serious threat to most because of vaccinations or previous infections.
We’re going to be swimming in this crap until it mutates enough to kill us off.
Thanks stupid people, your inability to follow basic precautions will doom us all.
Maybe this gets us before extreme weather and climate events… we’ve got options
it’s nice to have options!
My understanding: Viruses don’t mutate to kill hosts. They mutate to survive and be passed on. It’ll continue to get more mild but more contagious.
That’s why the flu from the 1919 pandemic was bad but short lived. COVID is following a similar pattern.
Different than bacteria and antibiotics. That’s a mess of our own making.
They don’t mutate for any purpose, that’s just what happens over time. What direction it goes can vary with how the mutation affects survival. On average not killing a host works out better, but that doesn’t imply that’s a preferred path nor exclude a mutation that gets worse for the hosts as well as the disease.
My understanding: Viruses don’t mutate to kill hosts. They mutate to survive and be passed on. It’ll continue to get more mild but more contagious. That’s why the flu from the 1919 pandemic was bad but short lived. COVID is following a similar pattern.
This simply isn’t true, also, (already healthy people) not dying from it doesn’t mean it’s all fine and dandy once you’ve recovered from the “flu” (or at all):
https://www.greaterkashmir.com/health/study-decodes-link-between-long-covid-and-chronic-fatigue/
https://www.donotpanic.news/p/why-covid-can-never-be-just-a-cold
It’ll continue to get more mild but more contagious.
Hope you’re right, and we’re not keeping a bunch of marginal immune systems alive through heroic efforts just to breed more variations.
viruses don’t mutate for any single reason, it’s not directed evolution, it’s errors in transcribing their own gene code in duplication.
That’s what most evolution is. For sure. Not imagining there a will behind it
Mutations don’t happen for a reason, but long term trends in widespread mutations absolutely do happen for a reason, namely that they meaningfully contribute to the organism’s ability to reproduce.
Killing the host doesn’t do that nearly as effectively as giving the host a minor cold that doesn’t even make them feel like they need to change their routine.
Same could be said about influenza in general. We’re never getting rid of it tbh
That is silly fearmongering. COVID will now always be a part of our lives and while it can be serious for some people it is absolutely not serious enough to warrant dictating our lives.
Rabies is part of our lives, should it be ignored? Polio?
you’re blithely accepting millions of deaths because it merely causes you inconvenience.
We’re not ignoring COVID. There are vaccines and they are updated according to the virus’ mutations. The flu killed tens of thousands of people every single year even before COVID and all we did was work on vaccines. As of right now COVID is quite similar to the flu, so why should we treat it any different? Anyone who is worried can still wear masks and distance themselves. But it’s crazy to ask that of everybody when there is so very little to gain. We would lose way more in the process, it’s simply not worth it.
when there is so very little to gain.
if we killed this by universal immunization and easy precautions (masks, handwashing) that would make sense. 1,190,000 dead in the us alone? It didn’t need to be this bad. And the system is still dealing with covid patients. People are still dying of it today.
We would lose way more in the process
lose what exactly? please lay it out, because weighed against the dead and the shit still circulating, what does that mean?
I see we’re just going full speed ahead with the whole attitude that Long Covid doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter.
.
I think it’s a more fundamental element of human nature that people don’t want to be nconvenienced for the sake of slightly reducing other people’s risk. The vast majority of all human behavior is fueled by self-interest. I don’t imagine you go to your job out of pure passion and a desire to help others, no?
This doesn’t make sense because it isn’t selfish inconvenienced individuals making these official recommendations.
It just doesn’t happen often enough and isn’t serious enough often enough that people would care anymore.
Oregon also hasn’t been tracking COVID for a long time and only reporting hospitalizations as COVID cases
Just when I think public health can’t plummet any lower, when I think governments can’t signal their eugenicist intent any more clearly, they do
https://donotpanic.substack.com/p/its-all-out-war-on-the-vulnerable
We’ve been dating for a couple months now.
No please don’t. This is the only sick time I’ve ever gotten.
