We're going to look like such fucking idiots when people read about how we collectively handled it.
The only consolation, is that most of us looked at how many people were handling it at the time and said, "well they're fucking idiots."
We'll probably still be morons no matter when people are reading about it. At least it'll provide reassurance that whichever things we screw up next are not unprecedented failures.
We'll need context to know whether they're talking about early 20th century Germany or early 21st century US.
I am so confused, what is that website even trying to say!? Is it just a collection of graphs that seem to have some important turning point around 1971? Why choose that year in particular, you could do it for any other year? This seems like a lamer non-automated version of https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
In 1971, USA dropped gold standard and it has given rise to all kinds of conspiracy theories.
I hear they're going to get a lot more frequent. I expect two Katrina-like events in the next ten years in Florida.
Maybe the tenth will be free.
Every pandemic that ended up as a seasonal disease is still active.
You can try denying they ended in this way, but you will end up with an unusable language because most things are technically not over as they had a continuation in some form.
Almost every sickness you get infected with had its hayday of mass genocide. It will die down and then occasionally reoccur.
Dont worry about it, they are mutating heck of a lot. 2020 pandemic is a lot different than the current situation is with the completely different strains we now have.
The current strains of COVID are more infectious and more dangerous than the 2019 strain was. Up until the end of 2023, the only reason we didn't hear about it was because the vaccines were effective against them (and the corporations want to pretend that it's been over for several years now). The latest strain is resistant to vaccinations from before the end of September, and the US just saw the second biggest spike in COVID cases since 2019, with an estimated peak at 2 million daily new infections on the 11th.
Just because big businesses say that the pandemic is over so everybody goes back to work and buying stuff doesn't mean that the pandemic ended. There are plenty of immune compromised people who never left quarantine because they can't with COVID still around. The rest of society simply decided that their deaths were less important than going back to drinking in crowded bars.
I mean, the pandemic has been over for over a year.
Covid is just endemic now like the flu. It’s seasonal and is never going to go away.
"For a small number of people, the disease could be fatal." Is three million people a small number? And as others have pointed out, the pandemic isn't over. https://www.who.int/data/stories/the-true-death-toll-of-covid-19-estimating-global-excess-mortality
I don't want to be that guy because it is a big number. However, in terms of the human population, there are 8 billion of us and when it comes to the difference between a million and a billion. It is about a billion. So about 0.04% of the human population. Terrible tragedy, yes however it is true.
But they didn't say a small percentage, which would be accurate, but a small number, which is not.
Calculating impact by dividing the number of deaths caused by a thing that has existed for 4 years over a population size that includes people more than 100 years old won't arrive at any sort of meaningful number. That's why you use rates, or per capita, or some other way of adjusting for population size and time. COVID 19 is the third most common cause of death in the US in 2020 and 2021. Calling one of the most common causes of death a small number of people is grossly inaccurate.
The pandemic is still ongoing. The US literally just had the second biggest wave of infections since 2019 this past week. It's estimated that there were 2 million new cases on Jan 11th alone. The only reason it seems over is because they won't let people test for it/keep track of case numbers and because the vaccines were effective against the new variants, which have been more infectious and more dangerous than the 2019 strain was.
You're right that it's never going away, but that doesn't mean that it's less dangerous than it was 3 years ago.
I didn't say it was gone. Just like the housing "crisis" and the death of the American Dream. Covid-19 is now just another fact of life now. It has become endemic to the world.
So long as humans exist - so too will Covid-19 alongside every other flu/virus/bacteria that has ever plagued us.
I'll be honest, even without Trump most Americans proved they were too stupid or stubborn to follow instructions, so he didn't really need to do anything to slap the whole US with more infections.
The problem is Trump is both the cause and the symptom of a very broken Republican party. He definitely brings out the worst in his supporters, but they also bring out the worst in him. You saw when he tried to encourage vaccines and his supporters turned on him instantly, so he had to quickly back track.
I think, like you said, the only way he can attempt to steer the MAGA-ship at this point is to offer solutions that blatantly look like he's doing it to own the libs. He can't say "get the vaccine because it'll prevent you from dying." He'd have to say, "Biden is trying to take away the beautiful vaccine I created. He wants to give it to illegal immigrants instead of hard working people like you! The deep state is trying to trick you to believe that the vaccine is poison so they can give it to their pedophile leaders so they can be safe, while you good, Christian patriots are dying."
Even then, I doubt it would work.
Unfortunately his strategy was much more cartoonishly evil. By making it so taking the pandemic seriously was a partisan issue, he could make it so people voting in person were disproportionately likely to be his base. Then set up some regulations to prevent states from counting mail in votes until in person voting is done to manufacture a narrative that they're less legitimate and try to stop the count.
I'm from third world country and before you said it i didn't knew that trump was president in other world, what can i say, TIL
Reported Dec 31, 2019, eh?
I was terminally online during that time, and some reports of a truly awful pneumonia in China were going around as early as mid-November. It was definitely known to be a major outbreak by early December. A lot of the early reports were taken down; just CCCP CCP doing CCCP CCP things.
Edit: whoops thought it had that extra C in there. Should probably use CPC anyway.
Yeah, I remember seeing TikToks about it way before December. Lots of “there are a LOT of people sick in China right now with pneumonia, and it has actually started to hurt their economy. It’ll eventually make its way over here” types of things. The warning signs were there, for those who cared to look.
I mostly saw it on the finance side of tiktok, since lots of financial analysts were like “uhh this shit could crash the economy if it spreads.”
When is the earliest heath officials reported it though? That paragraph doesn't disagree with your memory.
Considering there were quarantines in December, I'm pretty sure health officials were in the know. Though official international reporting may not have happened until Dec 31.
Well yeah. If people all over the world knew weeks earlier, obviously the health officials knew. But if they didn't report it before, that doesn't disagree with the textbook.
I was living in Oklahoma and I remember some of the local media mentioning this "coronavirus" thing that was spreading in China. I also remember people joking about Corona (the beer) being suddenly less popular.
Then in February, March, and April it getting more and more serious, and this is about the time that people started claiming it wasn't real, and if it was, it wasn't that bad, and if it was, then it was from a chinese lab bent on taking down the US...
April-May had me re-adjusting my previous opinions of people around me that I thought were rational.
I was working in the hospital at the time from a big-picture perspective and it seemed pneumonia cases were already spiking in the US during December 2019. My sister and my coworker both came down with a nasty "pneumonia" during then as well.
Vape lung was pandemic in the states in 2019, even in non-vapers like my dad as well, and then disappeared post-covid?
In 2019 there was an outbreak of a respiratory condition called EVALI and commonly referred to as 'vape lung.'
Reported cases sharply dropped off in 2020, despite an increase in vape sales.
I just think it's interesting, is all.
Vitamin E and MCT oil are the most heavily cited causes and you can still get cartridges made with both.
I suspect the dumbfounded reply you received was because one expected the word 'epidemic' to be used instead.
'pandemic' usually is taken to mean it has spread across several international boundaries. 'pan,' meaning 'all.'
They say history is written by the victors. I wonder who wrote this.
Inb4 'Probably Victor'
I think long covid is in a way worse than death. There are people, although I only personally know 2, suffering from long lasting effects for months or years at this point. Brain fog, heart problems, lung scars, the issues vary in kind and intensity. To me, that's way scarier than death.
My great-grandma survived the Spanish flu as a teenager. But the high fever during the illness fucked her up so bad, she died of heart failure in her forties.
I've had it for a couple of months now. Sure, it sucks, and I can't work currently, but I'd much rather have this than die though. This will pass (almost everyone gets better in a couple of years max), death is rather final. Also, don't kid yourself about the people that had COVID but don't experience long covid. Many of them have permanent changes to their body too, they just don't know it.
I've had minor asthma my entire life, but didn't used to really get asthma attacks. After getting COVID though I get them no problem. That was almost two years ago I was sick less than a week. Jogging, biking, sex, playing tag with the cats, need to grab my inhaler now.
My hypothesis is that when Covid started, the experts weren't really sure of the long term effects, and they were preparing for the worst.
It's bad enough as it is that I'm happy to wear a mask when appropriate.
More like as more people got sick, the worse side effects they found. At first, they didn't think there were any real long-term side effects. Then people started having the heart and lung issues, brain fog, hell, they even found permanent COVID damage in guys' testicles, causing infertility.
Even now, we don't know the effects it'll have had when we look back 10 years after the fact and make the connections between increases in conditions and COVID.
I was 34 when I first got it March 2020. I have no other health issues. I am not overweight. Covid fucked me up. My lungs were messed up for six months. I had long Covid for a year. My lungs are still not the same. I couldn’t smoke weed again if I wanted to (I was not a smoker at the time, but I did when I was younger). Then I got it two more times before vaccines were widely available. I’m a shell of the energy I had before, and I really feel like it did something to my brain
Yeah being disabled sucks. Millions of people live like this.
It's not until it happens to someone you know that you really think about it.
But people learn to live with it.
Some people became unable to live without assistance though. That's the part I found the scariest.
No one on this planet is able to live without assistance, and needing others to exist doesn't somehow reduce the value of ones life. You really have a lot of ableism to unlearn.
Again you learn to live with that.
You should do some reading about being disabled because you views are a little ignorant tbh.
I know you probably don't mean it to but the idea that it's better to die than to be chronically ill or disabled is ableist as hell. Society treating us like shit doesn't mean sick and disabled peoples' lives don't have value.
Guessing you mean in your post-2001 books, but this comment has me imagining a Black Mirror style thing where there's this future prediction in everyone's school books that all the teachers refuse to talk about.
Did you know it changed everything? Because that's what we were told regularly until about 2010 or so when pretty much everyone had stopped buying it.
Except it sort of did though. Life was pretty different in the 90’s compared to the mid 2000’s.
It also kind of kicked off the war on terror, and we know that had all kinds of ripple effects for the world at large
It didn't change everything, but it did change some things. We still take our shoes off to get through airport security, for example.
Airport security is by far the most identifiable change for me personally. We never used to take shoes or belts off at airport security, we never walked through backscatter x-ray machines, we could carry liquids onto the plane and you could see your family or friends off at the departure gate even if you didn't have a boarding pass.
That's more media than school. But my understanding of it is that it kind of did. Mostly for people who frequent airports and Muslims than anyone else though
A history textbook which goes past the 1960s? This definitely is not a book used in American classrooms
The first time I felt old was when my youngest sister learned about events I remembered in school.
I was in elementary school when 9/11 happened. My brother is 6 years younger, and doesn’t actually remember it. So yeah, I felt old when he was learning about it in high school history classes; And I was only in my mid 20’s at the time.
Are they going to leave out the part where the president called it a hoax while simultaneously spitballing ideas about UV light, bleach and horse dewormer cures all while thousands of Americans were dying every day. Or the part where he emptied the treasury with zero oversight?
What a bizarre experience.
When I was in school...I'm pretty sure the state history cirriculum was designed to be America centric, and pro-America. Any nation a boomer would remember being at war with? Not in the history books, or they appear out of nowhere, do something pro-America, and then disappear again, like Russia did from 1939 to 1945. And both World and US history classes end at 1950 because 1. to the limp dicks that actually make the policy, "The fifties are practically now" and 2. we haven't done much "being the good guys" since the jitterbug fell out of fashion.
So I'm not used to seeing something in a history textbook that isn't from at least two of my lifetimes ago.
We homeschool our kids, and are religious, but we are heavily opposed to Christian nationalism, and want our kids to learn what actually happened, not some whitewashed curriculum that downplays anyone particular people's ideological downfalls.
We found a curriculum, but it took a while. One of the first ones I opened to read through had a first chapter titled "God's gift to the world through America" noped right out of that one...
It has varying definitions, but not quite.
Definitions can range anywhere from "Effects a whole country" to "has spread to several large regions" to "threatens to affect the entire globe" but as a general rule the definitions shy away from saying global because then people will quibble about, like, Greenland not being effected because those bastards shut down the ports again.
So you could, for example, have a pandemic that spread through Europe and Asia but the swift and decisive actions of competent executives prevented the spread to the Americas.
