COVID Chronicles: Hurray! The Pandemic Is Over!
We continue our COVID Chronicles series. Hopefully this will be the last “COVID Chronicles” post we’ll have to make.
OK, I’m just going to get it out there… Hurray! The pandemic is over, because Joe Biden says so!
It’s amazing how a few words from a sitting president can cause so much consternation among his own “people”. I’m speaking of course, about that strange subset of humanity known as the “liberal”. You know, it’s that weird group of people who think that everyone should drive electric cars, the wealthy should give up all their money to everyone else, infants can be killed on a whim, and DNA doesn’t matter as long as someone wants to deny it.
Oh, and if you’re a liberal or progressive and you’re “offended” by what I said, go suck eggs.
If you’re a conservative and you’re responding to what I just said with “yes, Chaim, you’re right!” – don’t worry, because I can easily roast those “claiming” to be conservative but are just Trump sycophants, for your ridiculous denials that the climate is changing at all; that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump; that a whole election could be overturned by a bunch of moronic hippies storming around the Capitol building like hooligans storming the pitch at a European soccer match; that gays, lesbians, or transgender persons don’t deserve any respect at all; that medical people were trying to kill you with vaccines; and that people with racist and antisemitic views are just OK with you as long as they worship Trump.
Oh and by the way, my name is Chaim… I’m a Jew, I’m a doctor, I’m a real conservative and member of the Republican party decades longer than Trump has, and I’m better than all of you neo-fascist MAGA assholes.
Headline Syndrome
But I digress.
These people who seemed to bow down and worship oldster Joe Biden just a few years ago, are now screaming their rainbow heads off because they can’t understand what someone means when they say something.
They heard Joe Biden say “the pandemic is over” during an interview at the Detroit Auto Show a couple of weeks ago, and in true liberal fashion, they just heard “the pandemic is over” and freaked out that he would dare say something like that.
Well, first off to those liberal “friends” who are in meltdown-mode over this, I’d like to say – hey, you voted him into office in the first place, so who’s fault is it?
Waning Severity
But from a more medical perspective, I’d be willing to claim a new diagnosis: “Headline Syndrome”, to be defined as the excessive exposure to headlines and short phrases, leading to the inability to comprehend human language longer than a headline. Too bad I can’t stick my name in there somewhere, but somehow I don’t think that “Weitzner Syndrome” quite makes it.
But even more medically speaking, as of right now, Biden’s not exactly wrong. Many of us doctors are seeing a definite weakening in the viruses as they mutate. Current BA.2, based on evidence so far, appears to be causing much more mild disease than prior variants, and especially the original strain.
But certainly there are several reasons for this. Originally, no one had exposure to the original strain of SARS-CoV-2, and because of what we know from studying similar coronaviruses like SARS-CoV-1 and MERS-CoV, we could be reasonably sure that SARS-CoV-2 was going to have a wide-ranging set of symptoms and bodily effects. Obviously this turned out to be true, because we saw it and still see it happen.
Improving Immunity
Just like with several other viruses that can only be transmitted to and from a short list of organisms, the more people who get exposed, thus creating natural immunity, and/or those who obtain immunity by vaccination, the greater opportunity for the virus to mutate and weaken. We’ve seen this to a degree that the death counts early in the pandemic have dipped significantly. People who are contracting COVID19 now aren’t largely dying from it.
So, a number of leading medical researchers feel that eventually this virus, like its sister SARS-CoV-1, will die off. Obviously the reason why it hasn’t done that yet, is because SARS-CoV-2 quite literally circled the world infecting billions of people, whereas SARS-CoV-1 only affected a few countries and had many fewer deaths. The wider the spread of a virus, the longer it’ll take to eradicate.
Downgrading
And we’re starting to see this now. I anticipate the CDC to declare that COVID can be downgraded in the US to more endemic, rather than pandemic level, within the next few months. Now that we have targeted vaccines to reduce risk of contracting COVID19, and now oral antivirals like Lagevrio and Paxlovid to help decrease viral load in those affected, it’s safe to be unmasked in public, while still asking those who are sick to wear mask in public (see Vince’s post in this series on how masks actually work and how the government erroneously claimed they were supposed to work).
Also, despite anti-vax morons trying to sow doubt as to the effectiveness and safety of the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines currently available in the US (Vince did a whole subsection “The Vaccine Wars” in this series, please review them!), many people continue to be appropriately vaccinated in the US and other countries with rare instances of adverse effects (so suck it, anti-vaxxers!).
Endemic
Fewer people are succumbing from severe COVID19 infection. More people are recovering nicely, and fewer are getting re-infected. These are all statistically evident from data at the CDC, local and state health departments, as well as first-hand evidence from many of my fellow primary care doctors and nurse practitioners across the country. We’re certainly at the endemic level, with pockets of higher infection rates and areas of the country with practically no cases at all.
Certainly we doctors will tell everyone to continue to do what you were practically forced to do during the early days of the pandemic – washing and sanitizing hands frequently, coughing and sneezing into something instead of open air, avoiding others when you’re sick, and using a mask properly by donning one if you have to go out in public when you’re sick. Doing these things will continue to minimize the spread of the virus so that one day, America may be “great again” – by being one of the first in the world to statistically eradicate SARS-CoV-2 from our country… that’s one “MAGA” that I actually could get behind.
The Pandemic Is Over
So, from all this evidence as of this moment in time, I think that, love him or hate him, President Biden is actually right (for once!)… the pandemic – at least in the US – is actually over.
