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How do we know a pandemic's over?

Mainly of interest to Danes:
Nye COVID-19-tal: Det undgik vi ved at lukke ned (Videnskab.dk, Mar 10, 2025)
Østeuropæiske data viser, hvor galt det også kunne være gået i Danmark. Og at svenskerne ikke bevægede sig rundt så frit, som vi tror.
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New COVID-19 numbers: What we avoided by locking down
Data from Eastern Europe shows how bad things might have been in Denmark. And that the Swedes didn't move around as freely as we tend to think.

Notice that one of the authors of the article, Lone Simonsen, was one of the advocates of 'hybrid immunity' (or even 'super immunity), i.e. of abandoning all other precautions and restrictions after vaccinations and 'living with the virus'.
Lone Simonsen: »Det er snart tid til at stoppe med restriktioner og massetest« (Videnskab.dk, Jan 23, 2022)
KOMMENTAR: Fremover skal vi leve med virussen på samme måde, som vi lever med sæsoninfluenza, lyder det fra pandemi-forskeren
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Lone Simonsen: Soon it's time to stop restrictions and mass testing
Commentary: From now on we have to live with the virus the same way we live with the seasonal flu, the pandemic researcher says

Den spanske syge er et pragteksempel på, hvordan pandemier ender (Videnskab.dk, Mar 14, 2022)
Vaccineret + smittet = superimmunitet
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The Spanish flu is a wonderful example of how pandemics end
Vaccinated + infected = super immunity


In early 2022, a professional virologist should have known better! Denmark saw the steepest rise in C19 deaths at that point of the pandemic. Cumulative confirmed COVID-19 deaths per million people (Our World in Data)
'Super immunity' was a lie, and the C19 death toll in Denmark doubled from Nov 2021 to April 2022.
 
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marting said:
I look at the variant trends in combination with wastewater data to get a sense of the actual variant growth/decline rate. Mike's comment is dead on. Current variant mix are weak contenders. Unfortunately, the overall surveillance is declining so increasing uncertainty.
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More from Mike Honey today, taking its starting point in a Ryan Hisner thread yesterday:
Ryan Hisner on X (Threadreader), Mar 12, 2025:
Do you remember BA.3—the weakling cousin of BA.1 & BA.2 that seemed to take the worst from each & had weaker ACE2 binding than even the ancestral Wuhan Virus?
After 3 years, BA.3 is back.
And it is transmitting.
Who saw this coming?
1/13
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Mike Honey on X, Mar 13, 2025:
The latest example of a potential new variant evolving in a long-term chronic infection has been detected.
As Ryan H describes on this thread, it is descended from the BA.3 lineage

BA.3 was last in circulation about 3 years ago. So presumably it has been evolving in a chronic case since then, and recently managed to transmit to other people. The latest sample is from a different province and with one added Spike mutation (K356T).
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(...)
Here’s the lifecycle of BA.3.*, from it’s emergence in Nov 2022 to it’s apparent extinction around 6 months later (from my “Archive” dataviz). It only ever briefly reached 2% frequency in South Africa and then Poland, and was insignificant elsewhere.

If this new BA.3 saltation is successful, it would quite likely be another “reset” of the immunity landscape (like BA.2.86/JN.1), with most people suddenly being susceptible. With the current healthcare settings, this would likely drive another big wave.
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But that "if" is obviously hypothetical.
 
AOC, Sanders tell supporters to mask up for West Coast town halls (Fox News, Mar 14, 2025)
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., are taking the "Fighting Oligarchy" rallies out West next week – and advising supporters to mask up to participate.
Five years after the COVID-19 pandemic, Fox News Digital can confirm that the RSVP for the events in Denver and Las Vegas includes guidance that "masks are advised for all attendees of this event."
A post shared by conservative podcaster Stephen L. Miller on Friday about the Denver event had many wondering why masks would be advised for an outdoor event in 2025.
(...)
In addition to the mask guidance, the flier for next Friday's event with Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez includes typical safety precautions for large public events, including a request for anyone not feeling well to stay home.
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Considering what happened during the DNC in August' 24 (see previous posts in this thread), masking up for a mass event, even if it's outdoors, sounds like a good idea.

Fox News also quotes reactions from minimizers and/or MAGAs, who see it as a conspiracy:
"Still trying the Covid panic politics," the top comment said.
"Was this from the year 2020?" a content creator asked.
But another reply countered: "They don’t want the paid attendees found out."
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"Paid attendees" seems to be MAGA's current version of 'crisis actors'.
On X, Mike Hoerger, PhD MSCR MBA, uses a reference to the Sanders/ACO call for masking as an introduction to his new thread about the current state of the pandemic. It includes a video (50:05 min.):
1) 5-yr Anniversary of the WHO Pandemic Declaration
10 waves
Covid mortality rivals lung cancer
8 infections/person by 2030
Long Covid as catastrophic
Death trajectories becoming complex
"During Covid" as anti-science rhetoric
Serious ppl take Covid seriously
🧵
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And apropos of "During Covid as anti-science rhetoric," notice Fox News' "five years after the pandemic ..."
 
Great collection of articles from MSNBC "commemorating the fifth anniversary of the World Health Organization declaring the novel coronavirus a pandemic":
The Covid Test (MSNBC, Mar 11, 2025)
Covid broke America — we still haven't healed (Dr. Kavita Patel)
How Trump allowed Covid to ravage his strongest supporters (Paul Waldman)
I’m a funeral director. The Covid pandemic was the most harrowing stretch of my career. (Malcolm Gibson)
How the American people have memory-holed Covid (Jarvis DeBerry)
When Covid hit Black Americans hard, too many white Americans shrugged (Dr. Uché Blackstock)
The Covid pandemic forced ER doctors like me to battle a different kind of virus (Dr. Esther Choo)

Look, Fox News, this is how it's done!
From one of the articles:
"Five years after the start of the pandemic, America stands fractured yet paradoxically transformed."
Getting it right really isn't that complicated.
 
Met with a school friend yesterday, after many years. I was amazed to find him, of all people, hold forth on how vaccines were a hoax, and Covid completely overhyped. And then he passionately starts lecturing, apropos of nothing at all, about how Zelensky was Biden's puppet. After that I kept quiet, not wanting to part with an old friend on less than cordial terms. But it's a weird world we live in. A downright crazy world.
 
Fractured, weird and crazy, indeed, but why leave him with delusions that harm him as well as you yourself and the rest of us?
Friendship requires honesty. The latter sometimes terminates friendships, but without it, what remains is the illusion of friendship. I have put an end to 'friendships' a couple of times that way. It's unpleasant every time, but it's not something I ever regretted.
You chose polite dishonesty as an easy way out. I don't think you can call that parting with someone on 'cordial terms'.

Letting delusional people continue to be delusional is a sure way to let the world continue to be crazy and, in the case of antivaxxers, exposed to diseases that would otherwise be harmless.
Resist!

This is not the thread for discussing Ukraine, but I don't think it's wrong to describe Zelensky as the puppet of Biden and his Western allies.
(I think Denmark has given more aid to Ukraine per capita than any other country. To some extent, we're puppets, too. To some extent we're also perpetrators, too willing to support U.S. wars, for instance.)
The West has been waging a proxy war in Ukraine with no intention of letting it escalate into an actual war, i.e. WW3, with Russia and its allies.
So far, WW3 has remained on the level of hybrid warfare, for the most part. Russia's war against Ukraine and the US attack on Yemen and other countries, mainly in the Middle East, go beyond that level.
 
Another article that doesn't pretend that the pandemic is over:
Too many catching Covid-19 in hospital, experts say - but precautions being rolled back (RNZ.co.nz, Mar 18, 2025)
Five years since the pandemic began, Covid remains New Zealand's most harmful infectious disease. But experts are concerned lessons learnt in infection prevention and control are being ignored, and too many people are getting sick and dying after catching the virus in healthcare settings.
Based on Australian data, it is likely between 10 and 15 percent of Covid deaths are from hospital-acquired infections, representing hundreds of people. Avoidable infection and death are also costly to the health system.
Meanwhile, Covid policies continue to be rolled back.
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I had almost managed to forget the word nosocomial ...

ETA:
New book, Carl Zimmer's Airborne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe (Penguin)

ETA:
Morning Star on X, Mar 15, 2025
The NHS continues to say Covid spreads primarily through ‘droplet and touch’ while the WHO emphasises airborne transmission, meaning vulnerable patients and healthcare workers face unnecessary risks, reports RUTH HUNT
The dangerous confusion over Covid transmission (MorningStar, Mar 15, 2025)
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dann said:
Fractured, weird and crazy, indeed, but why leave him with delusions that harm him as well as you yourself and the rest of us?
Friendship requires honesty. The latter sometimes terminates friendships, but without it, what remains is the illusion of friendship. I have put an end to 'friendships' a couple of times that way. It's unpleasant every time, but it's not something I ever regretted.
You chose polite dishonesty as an easy way out. I don't think you can call that parting with someone on 'cordial terms'.

Letting delusional people continue to be delusional is a sure way to let the world continue to be crazy and, in the case of antivaxxers, exposed to diseases that would otherwise be harmless.
Resist!

This is not the thread for discussing Ukraine, but I don't think it's wrong to describe Zelensky as the puppet of Biden and his Western allies.
(I think Denmark has given more aid to Ukraine per capita than any other country. To some extent, we're puppets, too. To some extent we're also perpetrators, too willing to support U.S. wars, for instance.)
The West has been waging a proxy war in Ukraine with no intention of letting it escalate into an actual war, i.e. WW3, with Russia and its allies.
So far, WW3 has remained on the level of hybrid warfare, for the most part. Russia's war against Ukraine and the US attack on Yemen and other countries, mainly in the Middle East, go beyond that level.
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Agreed. That isn't friendship, merely an illusion. Didn't quite think that through at the time. (That is, I met him after years, and probably won't meet him for years now, if ever. So it made sense not to talk about contentious matters. But I suppose that thrashing those issues out, while that may have made for unpleasantness, but maybe, just maybe, that might have cleared the air, and cleared the way for us to keep in touch now. ...Oh well. Like I said, didn't think this through at the time.)

As far as Zelensky being Biden's puppet, I disagree completely. And I say this as someone who sees Biden's Israel policy as an unmitigated disaster. But Ukraine isn't Israel, and I support Ukraine completely, for what that is worth. ...But you're right, this isn't the place for that discussion.
 
Not a word about COVID-19!
UK:
tern on X, Mar 21, 2025:
Absolutely staggering that anyone claim the covid pandemic is over in schools in England.
Look at these graphs of absence in UK schools and then consider the key quote from the DfE summary of the pupil absence report:
"THE MAJORITY OF ABSENCE (in 2023/2024) WAS DUE TO ILLNESS"
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Charts of absence in England schools.2014-2020 are flat and low, then the years since are high and not going down.Quoting straight from the DfE Headline Facts and Figures Summary of the Report:“The majority of absence (in 2023/2024) was due to illness”

Tern on X, Mar 21, 2025:
THE MAJORITY OF THE ABSENCE WAS DUE TO ILLNESS.
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The majority of absence was due to illness
 
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David Joffe on X, Mar 23, 2025:
"If immune damage were was real, we would be seeing more TB"- Balloux
Things you wished you never said.
@fitterhappierAJ
Tuberculosis Is Making a Comeback
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Tuberculosis Is Making a Comeback - Bacterial disease reaches highest level in US in past 14 years (Newser, Mar 22, 2025)
Tuberculosis continued to rise again in the US last year, reaching its highest levels in more than a dozen years. More than 10,300 cases were reported last year, an 8% increase from 2023 and the highest since 2011, according to preliminary data posted this month by the CDC. Both the number of cases and the rate of infections rose. The new CDC stats aren't a count of how many people were newly infected, but rather of how many people developed a cough or other symptoms and were diagnosed, per the AP. Rates were up among all age groups, and 34 states reported an increase.
  • Cause: CDC officials say the rise is mainly due to international travel and migration. The vast majority of US TB cases are diagnosed in people born in other countries. Other illnesses that weaken the immune system and allow latent TB infections to emerge may also be at play.
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For people who are not familiar with Balloux, there's this on X.
 

"How do we know a pandemic's over?"​



A better question is how do we know that illnesses that have been attributed to "the pandemic" really are caused by "the pandemic"?
 
Clutch Cargo said:
I asked a question. It is your job to provide examples, not mine.
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What makes you think it is the job of anyone here to educate you?

If you really want to know the answer to your question, why not just look it up? That information is freely available. This is a discussion forum, not wikipedia.
 
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