John says:

Covid is so yesterday! Let’s get on to the next attack President Trump meme.

Quentin-Q Quill says:

“Covid is so yesterday?” Well, I have two relatives who are currently ill and waiting for the results of their covid tests. They live in an area that previously had low covid numbers but the numbers have recently been increasing fairly rapidly in their area. They’re expecting their tests to be postive because one of them has coworkers who’ve been sick with covid. They’re likely to recover okay because they don’t have any risk factors and they are in their fifties. In the small town where they live one person has already died of covid. I have another relative who has three firends who’ve had covid within the last couple months. This is in an area that previusly had a low number of cases but has seen an increase during the last few months. One of her friends died. Another was quite ill in the hospital. He’s now home but has to use oxygen and they don’t know if he’ll ever be the same as he was before getting covid. The third person was sick for around three weeks, was then recovering well, but then had a relapse. I haven’t heard how she has been doing lately.

A woman who works at a Mexican restaurant where I get takeout said she had a relative who died of covid. Her relative’s wife was quite ill and they didn’t know if she was going to survive. I’ve known of other people who had mild cases of covid and recovered without problems.

If you look at a graph of covid deaths in the U,S., you’ll see that the number of deaths has been about the same for the last eight weeks. It looks like there could be a trend of a slight to moderate decrease last week and maybe again this week, but the trend may increase when colder weather arrives. Annual flu related deaths are estimated to vary between 12,000 and 61,000 in the U.S. Covid deaths for the U.S. are now reported as being around 200,000 and we have several months left in 2020. It also appears that covid season is throughout the year, unlike the flu season which is usually just part or parts of the year. So when people said that “covid is just like the flu,” they were wrong.

I have a friend from Brazil whose sister works in a hospital in Brazil. His sister says the government is definitely hiding the number of covid deaths in Brazil. She said they’ve changed the way deaths are recorded in hospitals to hide covid deaths so the deaths from covid in Brazil are probably much higher than reported. I have another friend who lives in Costa Rica. Costa Rica had been successful in controlling covid but then cases came in from neighboring Nicargaua and now their cases are much higher. A woman who helped out my friend’s father a couple days a week came down with covid. My friend was afraid his elderly father would also get covid. Thakfully, so far his father has been fine and his helper has recovered. One reason covid cases increased in Costa Rica is that Costa Rica has a much better health care system than Nicaragua so people from Nicaragua crossed the border into Costa Rica to receive health care in Costa Rica.

A number of months ago the science writer Laurie Garrett, who has covered many epidemics, said she thought that there really wouldn’t be a “second wave” of covid-19 because the first wave would never really go away. She said cases would decline and increase in different parts of the world at different times. Her most optimistic estimate for getting covid under control worldwide was three years because of the time needed to develop a vaccine, and then once a vaccine was developed the logistics of getting most people in the world vaccinated. So far her outlook seems to have been correct. Cases have risen and fallen in different parts of the U.S. at different times as well as in the rest of the world. The United Kingdom, for example, is currently experiencing an increase of cases after having cases fall. The area in the U.S. where my realtives live previously had low rates of cases and deaths but they now have a fairly fast rate of increasing cases and deaths long after the number of cases and deaths declined greatly in the hard hit East Coast States.

The good news is that treatment has improved for more serious cases of covid-19, but no, covid-19 is not “so yesterday”, particularly if it increases again as we enter the colder months of the year in the northern hemisphere.

Laurie Garrett wrote the book The Coming Plague Newly Emerging Diseases In A World Out Of Order in 1994. In this book Garrett warned that because of social and environmental changes the world would likely see new diseases emerging in humans and that world health systems weren’t ready to deal with this. Garrett won a Pulitzer prize for explanatory journalism for her work on Ebola in Zaire and has also won Polk prizes for her science writing. Prior to entering science writing, Garret was working on a PhD in science. Garrett has been called a “Cassandra” because of her foresight about emerging diseases. I’ve noticed that when Garrett is wrong about something, she issues a correction.

Compare Garrett and other people like her, who have deep backgrounds of knowledge abotu diseases to the know-it-alls on social media with no special background in diseases. I’ve seen people proclaim things like, All viruses eventually go away.” When I pointed out that HIV hasn’t gone away, this person came up with some lame brained rationalization.

So in general, I’ll take the information given by scienstist and people like Garrett over the musings of people on social media who seem to think they’ve earned social media certificates of mastery in epidemiology and virology and throw around uninformed statements on social media I don’t always expect the experts to be right because this is a new disease and new information will continue to come in, but I find it hard to believe some of the uninformed ignorant blather from people with no background in disease who seem to fancy themselves qualified to issue declerations about covid and social media. The ignorance at times is truly astounding.

I agree that some of the responses to covid-19 haven’t made much sense. For example, it didn’t make sense that small stores had to close while big box sotres were allowed to remain open. As long as smaller stores followed the same guidleines as larger stores, it didn’t make any sense to me that smaller stores had to close.