This week’s hospital admission rate follows last week’s rise of more than 10 percent. While this data suggests more infections, a metric the CDC does not track anymore, it remains unclear how concerned people should be.
Wow if only there was some sort of institution that should help us understand how concerned we should be.
AutumnWinterSpringSummer surge. Hmm. Maybe it’s just always a surge because the pandemic isn’t over since we didn’t do anything about it.XBB, EG.5 (descendant of XBB.1.9.2 that has an extra spike mutation), XBB.1.9.2, XBB.1.9.1, and XBB.1.16 levels are all growing right now while XBB.1.5 levels are shrinking, according to to the wastewater variant graph.
Maybe it’ll do the Simpsons thing and not spike as hard because there’s so many of them this time?
So far, lower spikes tend to just mean longer waves with a higher floor. If you look at the wastewater for county levels you can see the higher floor at the nationwide regional level is made from “random” (ie, we’re not tracking anything) smaller spikes hitting the counties throughout the rest of the year. This is because people’s short term immunity is going out of sync and it’s slowing down the velocity of infections, whether that’s due to the number of variants or the vaccines, idk. But, you can also the floor rising on the county level. Our best case scenario (which is still going to be horrible) seems to be if we just end up in an endless wave that’s about half of what we spiked to during Delta… Worst case scenario is the variants mutate enough that they no longer offer immunity to each other and our endless wave comes with bonus spikes.
For some real
keep an eye on the year over year in the coming months.Good news, everyone! XBB 1.5 boosters are due out this fall. And just in time, too!
We should probably be giving out updated vax shots twice a year at least, but the big brains in government only want to do one before fall/winter with one or two infections as a “booster” in between. But since “hybrid immunity” is being sold as awesome and good, hardly anyone is getting the vaccines anymore.
We should also be filtering and cleaning the air indoors, and at the very least be requiring masks in hospitals, but nah. They really, really want this to be a seasonal virus for the winter but it’s just way too infectious and with no long lasting immunity. And a random mutation can pop up at any time causing things to become as bad as 2020 again, as it has the entire world to play with and is being passed between species. Fucking awesome.
What’s the worst a few infections a year with a t-cell destroying virus that causes brain, vascular, and organ damage gonna do?
new norm of summer surges
“Sorry sport, COVID is here forever, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it or even mitigate its spread, nor was there anything we ever could have done. COVID is as inevitable as the rising of the sun, the waves crashing on a beach, or the lingering cough everyone now has that definitely wasn’t caused by COVID.” :covid-cool:
