Coronavirus Week 122: Are we at post-pandemic yet? Close?

People like Walker Bragman on Twitter, and Gregg Gonsalves for the Nation, insist we're not in a post-pandemic world.

What if they're wrong? What if we're at least "getting there"?

In other words, per friend Massimo Pigliucci and the "demarcation problem," what if we're at ...

Semi-pandemic?

We should never sneeze at 300 deaths a day, pun not intended. But, we should look for context.

That's 2,100 deaths per week. Or, 110,000 per year.

Cut that in half and that's a season's worth of flu deaths. Just about exactly. (This isn't counting the last two years of flu seasons, where deaths have dropped due to COVID social distancing and masking.)

Look at Worldometers' US stats. Or the graph below:

We're in October now. Start of flu season coming up in the northern tier of states.

If there's not a big spike within the next six weeks, I'm ready to join Neoliberal Joe and Platonic Liar Fauci and say we're post-pandemic.

At the Atlantic, Sarah Zheng makes the same non-normalization error of comparing a six-month season's worth of flu deaths to the current average of COVID deaths, annualized.

Frankly, I am not sure if most state health departments even count flu deaths outside of flu season, or flu and pneumonia deaths, as they're usually counted in winter.

She does admit that we could be around 100K deaths a year relatively soon and semi-permanently. That's 2X flu deaths. The question as to whether that's "Acceptable" in post-pandemic defining is perhaps partly one of medical ethics. But, it's more a question of public policy definitions.

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Meanwhile, if we're talking about this from a public health issue, it would be "nice" if the likes of Walker Bragman, in the non-professional world, could talk about Biden putting most of his eggs in the mRNA booster basket. Or if "Your Local Epidemiologist" would read the likes of Paul Offit, referenced in that link just above, questioning bivalent vax efficiency before giving the world what she calls a "bivalent boosters science update," which doesn't even tell you, besides Offit, the vote to approve the bivalent booster wasn't unanimous. Besides the one actual "no," there were several hestitant "yeses."

She does say that the first human test info is in. I'm not a scientist, so I can't argue with her analysis, but somebody probably can. She DOES, below that, admit that "we don't know how mRNA vaccines will hold up." Actually, I think we DO know, and the answer is "not that well." And, contra the touting of the bivalent, Offit recommended a Science Mag piece that said it won't hold up that well.

Ergo, they're probably not recommended for the general population. In fact, per next week's piece, already in the hopper, the CDC originally considered recommending them to just the over-50 population but decided that would be too confusing.

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And, for all the antivaxxers, COVID denialists or COVID minimalists that are out there, how many COVID-Zero touters are out there, claiming that "if we just had everybody wear masks all the time," and "everybody got every booster," we'd have no COVID. No, really, this:

Want COVID to end? Wear a goddamn mask and socially distance.This could have been eliminated a long time ago if people weren’t so concerned that caring for themselves and others would cause such unimaginable physical,mental,and social agony that they simply would not survive. 😱

— GingersnapWabbit (@GingersnapW) October 8, 2022

Umm, aside from lying Chinese stats, places like New Zealand got hit hard, relatively, on Omicron.