I find it very interesting how much we suck! Our money paid for vaccines, lockdowns, etc. yet total failure. Got Covid, go home until you are too sick to save. If not, glad ya made it. It’s backwards medicine. Here in Virginia, treatments are based on equity. White male, Fack off! Black/Latino- hey got some monoclonals for ya. Pretty sad really. An effective treatment early denied for race. Should have gone all in on these treatments period, with a focus on an all inclusive run… nope, this administration shakes the fist and spites the hand.
I pulled my comments from the other thread a long time ago. I get triggered about Covid because I've been in medicine for 30+ years.
The basic situation is that viruses have been around since the beginning of time. Covid is another virus strain that causes acute respiratory distress- it is airborne. It is damn near impossible to avoid being exposed to an airborne virus. That is what the attempts at social isolation/distancing, masks, etc have attempted. It is a mitigation process, not elimination of the risk. It is damn near impossible to prevent exposure. Traditionally, we have approached disease conditions and the prevention as the responsibility of the individual, not the community based on the above premise that it is damn near impossible to prevent exposure to an airborne virus short of living in a plastic bubble. One can not prove a particular individual's lack of participation in mitigation measures directly resulted in the infection of another individual. For this reason, the burden of prevention has traditionally (and correctly IMO) been placed upon an individual not wanting to be infected. It is foolish to suggest that a mask can prevent you from spreading a virus to another, but NOT be equal in protecting you from being infected by a non mask wearing individual.
Covid has a couple of unique factors that made it particularly hard to prevent transmission. One, it has a delayed onset of symptoms while shedding virus. In other words, infected persons didn't know they were infected until long after spreading virus. Another is its very high rate of infectivity if exposed.
There are only 2 ways to keep from getting infected when exposed which is immunity. Either you have been exposed to live virus before and survived to develop antibodies or you were exposed to an attenuated vaccination form to develop antibodies. That's it.
Unfortunately, the whole Covid pandemic was too profitable to politicians and businessmen to resist getting involved and politicizing the process. Politicians became doctors and doctors became politicians and that's whey we have such unclear and constantly changing public guidelines.
Honestly- the first message should have been:
1. Hundreds of thousands of people are going to die, regardless of what we do.
2. You can reduce your chances by participating in the mitigating measures.
3. It is your responsibility to protect yourself and your loved ones.
4. Get the vaccination when we have it if you want the best chance to protect yourself.
We messed up IMO with all the shut down of commerce, education and subsidized the entire country basically. We've let the genie out of the bottle in our public response.
Influenza is also an airborne respiratory distress causing virus that kills tens of thousands a year in the US and mutates annually. We'll never "beat it" either. We've reduced it by having a vax program annually. That's where the Covid will go with annual mutation vax "boosters" for new strains. Boosting a vax without adding specific antigiens does little to improve the resistance to develop the disease. That's why vaxed folks are also getting Omicron.
- I'm tired of writing. I could go on about how many hundreds of thousands of unused vaccine doses are nearing expiration on the shelf. Or how much money is being made by "rapid" home test kits which are being recommended for nearly everyone. Which asymptomatic persons are getting + results and not knowing what to do with them. Or the ever changing attempts to NOW reduce the effects on the economy in the name "we now know more".
In summary, deadly pandemic viruses are nothing new. This one is among a line of many that have been deadly. What is new is how chose to politicize our response to the detriment of hundreds of thousands of people with latent ill defined effects.
Just really disappointed how the CDC and our government responded.