10th COVID wave now surging in the US, amid total silence in the corporate media
10th COVID wave now surging in the US, amid total silence in the corporate media
The entire political establishment is in agreement on the need to enforce the pro-corporate policy of “forever COVID,” in which the working class and broad layers of society as a whole are condemned to unending waves of mass infection, death and debilitation with Long COVID.
O RLY?
Fox News has a Coronavirus Category with 5 new stories this month
If you're going to be an alarmist asshole you might as well avoid adding a bunch of lies to your headlines in addition to it.
although i agree with the post title being a bit incorrect, and your comment of "alarmist asshole" not really called for, its not front page news and that's because people are over COVID and could care less while people who are at risk from severe infection are getting it and dying still. People are just going to get super sick and say "yeah its a flu covid is over so it cant be that"
“it’s totally silent if i plug my ears and totally dark if i close my eyes”!
thank you for your service. this is the type of post i wish would get downvoted to the floor. if we can’t get basic googleable facts right in !news@lemmy.world how can we have any hope for accuracy in reporting on climate catastrophe and genocide? hawt damb
Given how silo'ed everyone's media consumption is now a days I find it entirely too plausible that someone could avoid any new COVID news.
I only get my news here!
... is that bad?
Given the known incidence of Long COVID, the current levels of transmission are generating an estimated 200,000 new cases of Long COVID per week.
Holy fuck, it's making us dumber. That explains a lot!
Getting a flu + covid shot is free or nearly free for every American that has health insurance. It may be less convenient, but there are places to get a free flu and covid vaccines, if Americans do not have health insurance. Anecdote: This year, I had zero side effects from the shots besides a sore arm!
I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t realize the importance of getting a flu shot prior to living through the COVID pandemic. I do my best these days to inform people my age that getting vaccinated is about protecting others who might not fare against the virus as well as you might.
Zero side effects from my last flu + COVID booster. Get it done, even if you’re not personally worried about getting sick.
I went to a CVS and received both for free. I wasn't even asked about insurance.
Did they likely have your insurance on file? I know that when I hit the pharmacy they never need to ask. Even for doctors offices, I've found different offices being different levels of worried. Some want to see my card every time, some once a year, and some seem content to try to file and only bother me if that fails later.
Getting a flu + covid shot is free or nearly free for every American that has health insurance
that is a lot of conditions for the accessibility in a country notorious for people having no health insurance.
My grocery store(Safeway) even gives 20 percent off groceries if you get your shot with them.
What about masks?
I keep forgetting to get mine, but last year, when I went to schedule mine, they had open appointments starting a half an hour from then. I could've practically walked in and gotten a shot right then and there.
This year I made my appointment for my double shot and misread the confirmation/showed up a week early. They just let me get it as a walk in when I showed up.
I was at a pharmacy recently that had a sign saying walk-ins welcome for flu shot. Especially this late in the season.
Definitely everyone should be wearing masks inside in public this time of year.
“If we don’t talk about it anymore, stop testing, stop taking statistics, it’s almost like it doesn’t exist and we can just focus on growth” —Corperate media funders, probably
- It's less deadly
- It doesn't sell stories
- People aren't interested
- People are vaccinated
But it can cause long-term and permanent damage to certain organs, and that is a pretty big reason to care. Unfortunately that fact doesn't seem to clear the hurdle of point 3 on your list for many people.
Yeah, but so can alcohol, smoking, microplastics, and red meat. Heart disease is back to being the #1 killer of Americans, and humans still prioritize fear over serial killers and Bird Flu rather than heart disease and car accidents.
Humans are notoriously bad at assessing risk. It's a lot of work to overcome our cognitive biases.
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.
because the virus is weaker (this happens with new illnesses - they get less fatal and spread more).
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.
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.
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.
They're silent because nobody, except for a handful of terminally online pandemic cosplayers care about it anymore, the rest of us have been living our lives normally for ~4 years now, despite your best efforts to drag us and the economy down by keeping us in pandemic mode for eternity.
Yeah, I wish they'd stop talking about cancer because nobody, except for a handful of terminally online chemotherapy cosplayers care about it anymore, the rest of us have been living our lives normally for ~4 years now, despite your best efforts to drag us and the economy down by keeping us in cancer fearing mode for eternity.
Will you sacrifice your grandparents for the economy?
I think the government has a good handle on COVID-19 now with more-or-less mass vaccination, so it's not going to cause mass deaths and disabilities.
I'm more worried about H5N1 bird flu, more currently the affect it's having on milk and egg prices (over USD$12/doz. yikes!) and the potential to mutate to direct human-to-human transmission.
From https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/22401-bird-flu dated 12/5/2024
What’s the mortality rate of bird flu?
Overall, the mortality (death) rate for bird flu in humans is high — historically, about half of all people with known infections have died. But most recent cases in the U.S. have been mild.
Except it is causing mass deaths. Have you read the 2024 numbers? Much lower than a few years ago but much higher than zero.
Sure, I'll bite:
In 2024 up to week 50, there have been 45,447 deaths involving COVID-19. This is compared to 159,940 deaths involving flu or pneumonia and 2,892,661 deaths from all causes in the same time frame.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm
For comparisons sake, traffic accident deaths in the first three quarters of 2024 were 29,135.
Overall, the mortality (death) rate for bird flu in humans is high — historically, about half of all people with known infections have died. But most recent cases in the U.S. have been mild.
This is a good thing in immunology, actually. Diseases with extremely high severity rates tend to not spread through a population because it incapacitates their host too quickly- Ebola is a classic example. Fucking insane severity, but bad to the point where it hasn't ever spread to epidemic proportions because it's super easy to recognize then isolate. Ebola outbreaks have been (mostly, sans 2014) limited to small geographic areas of small populations.
This only matters if it incapacitates the host quickly enough that they don't spread it, which isn't necessarily closely related to its deadliness. In the 1980s, AIDS was a death sentence, but that didn't make HIV less transmissible.
Fortunately you can just not eat eggs and not consume milk.
You can't not breathe air.
Easy way to avoid high egg/dairy prices, drastically or completely eliminate your chance of getting it, and reduce the spread of it overall: just don't eat 'em. Consider making some chili instead.
There is someone out there right now with a family recipe who is incensed at your implication that you can't put eggs in chili.
$12? Maybe at 711 or some shit, but Aldi by me still has eggs under $3
Depends where you shop and where they source them from. Once that source gets hit and they have to cull their entire flock, you'll see the price increase.
I think you mean "for now" rather than "now." Less than a month from now will likely be a very different story.
yes. why would they care? since we have vaccines, covid is just a flu, and it, like a flu, spikes in the winter.
Except the flu doesn’t give you long covid.
It's crazy how short people's memories are. And this site, you would think, tends to have higher than average educated users. And they're still going with the "it's just the flu" shit (completely ignoring that flus can be horrific and deadly).
This current, modern iteration of Homo Sapiens sapiens deserves extinction.
It can give you long flu. https://www.health.com/condition/flu/flu-long-term-effects
until tweedle dee and tweedle dumbfuck come in and ban vaccines.
Because its taboo, and some viewers/readers will scream about it (or at least disengage) just like they do for global warming.
It makes my skin crawl whenever I see our (Florida) weathermen bite their tongues when looking at, say, a graph of ocean heat content, and thats an order of magnitude worse on big, national, corporate media. COVID is no different.
Then turn that off and switch to a news source that tells the news
This is from December 19 but has some interesting info that I hadn't seen before. It would be more readable if separated from the class war stuff.
“Your corporate media is lying to you because they literally don’t care whether you live or die”
“You right. What’s this about, is it global warming? Trump’s very real plans to literally kill or imprison any American who stands in his way? Health care which reaps a bountiful harvest of corpses every month in the name of profit? PFAS? Microplastic? Good old particulate emissions which are still giving out asthma, COPD, lung cancer, and other forms of disability and early death? The global rise of authoritarianism which they are gradually warming to, more or less explicitly, instead of making even a lukewarm attempt at reporting on honestly? The death of education and the daily misery of every public school teacher, nurse, delivery driver, or anyone else who actually does all the work to keep it all going? Insects dying? Amphibians? Methane? Death of the oceans? TikTok and YouTube and the mental destruction they cause in babies and toddlers too young to resist the harm it causes them?”
“Wastewater Covid is going up.”
“Oh. Well, you’re not even wrong, really. Put it on the pile.”
What's a million deaths anyway when you have corporate earnings to pump.
US politicos brag about our economic recovery after COVID lockdowns like it's not just one point along the optimization curve between "economy" and "deaths". We had a strong recovery because we sacrificed (and continue to sacrifice) people.
The line goes up.
Look, they don't make money by curing things. They make money when you have to take lifelong treatments to prevent the disease. The public isn't directly paying for COVID shots, except they are by paying taxes.
The pharma companies don't want people to be educated and taking preventative measures, they need more people to get COVID so that they can inspire others to fear getting it just enough to get the vaccine. Pharma pushes more units and the line goes up.
There's no money to be made in completely eliminating the disease, so they won't do that.
The 23rd was my first day fever free for my 2nd bout with COVID. It wasn't bad at all this go around and I hadn't had a booster in 18+ months.
It's milder, yes... but it also depends on how much of the virus you get at the time of transmission. Talking with an infected person for a couple minutes is different than being next to a person laughing in a movie theater for two plus hours. The more virus you receive at the time of infection, the more sick/damage it can do before antibodies take over.
Yeah, so the initial infection isn't the only (and I would argue the lesser) concern though. It's the 3+ years after that show increased odds of all sorts of chronic conditions like auto-immunity. Then there is the whole brain damage, even from mild cases thing.
The brain fog is something that is still affecting me. General confusion especially around time awareness (I logged into a meeting early) and other relatively simple brain tasks such as where's my phone/keys/wallet. These were the most immediately noticeable concerns.
It'll matter once lil Donnie is in office again like before and they tally up the amount of Americans who died under his watch before he has a thought to do something about it. Like before.
"If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any".