How do we know a pandemic's over?

[dann]

It is amazing how some people can present what we are all seeing every day with our own eyes as if they have discovered something hitherto unseen that needs to be presented as "reality".
Unlike them, we actually know about reality and what reality is:

My oped on the JN.1 variant and the 2nd biggest US wave of infections (after Omicron) since the pandemic began
We're playing make believe with COVID (LATimes, Jan 4, 2024) @latimes @latimesopinion #LongCovid

With all three respiratory viruses circulating at full force, you would think we'd be seen people wearing masks everywhere in public. That couldn't be further from the truth. The state of denialism and general refusal to take simple steps to reduce the risk of infection can be seen everywhere.
(...)
Now in its fifth year, SARS-CoV-2 has once again proved to be highly resilient, capable of reinventing itself to infect us. Yet we continue to make-believe that the pandemic is over, that infections have been transformed to common cold status by prior exposure(s) and that life has returned to normal. Sadly, none of this is true

Eric Topol (X, Jan 4, 2024)

The alleged "real world around you" is conspicuous. We can see it! We live in it!
Reality is that people are being encouraged to ignore the inconspicuous virus, and even when they're infected by it they are currently encouraged to continue to ignore it and go to work if they're still able to. And people do.
The most amazing thing is that a few skeptics have joined the brigade of if-we-ignore-the-pandemic-and claim-it's-gone-it's-so-much-easier-for-us-to-pretend-it-isn't-there brigade to the extent where they come up with deliberate lies and disastrously wrong predictions about the virus.

So I guess it's time for another one of those reality checks of The Atheist's predictions that he prefers to ignore:

I posted this in the science thread yesterday.

Since the start of omicron, we've [NZ] had an official 11% of the population infected, and I'm going to err way on the side of caution and say the true numbers are 20%, or 1M cases. (I believe it's more like 40%, using absence numbers at schools and workplaces)

Of that million infections, we've never had over 1000 in hospital, with numbers dropping right now, and maximum 40 in ICU. Deaths are listed at 192, but that is all deaths where covid has been present within 28 days of death. The number confirmed to be as a result of covid is a whopping 43.

It's now abundantly clear that post-vaccination omicron is a very minor issue. The people dying have almost exclusively been very frail people, or as my Aussie mate says, people whose toe tags had already been printed. 'Flu deaths here are ~500 a year, and omicron's going to be much lower than that.

Barring a new variant of concern, the pandemic is done and dusted.

I see nothing about long covid to dissuade me from that view, and omicron has shown that nothing will stop it, so the best plan is to ignore it. Masks are fine, but merely delay the inevitable. The evidence of harm among the vaccinated is sketchy and shows no major harm being done to more than a tiny fraction of people, if even that.

My first reality check was on Dec 30, 2022, so it's high time for a follow up:

Back then, this is how far The Atheist's prediction of omicron being "much lower than" the flu deaths of "~500 a year" was off the mark:

Cumulative confirmed COVID-19 deaths, New Zealand, March 25 to Dec 27:
Mar 25, 2022: 273
Dec 27, 2022: 2,331

Cumulative confirmed COVID-19 deaths, New Zealand, 2022: 2,283 (Covid-19 deaths from Jan 1 to Feb 19, 2022: 5 (five!)).

Man, they must have had an awful lot of flu deaths this year to make 2,283 a much lower number than that!

Hospitalizations 2022
Flu: 5,087
Covid-19: 20,516

So let us look at how much lower than flu deaths Omicron deaths have become since then:
Cumulative confirmed COVID-19 deaths in New Zealand from Jan 1 to Dec 11, 2023: Jan 1: 2,331 - Dec 11: 3,596 = 1,265.

How about flu deaths, then?
Unlike last year, the numbers are much harder to come by now. I (don't really) wonder why.
However, given the number of COVID-19 deaths, there is little reason to assume that it is "much lower than" the number of flu deaths in the most recent flu season.

But for the people who still cling to the belief that COVID-19 is seasonal, here's a little NZ information to the contrary:

New Zealand is experiencing a fifth wave of Covid-19 infections, with case numbers rising once again as we head towards the summer holidays. But those under 30 are still not eligible for a second booster and most people under 65 aren’t easily able to access preventative antiviral medication.
(...)
The seven-day rolling average of new infections was 849, with the total number of new cases at 5,947. That’s up from 5,872 the week before. (These numbers are likely to be under-reported. Did you log your infection the last time you got Covid?)
There were 284 people in hospital with Covid-19 as of midnight Sunday, compared to 212 at the same time one week earlier.
The rolling average number of deaths was five, with the overall Covid death toll rising by 27.
A pandemic state of play as we enter the fifth Covid wave (The Spinoff.co.nz, Nov 16, 2023)

So the pandemic also isn't over in New Zealand.
The next update to the COVID-19 data portal will be on 15 January 2024. (NZ COVID-19 Data Portal)

 

[The Atheist]

So the pandemic also isn't over in New Zealand.

As always, you confuse reality with drama.

Yes, lots of people are catching covid.

Nobody cares.

 

[dann]

Nobody?!
As always, The Atheist confuses reality with drama.
Fortunately, we are already familiar with The Atheist's use of numbers and hyperbole:

Like I said, you're a lone voice and 99.999% of the population does not give a toss about the disease any more.

I live in an area where about 30% of the population are Chinese and they're largely still wearing masks and that's fine.

Sometimes numbers are difficult. Sometimes people don't get them right because they don't give a toss.

ETA: It's astonishing how scared pandemic minimizers get when they see or hear about people doing something on an individual basis to lower the risks of transmitting the virus:

My dentist bought a HEPA filter for me It was up and running at max in the room when I arrived. She was so proud and I was so happy.
Fio (X, Jan 4, 2024)

After an awful lot of tweets supporting the action taken by the dentist, the troll army of haters and minimizers appear. For instance:

WhatsLeft @nogoodlifeleft · 12h
Get help for your anxiety. Middle aged women like yourself suffer hard from it.

namecantbeblank @knalbebtnaceman · 12h
think of all the electricity you are wasting. just so you two can feel proud and happy. way to add to the climate crisis. so selfish.

Ropinionsonly @ropinionsonly · 1h
You sound vaccinated

WW G1
@pronounsBroBruh · 5h
Fake news, filtering out a nano particle with consumer grade paper filters, lmaoooook

JPBeck
@JPBeck1776 · 12h
Sounds like she gave in to a mentally I’ll person

Demosthenes @dongcopter997 · 9h
Loser.

sleepy @sleepproject · 12h
You’d be better off seeing a psychiatrist rather than a dentist

Wow, look at all those pathetic trolls, feeling so threatened by a post about a dentist providing access to a HEPA filter.
Fio (X, Jan 5, 2023)

Indeed!

 

[The Atheist]

Nobody?!
As always, The Atheist confuses reality with drama.

You've proven time and again that your understanding of English is weak, and I do understand that as a second language you probably don't do idiom well, but constantly parroting what I say just gets tedious.

Cherry-pick all you like, the fact stands that nobody gives a damn about covid in 2024, except for the clowns at WHO seeking funding. Nobody is masking, nobody is failing to attend mass events and covid is the furthest thing from people's minds.

The really sad part is - and you and the doctors at WHO fail to realise this - is that the continued attempts to panic people over covid will backfire spectacularly when a real threat hits, as it must do.

People have so much pandemic fatigue from clowns screaming about masking up after four years that when a really deadly disease hits, the story of the Boy Who Cried Wolf will be the reaction and following guidelines will be impossible. Aesop knew this 2500 years ago but some people are slow to catch on.

As you were.

 

[dann]

I can empathize with The Atheist.
Living in fear is tough - in this case, the fear that more people will discover the gaslighting being done by health authorities in many countries and then having to come to terms with the realization that they are still living in an ongoing pandemic.

As for the gaslighting, I am not sure if The Atheist knows that his idea of making sure to get an XBB booster shot isn't really an option in New Zealand since the country is saving the XBB booster vaccines for the NZ winter when new variants may have evolved the ability to evade them, and in the meantime: "For boosters, we use the Pfizer BA.4/5 bivalent vaccine."

Your legendary status confirmed yet again - I'm due a booster right now, so I'll make sure it's the XBB one.

I explained this in the Sweden thread, post 1,279.

 

[dann]

Pandemic reporting

More than 1,300 people are in hospital with flu across England, with the figure having increased by more than a third over the Christmas period, according to figures released by the NHS.
There were an average of 1,313 people in hospital with the virus each day during the week ending 31 December. That was an increase of a third on the week before, when the figure was 942.
(...)
The number of people admitted to hospital with Covid-19 increased by 72% in December. There were an average of 3,929 people in hospital with the virus each day across England in the last week of 2023, up from 2,290 in the week ending 30 November.
Number of flu patients in English hospitals rises by a third to over 1,300 (TheGuardian, Jan 5, 2024)

We know that the CFR of COVID-19 is also higher than the CFR of influenza, so why does the article (as well as the title) focus on the flu?

 

[dann]

A viral social media post based on data from the U.S. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention is calling this surge the second-biggest COVID wave in the history of the U.S. — after the omicron surge from late 2021 to early 2022, which infected more people than even the early days of the pandemic.
The US is starting 2024 in its second-largest COVID surge ever, experts say - With the U.S. in the middle of a COVID surge, it's time to make sure you're vaccinated and return to masking, experts say. (Today, Jan 5, 2024)

According to Dr. Lucky Tran's media post:
"Models suggest ∼2 million people a day will be infected at the peak, and ∼100 million or ∼1 in 3 people will likely get COVIC overall during the entire wave."

However, in Denmark it appears to be more than that already, and the wave is far from over:

"We can see that the concentration in waste water is up to the same level as approximately two years ago, when Omicron peaked. My best bet is that around half of the population has had corona in recent months," says the mathematician Lasse Engbo Christiansen, who is a senior researcher in SSI's department for epidemiological research.
Omicron wave has swept over the country with millions infected (X, Jan 7, 2024)

 

[Horhang]

Here is how I know the pandemic is over: people have started living their lives mostly like they lived them before. I spent the last 2 weeks traveling in Japan. Subways full mostly unmasked people. Tourist places full. Crowds of people in public interacting. The pandemic is over. COVID has become an endemic disease that we will now live with much as we do with influenza.

 

[Cosmic Yak]

We know that the CFR of COVID-19 is also higher than the CFR of influenza, so why does the article (as well as the title) focus on the flu?

Possibly because it's an article about the flu.

 

[8enotto]

Here is how I know the pandemic is over: people have started living their lives mostly like they lived them before. I spent the last 2 weeks traveling in Japan. Subways full mostly unmasked people. Tourist places full. Crowds of people in public interacting. The pandemic is over. COVID has become an endemic disease that we will now live with much as we do with influenza.

Good Sir, is it not clear by Dann's posts that a pandemic cannot be ended by 98% of the world population going back to regular life?
The WHO and CDC still do flu studies long after the 1917 outbreak, which are probably the basis of the CV studies now. But there have not been quarantine situations continued since 1917 either. (Isolated cases up to the 1950's)
Dann doesn't like that. History will probably repeat itself anyway.

 

[theprestige]

Back in October, my employer announced that starting January 8, we would be working from the office Mon-Thu. Everyone. No exceptions. No discretion. So for me, today feels like the last day of a three-year interregnum, and tomorrow will mark a return to the Old Ways.

Hell, I actually caught Covid twice in the past year and a half, and it still feels like the pandemic is over, to me. Kind of like how I'd catch the flu, most years, but never once troubled myself about a flu pandemic. Even though the flu is known to kill the elderly and people with other respiratory conditions.

 

[dann]

The Popularity of Argumentum ad Populum among Skeptics

Here is how I know the pandemic is over: people have started living their lives mostly like they lived them before. I spent the last 2 weeks traveling in Japan. Subways full mostly unmasked people. Tourist places full. Crowds of people in public interacting. The pandemic is over. COVID has become an endemic disease that we will now live with much as we do with influenza.

Has anybody, anybody at all, denied that people have started living like they used to do - except for the ones who died or got long covid and are thus excused? Or that people are seen crowding everywhere unmasked?
As I already said:

It is amazing how some people can present what we are all seeing every day with our own eyes as if they have discovered something hitherto unseen that needs to be presented as "reality". Unlike them, we actually know about reality and what reality is:

My oped on the JN.1 variant and the 2nd biggest US wave of infections (after Omicron) since the pandemic began
We're playing make believe with COVID (LATimes, Jan 4, 2024) @latimes @latimesopinion #LongCovid

With all three respiratory viruses circulating at full force, you would think we'd be seen people wearing masks everywhere in public. That couldn't be further from the truth. The state of denialism and general refusal to take simple steps to reduce the risk of infection can be seen everywhere.
(...)
Now in its fifth year, SARS-CoV-2 has once again proved to be highly resilient, capable of reinventing itself to infect us. Yet we continue to make-believe that the pandemic is over, that infections have been transformed to common cold status by prior exposure(s) and that life has returned to normal. Sadly, none of this is true

Eric Topol (X, Jan 4, 2024)

The alleged "real world around you" is conspicuous. We can see it! We live in it!
Reality is that people are being encouraged to ignore the inconspicuous virus, and even when they're infected by it they are currently encouraged to continue to ignore it and go to work if they're still able to. And people do.

It's just a weird way of denying the reality of the pandemic, the one that epidemiologists keep telling us about. It is especially weird at a forum catering to skeptics. It most of all reminds me of the way believers might confront atheists when there were still very few atheists around:
Here is how I know there is a God: people believe in God. I spent the last 2 weeks traveling all over the country. Everywhere the churches were full of people worshipping God. I saw crowds of people praying to the Lord. Atheism doesn't have a leg to stand on. You people with your science claiming that there is no God might as well give up. Nobody listens to you.
And what does science know anyway?!

That a majority of people and even many skeptics reject science and embrace make-belief is a fact. A very unfortunate fact, but still definitely a fact.
That many skeptics also embrace argumentum ad populum is another fact, and just as unfortunate:

In argumentation theory, an argumentum ad populum (Latin for "appeal to the people") is a fallacious argument which is based on claiming a truth or affirming something is good because the majority thinks so.
Argumentum ad populum (Wikipedia)

I hear you, brothers and sisters! I hear the sigh of the oppressed creature, I empathize with your longing for the pandemic to be over and the delusional thinking that it begets: 'The pandemic is over if enough of us believe and pretend that it's over!'
My heart goes out to you, but my common sense prevents me from joining the community of pandemic delusion.

 

[dann]

The San Diego numbers, continued from post 403

Dec 28, 2023:
COVID-19: Cases 29,730, Deaths 171, Outbreaks 273.
Influenza: Cases 7,232, Deaths 12, Outbreaks 7.
RSV: Cases 3,234, Deaths 4, Outbreaks 4.
San Diego County Respiratory Virus Surveillance Report (San Diego County, Dec 28, 2023)

Jan 4, 2024:
COVID-19: Cases 32,528, Deaths 181, Outbreaks 291.
Influenza: Cases 9,041, Deaths 14, Outbreaks 8.
RSV: Cases 3,651, Deaths 6, Outbreaks 6.
San Diego County Respiratory Virus Surveillance Report (San Diego County, Dec 28, 2023)

The flu and RSV are still lagging far behind in deaths and outbreaks, and there are even more cases of C19 than of influenza again. I wonder why there are so few outbreaks of the flu? Just the one in spite of 1,800 cases. Is it easier to keep the flu out of old people's homes?

COVID has become an endemic disease that we will now live with much as we do with influenza.

Except for the ones who don't get the chance to learn to live with it because they died. That it's still a pandemic in spite of your faith will do nothing to shake it, obviously. As Friedrich II, King of Prussia, put it: "Jeder soll nach seiner Façon selig werden."

 

[dann]

Possibly because it's an article about the flu.

No, it's not. It's an article about the flu and COVID-19, which makes the focus on the least contagious and fatal of the two peculiar.
You should read it. It's very short.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

.... But even that didn't exist in a vacuum. Hillary Clinton said she would have done a much better job of handling the pandemic than Trump, who she accurately described as a 'vindictive score-settler'. Trump's vindictiveness certainly was a major factor. He gutted Obama's pandemic preparedness systems and installed sycophants who were incompetent or even antagonistic towards their roles. Then he downplayed the virus and prayed it would just disappear, because he feared that 'panicking' would tank the economy and make him look bad. So is it all Trump's fault? No, it's the fault of all those who voted for a man totally unsuited to the role of President.

Clinton certainly would have done a lot better. For starters she would have continued the pandemic preparedness program and listened to what the non-partisan health authorities told her should be done. And she would have done the right thing regardless of the political fallout. This might have saved close to a million US lives.

But apart from that, would things be much different today if Hillary was president in 2020? I doubt it. Imagine she gets lucky and manages to contain the virus with closed borders, strict lockdowns and quarantines (as some other countries did). The CDC gets the right messaging out so people are well informed and understand why these 'draconian' measures were needed. 6 months later the US is Covid-free and the economy is booming. Awesome, right?

But we are forgetting that 40% of the population hate her guts and would deliberately do the opposite of what any Democrat asks of them anyway. Throw in a big dollop of selfish individualism and the chances of getting the whole country doing the right thing is nil. That means the virus will not be eliminated, only (hopefully) suppressed long enough to get most of the population vaccinated. That's when we hit the next problem - half of them won't. ....[snipped unsupportable speculation.]

Clinton would not have disbanded the pandemic planning committee.There was no reason to.

She wouldn't have paid millions to Trump crony PPE providers that had no PPE.

She would have acted sooner when the first cases started showing up in the US.

She wouldn't have encouraged the anti-vaxxer or anti-masking movement.

 

[marting]

No, it's not. It's an article about the flu and COVID-19, which makes the focus on the least contagious and fatal of the two peculiar.
You should read it. It's very short.

The article, as is all too common, provides different stats for Covid-19 v Flu. The former has an increase over a month 73%, the latter over a week, 29%. But, I suppose, consistency is the hopgoblin of small minds.

That said, Covid-19 CFR's are still more fatal. However, since Flu is increasing about twice as fast as Covid-19 (29% v 15%* per week *C19 stats adjusted for monthly to weekly) Flu is currently more contagious than Covid-19.

 

[The Atheist]

Good Sir, is it not clear by Dann's posts that a pandemic cannot be ended by 98% of the world population going back to regular life?

That 98% of the population is definitely at the post-pandemic stage, and only the WHO is mentioning covid because they want more funds. Not even medical establishments here (or anywhere else I know of) insist on masks any more. Covid has only been killing people with a toe-tag already ordered for a couple of years now. I'd say well under 1% of non-Asians are wearing masks right now and Asians were wearing them prior to covid so don't count.

There is, however, a tiny minority of people who want to stay in pandemic mode forever. They're clearly suffering from some form of societal anxiety/phobia and it suits them to socially distance and mask up so they don't have to interact with actual people in the real world.

It's quite sad, really.

 

[theprestige]

That 98% of the population is definitely at the post-pandemic stage, and only the WHO is mentioning covid because they want more funds. Not even medical establishments here (or anywhere else I know of) insist on masks any more. Covid has only been killing people with a toe-tag already ordered for a couple of years now. I'd say well under 1% of non-Asians are wearing masks right now and Asians were wearing them prior to covid so don't count.

There is, however, a tiny minority of people who want to stay in pandemic mode forever. They're clearly suffering from some form of societal anxiety/phobia and it suits them to socially distance and mask up so they don't have to interact with actual people in the real world.

It's quite sad, really.

I think some people see pandemic lockdown as a way to destroy capitalism, and usher in an age of human suffering like nothing ever seen before in recorded history.

 

[theprestige]

Chanakya, do you know the influenza pandemic is over? Why or why not?

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Both COVID and influenza have different strains, different seasons, differing vaccine efficacies and different means of transmission profiles making it impossible to determine which is worse unless you delineate the parameters you wish compare.

And choice of objective measures differs as well. Is it economic losses? Do you include parents who have to stay home from work with sick kids? Do you include how many parents go to work sick and send their kids to school when sick? Do you compare hospital resources used? How do you measure patients who have to be transferred to other care regions? How do you measure deferred elective surgeries?

You might be able to compare one strain against another in a small population over a limited period of time. There's not much use in doing that.


As for ignoring COVID preventative measures like it's one's religious conviction to do so, go suck eggs. We are all individuals in different countries. I'm severely immunocompromised with an autoimmune respiratory disease. I don't care if you wear a mask or not. Same with getting vaccinated.

I do care about people amplifying misinformation just because they are annoyed not everyone wants to take the same, 'ignore it', POV.