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Biden says the pandemic is over

[url]https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/18/politics/biden-pandemic-60-minutes/index.html?fbclid=IwAR0cesfGMfKQw83EXeEdgac-gAUFxcPazO9AdB-5TaHpUYNHqYNe2usChkE/url]

It seems so weird.  It just feels funny.  Now I need to remember that it is no longer a pandemic.

I wonder.  Spanish flu disappeared completely.  Will Covid-19 ever do the same?

I will keep my mask on because I look better with it on than I do with it off.

Not a chance .. what do you think your yearly flu shot is for ?

Spanish flu of 1918 = modern day influenza

it never went away, just like covid won't ever go away. It's not a pandemic anymore because it is endemic now.

I know we all have differing views of the whole thing but I just read that Howard Stern just recently came out of his house for  the first time because of covid. It's just amazing to me as a person who never stopped doing anything, and spent time in the hosptial for covid, that people are paralized by fear of this thing when they don't have any reasonable reason to be fearful. Unless you are at medical risk it really shouldn't cause you to give up your life ... especially now with drugs readily available to help you recover. 

So how come it doesn't kill millions of people every year?

for the same reason smallpox decimated native american populations and didn't decimate european populations .. because once you're exposed and you survive you produce antibodies that give you some protection against it.

no matter how much the flu mutates or covid mutates, it won't be as deadly to the general population as the first time when no-one had any protections at all

Everyone has their own level of safety.  I should be more careful than I am, honestly.  I still think the smart thing would be to put on a mask in high density, indoor situations.  I would do it, but I'm not in the habit of carrying a mask, so I find myself...like, in a school cafeteria with a hundred people all close together.

It's just a smart mitigation to not put yourself at risk to get sick with COVID or Flu or anything else, frankly.   Since the vaccine is available, I don't really care too much about what other people do.  There are still people getting sick, big medical bills, loss of quality of life, etc -- but that's a choice now, pretty much.  There is a health gap for those who haven't taken the vaccine, but I can't care about that anymore.

I just don't like getting sick.  It sticks with me for a long time, especially things related to lungs.  Even with the common cold, I'll cough for months after I'm better.

With people like Stern, he's old, and he doesn't go into public anyway, because he's a public figure who doesn't need to and probably gets harassed and hounded anyway.

Biden saying "the pandemic is over" is probably the wrong message, despite being technically correct.  Yes, it's endemic, now.  But it doesn't mean that you should just go on normally.  Extra care in not spreading disease is the new normal.  We collectively learned a lot about illness and changed some habits, COVID or not.  I'll keep those up.  There's areas I can do better.

The flu does kill a pretty decent amount of people, but as Fau said, it's antibodies being built up over time, as well as the virus mutating to spread without killing its host as aggressively.

But if you get the flu and then visit some uncontacted tribe in the rain forest, they'd probably get pretty messed up from it.

How does that account for the stronger Delta Variant that emerged?

From what I understand, the Delta variant wasn't necessarily stronger.  It was more virulent, meaning easier to catch. 

Over time, since viruses want to survive, the dominant strain that survives is less likely to kill its host quickly and will spread easier.

Biden must have just said this because the midterms are coming up.

Not that I'm defending Biden but you can say that pretty much about every politician. I hate this time leading up to the elections. 

Politicians definitely save things for the right time, politically.  Whether this was that, who knows?  I know that Biden is getting flack from the left for it, saying that his phrasing of it is kinda irresponsible.

Just today, my daughter is sick.  As I care for her, when I leave my bedroom, I wear a mask in the house.  I lysol the surfaces after she goes back to her room for the night.  She tested negative for COVID.

But these are just things I didn't do before.  I see sickness different now.  Not because of politics.  I used to think that "people just get sick sometimes".  And while that's true, there's a lot that we can do collectively, but also that I can do personally, that isn't really inconveniencing and can make a difference in how often that happens for me.

You can't pick a single date for the end of a pandemic.  But it seems to move into something similar to flu, smallpox, or AIDS not over but no longer out of control.

Yes and no.  Infectious germs have become stronger and more resilient because of the heavy use of more anti-microbial cleaners and stronger drugs.  The germs react and become stronger.  Getting sick and building a natural resistance is a better way to fight germs.

True: antimicrobial agents eliminate the least resistant strains, leaving the more resistant strains to reproduce and spread.  Over time, microbes become resistant to those agents.

Keep in mind that this applies to antimicrobial drugs, but this does NOT apply to something like soap, which breaks down the physical structure of the microbes.  It's like the difference between poisoning insect pests, and physically smashing them; pests might become resistant to a specific kind of poison over time, but they can't develop a resistance to being smashed.

False.  Fundamentally, it doesn't even make sense: you can't avoid getting sick by allowing yourself to get sick on purpose.  You've already lost.

If you squint really hard, vaccines might seem like a variation on that premise.  But the reason why vaccines work is that you get the protection of a recovered sick person without suffering the sickness itself.  However, a vaccine that caused the same symptoms as the sickness it "protects" from would be worthless; if you could get paralyzed by the polio vaccine, or if the COVID vaccine could put you on a ventilator, there would be no point in them.  (Some people might be inclined to point out that COVID vaccines can cause muscle aches and mild fever; if those were the most dangerous symptoms of COVID, there wouldn't even BE a COVID vaccine because no one would give a damn.)

We have many centuries of evidence that getting sick and building a natural resistance does not make you healthier.  Getting sick means you got sick, and it doesn't prevent you from getting sick with something else later.  It only makes you less likely to get sick AGAIN from the same thing, which makes you worse off than the person who avoided getting sick in the first place.

I didn't mean to imply that on an "individual" level, but rather that on an evolutionary level.

Under very specific conditions that is possible, but those conditions don’t exist for Covid.

Those conditions are as follows:

1.  The vast majority of those who die of the disease  do so BEFORE childbearing age.  A disease that is primarily lethal to old people will not benefit from natural selection.  So Covid fails.

2.  Natural immunity to the disease is hereditary.  Quite frankly we don’t know.  But given that there hasn’t been any evidence of homogeneous reactions within families, this is doubtful.