https://xcancel.com/michael_hoerger/status/1993183181932310977

Wastewater-derived estimates suggest that 74 million people in the U.S. got infected during the summer wave.

That’s 21.6% of the population, about 1 in 5 people. These infections are anticipated to translate into 3.7-14.7 million long-term conditions. #LongCOVID

sadness-abysmal

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Graph titled “SARS-CoV-2 New Daily Infections, Wastewater-Derived Estimates (U.S.)” which has days on the X-axis (with ticks for the first of each month for July through November 2025) and infections on the Y-axis. The graph highlights a peak of 1.4 million infections/day in early September. Additionally, it shows that 60 million infections occurred in the two-month span from early August to early October, and 75 million infections occurred in the three-month span from mid-July to mid-October. The graph is attributed to Mike Hoerger, PhD, MSCR, MBA (@michael_hoerger ) and links to pmc19.com/data

    • LeninWeave [none/use name, any]@hexbear.net
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      4 months ago

      Many things begin to make sense. agony-turbo

      Jokes aside, this is probably very bad for American society. A whole bunch of people with brain damage that makes it harder for them to understand things and more prone to frustration, with absolutely no support system or even acknowledgment that the disability exists. Just people who will be angry and frustrated all the time now, not even realizing why that is or that anything changed in themselves. What a nightmare.

    • TheModerateTankie [any]@hexbear.net
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      4 months ago

      The lowest estimate I’ve seen of your chance of getting long covid every infection is 3.4%. And reinfection raises that risk. I’ve not seen any new estimates other that studies confirming long covid risk is real and increases with every infection.

      So with 74 million infections, that would be about 2.5 million people with new onset long covid symptoms. What are the consequences of giving 2.5 million people brain damage? How many people could you essentially give a concussion to before you’d notice an impact on society?

      Kids were probably hit harder than most due to school and parents being told it’s not harmful to kids and being spooked by anti-vax sentiment. How many kids could you give concussions to before school performance starts being effected?

      We lost about 2 million people to covid in the first couple years, and couldn’t forget about it fast enough, so I guess I’m not surprised our society can just overlook this shit or refuses to come to grips with the impact it’s having on us still. “Large number bad and scary so it can’t be true.”

      • mononoke
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        4 months ago

        Phone bad, “lockdowns”, poor weight/diet/exercise, anything but the C word.

      • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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        4 months ago

        And as conservative as those numbers are, let’s not forget that people are still seeing cognitive slowing without clocking any of the symptoms that indicate Long Covid.

        And this was years ago. The average person is like 5 infections deep at this point, minimum.

    • blunder [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      4 months ago

      meow-hug hope you’re seeing some progress at least.

      I’ve been posting about my post COVID brain stuff for a while, join me sicko-crowd

    • bigpharmasutra [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      4 months ago

      My personal opinion on this one is that the virus is purposefully mutating away from more deadly strains and picking up more long lasting mutations as a way of continually perpetuating itself.

    • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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      4 months ago
      1. Because we sacrificed the most vulnerable to the line, en masse.
      2. Undercounting. Covid is just being flat out ignored in many cases. It’s not just the lack of masking, many places don’t even bother to test anymore.
    • TheModerateTankie [any]@hexbear.net
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      4 months ago

      In the last year there hasn’t been any crazy new variants (until this summer/fall anyway) so it hasn’t been as deadly. As mutations are random, that’s not unexpected. It will be like the flu, where there are good and bad years, but in this case it’s more like periods of 3-6 months since covid isn’t seasonal. After things were declared normal, covid has been killing about 4x as many people as a typical flu year. This past year has been an exception because the 2024-2025 winter was the worst flu season in 15 years, and this coming winter might be worse. (yes, that will be “worst flu season in a decade” two years in a row).

      So this past year covid was just slightly less deadly than the worst flu season we’ve seen since the swine flu pandemic. This is being reported as if covid has finally become less dangerous than the flu, which I think is a bit misleading.

      And while there are long term health conditions that can result from the flu, covid will always be worse and lead to more health problems due primarily to it’s ace2 binding ability, along with the toll it takes on the immune system (opens you up to worse infections of other diseases, like the flu, because your body can’t respond to it as well as it should) and increased risk of vascular problems. There is also no cure for long covid, which can be a wide array of problems due to covid being able to attack every organ in our body, but the worst form of it resembles ME/CFS and there are no current treatments for it.

    • triplenadir@lemmygrad.ml
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      4 months ago

      […] excess deaths. That’s the level of mortality above what it was before the pandemic. This metric has not returned to normal and remains significantly elevated […] 120,000 unanticipated dead people per year [in the US]. That’s roughly the equivalent of two fully loaded standard commercial jets crashing and killing everyone aboard every day.

      https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2025/10/31/Physicist-COVID-Seriously-Enough/

      • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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        4 months ago

        And that’s 2% on top of the millions of premature deaths that are now missing from present day stats. I know I’m a broken record on this stuff, but if for no reason you randomly killed off a million of your most medically vulnerable people, your excess deaths should running in the negatives for years.

    • mononoke
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      4 months ago

      Are you personally keeping track? Is anyone else?