How do we know a pandemic's over?

Enjoy it while it lasts! (Or better still: encourage people not to 'let it rip'.)

As mentioned in the previous thread, some regions in Sweden recently introduced "extraordinary measures", and the notorious anti-mask country is now masking up - at least in hospitals:
Restriktioner tillbaka på flera svenska sjukhus (SVT.se, Nov 15, 2023)
Restrictions are back in several Swedish hospitals

Flera sjukhus inför restriktioner – munskydd på patienter (SverigesRadio.se, Nov 15, 2023)
Many hospitals introduce restrictions - patients to mask up

Smittskyddsexperten: så kan företagen hantera att covid-19 ökar (Prevent.se, Nov 20, 2023)
The infection prevention expert: how companies can handle the rising level of COVID-19

... while telling people that it's OK to go to work sick!


ETA:
– Så många smittade har det aldrig varit hittills under pandemin, säger Anders Nystedt, länets smittskyddsläkare.
Värsta covidspridningen i Norrbotten någonsin (SVT.se, Nov 20, 2023)
- So far, we never had so many cases of infection during the pandemic, says Anders Nystedt
The worst outbreak of COVID-19 in Norrbotten ever
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Dann, just tell us when it's safe to go outside without full hazmat suit and respirator.

We're patient.
 
Minimizer jokes are just so funny!
Now, can you also tell us one about the crazy people who wear condoms when they have sex?
 
dann said:
Now, can you also tell us one about the crazy people who wear condoms when they have sex?
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You know when someone is losing an argument when they come out with idiotic failed analogies like that.

Death rate covid to date - <0.5%
Death rate HIV to date - almost 50%
 
The Atheist seems to have confused this thread, How do we know a pandemic's over?, with his two imaginary threads, COVID-19's death rate is higher than HIV's, Make any and all diseases seem irrelevant by comparing them to others that killed more people.
I'm just surprised, The Atheist didn't choose the plague, but maybe he's saving it for later.

But now that The Atheist is back, I'll remind him of the posts earlier this year he never responded to: post 290 and post 291.
 
Yes, that pandemic sure is something!

The University of New Mexico Hospital is at a critical point, having more patients than beds. The surge over the last two weeks has hospital staff scrambling to find places to people who need care.
Since Thanksgiving, the hospital says its patient numbers have skyrocketed. As of Wednesday, they're at 124% capacity at the adult units, with patients arriving to find there may be a long wait to find a bed.
"Add on top of it, the seasonal viral illnesses that are going on right now. So, and that, the those two really big ones right now are influenza, which is starting, and COVID, which continues," said Dr. Steve McLaughlin, chief medical officer.
UNM Hospital over capacity, patients having to wait for beds (msn.com, Dec 7, 2023)
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It's a good thing the pandemic is over, isn't it? I wonder how they would have coped if it weren't.

The situation in general according to Peter Hotez:
1/n Latest COVID trends in United States: I don’t like what I’m seeing:

1. Hospitalizations climbing
2. JN.1 accelerating
3. Things already bad in parts of Europe
4. A weary healthcare workforce
5. Rampant COVID denialism in media
6. Under vaccinated U.S. population
Prof Peter Hotez MD PhD (Twitter/X, Dec 8, 2023)
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Prof Peter Hotez MD PhD @PeterHotez
2/n I’m really trying not to be this guy [the Grinch], but saying what I think should be said to avoid a Christmas surge on our hospital ER’s or ICUs. There are still things we can do over the next few weeks…
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See the things that can be cone in the Twitter/X thread.
'Tis the season ... :xmas0662
 
TragicMonkey said:
"Manageable" means there is room enough and staffing in hospitals to handle the case load without extraordinary measures. It's been like that for some time now where I am, we even closed down the special respiratory clinic sites which we'd had to open in 2020.
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And what's the situation like where you are at this point?
 
dann said:
And what's the situation like where you are at this point?
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Exactly as I described it in the post you just quoted. We have plenty of hospital beds available, there has not been a surge in cases, vaccinations are available and being administered to those who want it. The disease is present but currently manageable.
 
Been traveling extensively these last few weeks; and after a point, simply gave in to expediency, to convenience, and simply stopped with the mask thing.

Once I return, will I go back to masking again? Absolutely I will! Because it makes sense to. (But it also makes sense, my personal subjective take, to let it go when it gets unmanageably cumbersome, as now. My personal middle-of-the-road stay-careful-but-don't-go-overboard-with-it policy. (This is the first time I've lapsed, incidentally.)
 
dann said:
And what's the situation like where you are at this point?
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We're getting warnings about an ongoing surge in demand at hospital emergency departments.

Ambulance 'ramping' is at an all-time high.

(Ramping is where patients cannot leave the ambulance because there is nowhere in the hospital to put them).

We're very lucky that this surge is happening out of step with seasonally repiratory viruses (our summer has just started).
 
In San Diego there has been a rapid increase in flu which was close to non-existent until about a month ago. Flu now accounts for half the resperatory ICU patients and C19 the other half. The Flu pattern is back in the typical long term seasonal pattern and not higher than normal. C19 has been inching up but much slower than C19. RSV is also ramping up fast like flu.
 
I have referred to Australia and NZ a couple of times lately. In the Northern hemisphere, people still like to think that SARS-CoV-2 is seasonal.

For a month or so, the Danish health authorities have used the other current epidemics, i.e. pertussis, mycoplasma, RSV, influenza, to make COVID-19 appear to be just one of many even though it causes more hospitalizations and deaths than all the others combined and may be the cause of the surge of those others by weakening immunity.

For Danes who are interested in the C19 numbers and didn't know where to find them: Covid-19 - Danmark (region) - opdateres her onsdage kl. 14
Go to the graph Nye indlæggelser pr. dag (bottom, right) and use the arrows to find more.
Notice the graphs showing Nye indlæggelser pr. aldersgruppe de seneste 7 dage. The number of hospitalized 0-2-year-olds is shocking.
We really should be vaccinating all pregnant women as well as six-month-olds - and the rest of the population.
The number of C19 deaths (all ages) is also rising - something the health authorities also prefer to sweep under the rug.
New numbers on Wednesdays.
 
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dann said:
It's a good thing the pandemic is over, isn't it?
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Yes. The pandemic is over. Compare 2023 with 2021 and 2022.

[IMGw=400]http://jt512.dyndns.org/images/covid2023.png[/IMGw]

Covid-19 has become endemic.
 
The Atheist said:
You know when someone is losing an argument when they come out with idiotic failed analogies like that.

Death rate covid to date - <0.5%
Death rate HIV to date - almost 50%
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Well that makes it OK then. :rolleyes:

The total number of confirmed Covid-19 infections in the 4 years since December 2019 is 772 million. 6.9 million (0.9%) have died from it, an average of 1.725 million per year.

Out of the 29.8 million people with HIV in 2022, 'only' 630 thousand (2.1%) died of AIDS related illnesses. While not curable, HIV can be suppressed to undetectable levels with antiretroviral drugs, preventing transmission and maintaining health (remember that AIDS itself doesn't kill you, it just destroys your immune response so other diseases can kill you).

But the biggest difference is that HIV is relatively easy to avoid - much easier than Covid-19. If it wasn't for isolation, masks and vaccines the number of deaths from Covid-19 would be many many times higher than AIDS.
 
In New Zealand it's not over. People are just pretending that it is.

Hospital admissions are up to the same as they were in the middle of last year, soon after we let the virus rip.

picture.php


Wastewater detections and reported cases continue to diverge.

picture.php
 
Chanakya said:
Been traveling extensively these last few weeks; and after a point, simply gave in to expediency, to convenience, and simply stopped with the mask thing.

Once I return, will I go back to masking again? Absolutely I will! Because it makes sense to. (But it also makes sense, my personal subjective take, to let it go when it gets unmanageably cumbersome, as now. My personal middle-of-the-road stay-careful-but-don't-go-overboard-with-it policy. (This is the first time I've lapsed, incidentally.)
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I had stopped masking up and only took it up again recently. I am the only one (or at least the only one I've seen so far) in my borough of Copenhagen, Frederiksberg, which "occupies an area of less than 9 km2 and had a population of 103,192 in 2015."
I was never a fan of herd mentality anyway. :)
 
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