News

although i agree with the post title being a bit incorrect, and your comment of "alarmist asshole" not really called for, its not front page news and that's because people are over COVID and could care less while people who are at risk from severe infection are getting it and dying still. People are just going to get super sick and say "yeah its a flu covid is over so it cant be that"

“it’s totally silent if i plug my ears and totally dark if i close my eyes”!

thank you for your service. this is the type of post i wish would get downvoted to the floor. if we can’t get basic googleable facts right in !news@lemmy.world how can we have any hope for accuracy in reporting on climate catastrophe and genocide? hawt damb

Given how silo'ed everyone's media consumption is now a days I find it entirely too plausible that someone could avoid any new COVID news.

This is honestly the seocnt time I'm hearing about this. Though it may be out there, it's not front-page news for sure.

I went to a CVS and received both for free. I wasn't even asked about insurance.

I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t realize the importance of getting a flu shot prior to living through the COVID pandemic. I do my best these days to inform people my age that getting vaccinated is about protecting others who might not fare against the virus as well as you might.

Zero side effects from my last flu + COVID booster. Get it done, even if you’re not personally worried about getting sick.

Getting a flu + covid shot is free or nearly free for every American that has health insurance

that is a lot of conditions for the accessibility in a country notorious for people having no health insurance.

My grocery store(Safeway) even gives 20 percent off groceries if you get your shot with them.

I keep forgetting to get mine, but last year, when I went to schedule mine, they had open appointments starting a half an hour from then. I could've practically walked in and gotten a shot right then and there.

But it can cause long-term and permanent damage to certain organs, and that is a pretty big reason to care. Unfortunately that fact doesn't seem to clear the hurdle of point 3 on your list for many people.

That's slightly disingenuous in that COVID is still very dangerous. The last time I checked the fatalities, which I believe had been those of the first week of November, there were somewhere around 400 deaths from COVID that week and 13 from the flu in that 7 day period.

I remember reading reports about the strains going around at the beginning of last year (Jan of 2023), and those were actually more dangerous and more infectious than the original strains were. But there were nowhere near the casualty rates because the vaccines work. But not everybody can get vaccinated, and every infection still has about a 20% chance of causing Long COVID despite the vaccine, which can be so crippling that it can put you on permanent disability or cause infertility (COVID is also stored in the balls, along with the pee).

The reason that we see the wastewater reports is because that's the only way that they're legally allowed to report infection rates. The government mandated that the CDC stop recording other rates sometime during the height of the pandemic, around the time that companies started pushing for an end to lockdowns and for grandparents to die for the economy because their grandkids would thank them for it. Also around the time that DeSantis tried to make the person running the COVID tracking website for Florida fake the numbers so that he could say that COVID was over.

because the virus is weaker (this happens with new illnesses - they get less fatal and spread more).

This isn't true. It's a debunked theory from the 1800s. Viruses evolve chaotically, sometimes strengthening sometimes weakening. There's no general rule that they get weaker and COVID's reduction in lethality is due to other factors.

Right. Except it does kill people, just like the flu kills people. Large numbers, not nearly as large as several years ago but still large. And the effects of Long COVID look rather bad, too.

So it is newsworthy, by your standards. Meh.

Of course people are dying. And getting long covid. And other organ failures

Also, there's been a January spike every January since 2021. It's practically clockwork. Which also makes it not really newsworthy, especially as the disease becomes less deadly.

https://www.mwra.com/biobot/biobotdata.htm

On the other hand, I saw plenty of news stories about bad travel this holiday. Which is really, really not newsworthy. But we get those every year.

Overall, the mortality (death) rate for bird flu in humans is high — historically, about half of all people with known infections have died. But most recent cases in the U.S. have been mild.

This is a good thing in immunology, actually. Diseases with extremely high severity rates tend to not spread through a population because it incapacitates their host too quickly- Ebola is a classic example. Fucking insane severity, but bad to the point where it hasn't ever spread to epidemic proportions because it's super easy to recognize then isolate. Ebola outbreaks have been (mostly, sans 2014) limited to small geographic areas of small populations.

Except it is causing mass deaths. Have you read the 2024 numbers? Much lower than a few years ago but much higher than zero.

Fortunately you can just not eat eggs and not consume milk.

You can't not breathe air.

“Your corporate media is lying to you because they literally don’t care whether you live or die”

“You right. What’s this about, is it global warming? Trump’s very real plans to literally kill or imprison any American who stands in his way? Health care which reaps a bountiful harvest of corpses every month in the name of profit? PFAS? Microplastic? Good old particulate emissions which are still giving out asthma, COPD, lung cancer, and other forms of disability and early death? The global rise of authoritarianism which they are gradually warming to, more or less explicitly, instead of making even a lukewarm attempt at reporting on honestly? The death of education and the daily misery of every public school teacher, nurse, delivery driver, or anyone else who actually does all the work to keep it all going? Insects dying? Amphibians? Methane? Death of the oceans? TikTok and YouTube and the mental destruction they cause in babies and toddlers too young to resist the harm it causes them?”

“Wastewater Covid is going up.”

“Oh. Well, you’re not even wrong, really. Put it on the pile.”