“Only fat slobs and geezers need to worry about this bug.”
Yeah, no worries, the 70% of Americans that are fat slobs and geezers aren’t real people.
Most testing is based on contact tracing. The numbers of tests have gone up, but the positivity has gone down. There are still plenty of new cases being reported and it is NOT simply a matter of expanded testing (else the positivity would have held constant).
It’s over 225,000 deaths, and we’re still around 1,000 per day. That’s more than the Spanish Flu per day average (yes, there was a huge second wave spike for the Spanish Flu, but that doesn’t really help the argument against comparison since we’re doing it without a spike). And, in fact, the Spanish Flu numbers included the regular flu since they couldn’t easily distinguish back then, and for clarity, for the first six months of the SF pandemic there were only 14,000 surplus deaths from “Spanish Flu” over the 1915 statistic (75,000 “Spanish Flu” deaths in 1918 versus 61,000 flu deaths in 1915), or a little less than 20%. But we CAN tell the difference, and our CCP-19 deaths are just a bit over that 20% bump. 225,000 surplus deaths over the average 36,000. That’s 625% (525% increase, or excess). And that’s for just 7 months, not the full 12 for the flu stat.
Good news, though, is that the mitigation that at least some people engage in has lowered the number of common flu cases dramatically, by like 95%. Before you go there, as I mentioned, we can distinguish between the two diseases, so, no, the flu numbers are not being absorbed into the covid numbers, and even if they were, that still doesn’t explain away the other 190,000 dead. What’s actually happening is that the defense against covid is taking out the flu as collateral damage. One might argue that that is a measure of how effective the mitigation is - is it stopping 95% of covid spread? Probably not, but you have to be pretty obtuse to claim it isn’t having a significant effect. That sort of denial is just reflected confirmation bias by those in the throes of weapons-grade ODD.
Personally, I have noticed that I am less congested than I usually am, since I mask in public. I attribute it to avoiding pollen, pollution and the general low-level viral load we are all normally exposed to. Or to avoiding the virons spewed out by everybody all the time under normal circumstances.
FTR, using the 2009 pandemic as a bar isn’t really viable given the amount of politicization by the Obammy administration involved.
Other respiratory diseases (eg. "colds") are doing their normal fall thing and getting into the act. Since some of these are considerably more infectious than flu, mitigation does not suppress them as well as it suppresses the flu.
I'm a great example: My daughter brought home "something" from school, and all 3 of us, my wife, my daughter and I all got the same symptoms, with varying degrees of severity. My wife's illness was mild, my daughter's generated a 100.5 deg. fever and she felt bad for 3 days, one day more so, and I really got pasted for almost 3 days, got about 90% better, but can't seem to throw the chest congestion and an occasional cough. We were all 3 tested for CV-19, results for all 3 of us were negative.
Serious / critical cases are on the rise in the US, but, not rapidly so at this point.