News

That's slightly disingenuous in that COVID is still very dangerous. The last time I checked the fatalities, which I believe had been those of the first week of November, there were somewhere around 400 deaths from COVID that week and 13 from the flu in that 7 day period.

I remember reading reports about the strains going around at the beginning of last year (Jan of 2023), and those were actually more dangerous and more infectious than the original strains were. But there were nowhere near the casualty rates because the vaccines work. But not everybody can get vaccinated, and every infection still has about a 20% chance of causing Long COVID despite the vaccine, which can be so crippling that it can put you on permanent disability or cause infertility (COVID is also stored in the balls, along with the pee).

The reason that we see the wastewater reports is because that's the only way that they're legally allowed to report infection rates. The government mandated that the CDC stop recording other rates sometime during the height of the pandemic, around the time that companies started pushing for an end to lockdowns and for grandparents to die for the economy because their grandkids would thank them for it. Also around the time that DeSantis tried to make the person running the COVID tracking website for Florida fake the numbers so that he could say that COVID was over.

Right. Except it does kill people, just like the flu kills people. Large numbers, not nearly as large as several years ago but still large. And the effects of Long COVID look rather bad, too.

So it is newsworthy, by your standards. Meh.

Also, there's been a January spike every January since 2021. It's practically clockwork. Which also makes it not really newsworthy, especially as the disease becomes less deadly.

https://www.mwra.com/biobot/biobotdata.htm

On the other hand, I saw plenty of news stories about bad travel this holiday. Which is really, really not newsworthy. But we get those every year.

A virus that kills its host looses a vector to spread. It’s an evolutionary advantage to not kill your host, just leach off them to spread. Look at how well the common cold does.

$12? Maybe at 711 or some shit, but Aldi by me still has eggs under $3

Overall, the mortality (death) rate for bird flu in humans is high — historically, about half of all people with known infections have died. But most recent cases in the U.S. have been mild.

This is a good thing in immunology, actually. Diseases with extremely high severity rates tend to not spread through a population because it incapacitates their host too quickly- Ebola is a classic example. Fucking insane severity, but bad to the point where it hasn't ever spread to epidemic proportions because it's super easy to recognize then isolate. Ebola outbreaks have been (mostly, sans 2014) limited to small geographic areas of small populations.

Easy way to avoid high egg/dairy prices, drastically or completely eliminate your chance of getting it, and reduce the spread of it overall: just don't eat 'em. Consider making some chili instead.

I think you mean "for now" rather than "now." Less than a month from now will likely be a very different story.

“Your corporate media is lying to you because they literally don’t care whether you live or die”

“You right. What’s this about, is it global warming? Trump’s very real plans to literally kill or imprison any American who stands in his way? Health care which reaps a bountiful harvest of corpses every month in the name of profit? PFAS? Microplastic? Good old particulate emissions which are still giving out asthma, COPD, lung cancer, and other forms of disability and early death? The global rise of authoritarianism which they are gradually warming to, more or less explicitly, instead of making even a lukewarm attempt at reporting on honestly? The death of education and the daily misery of every public school teacher, nurse, delivery driver, or anyone else who actually does all the work to keep it all going? Insects dying? Amphibians? Methane? Death of the oceans? TikTok and YouTube and the mental destruction they cause in babies and toddlers too young to resist the harm it causes them?”

“Wastewater Covid is going up.”

“Oh. Well, you’re not even wrong, really. Put it on the pile.”

Then turn that off and switch to a news source that tells the news

Yeah, so the initial infection isn't the only (and I would argue the lesser) concern though. It's the 3+ years after that show increased odds of all sorts of chronic conditions like auto-immunity. Then there is the whole brain damage, even from mild cases thing.

It's milder, yes... but it also depends on how much of the virus you get at the time of transmission. Talking with an infected person for a couple minutes is different than being next to a person laughing in a movie theater for two plus hours. The more virus you receive at the time of infection, the more sick/damage it can do before antibodies take over.