O RLY?
Fox News has a Coronavirus Category with 5 new stories this month
If you’re going to be an alarmist asshole you might as well avoid adding a bunch of lies to your headlines in addition to it.
“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
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”
But that’s not the issue, the public is being misinformed from their own cognitive dissonance. They think that since the news is not reporting it anymore or that everyone else is not wearing masks, that it must be over so following rules to prevent the spread of COVID (and, in my perspective, general viruses) that don’t interrupt daily life, like washing hands thoroughly, wearing a mask at places that have large gatherings like the subway during rush hour or the bus, or grocery shopping. During COVID there were mostly people who followed this and some who ate the rabbit of tiktok, but now that the full propaganda machine from russia/china is in full swing, nobody trusts anything their government in the west says unless its a hot button issue like immigrants or expensive goods.
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.
Getting a flu + covid shot is free or nearly free for every American that has health insurance. It may be less convenient, but there are places to get a free flu and covid vaccines, if Americans do not have health insurance. Anecdote: This year, I had zero side effects from the shots besides a sore arm!
I went to a CVS and received both for free. I wasn’t even asked about insurance.
What?! I went to CVS for my flu shot and had to pay $70 - the Covid booster was $120 or something like that so I ended up skipping it (I’m also uninsured).
Did I just get unlucky?
Really? Dang, I don’t live in a blue state even. I’m sorry you had to do that 🙁 I do live in a particularly red area, in the past I have gotten the covid vaccine earlier than I was supposed to for my age group because nobody was going and they needed to use it.
Did they likely have your insurance on file? I know that when I hit the pharmacy they never need to ask. Even for doctors offices, I’ve found different offices being different levels of worried. Some want to see my card every time, some once a year, and some seem content to try to file and only bother me if that fails later.
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.
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.
Yeah but now Bill Gates can track you and that’s not even mentioning the reptilians! Then you’ll get autism and die.
Add RFK to that mix and one-two years from now, were all fucked because that leper colony beill be sharing all it’s goodies cooties with the rest of the world.
Given the known incidence of Long COVID, the current levels of transmission are generating an estimated 200,000 new cases of Long COVID per week.
Holy fuck, it’s making us dumber. That explains a lot!
- It’s less deadly
- It doesn’t sell stories
- People aren’t interested
- People are vaccinated
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.
Yeah, but so can alcohol, smoking, microplastics, and red meat. Heart disease is back to being the #1 killer of Americans, and humans still prioritize fear over serial killers and Bird Flu rather than heart disease and car accidents.
Humans are notoriously bad at assessing risk. It’s a lot of work to overcome our cognitive biases.
You really don’t see the difference between vices that a person chooses to ingest, and people spreading a potentially deadly/debilitating virus to a person unwittingly?
Really?
Copying from my comment when you posted this on another community:
The issue is that it’s less severe, partially because people have immunity and partially because the virus is weaker (this happens with new illnesses - they get less fatal and spread more).
But wastewater isn’t newsworthy. It never has been. It’s disingenuous to say the media isn’t covering this when ERs are NOT having issues and people aren’t dying.
Many doesn’t the media have mass coverage of the common cold? Why don’t they cover norovirus? Endemic shit that doesn’t kill people isn’t really newsworthy.
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.
Flu and COVID will peak at different times in given communities comparing apples to oranges if the epitome of disingenuous
As is downplaying the risk and severity of what is very much still a dangerous virus - something that the US government is complicit in doing. Those numbers were national numbers for the US that week. Regardless of what part of the year they peak in, they’re both dangerous, but the CDC is only mandated to be unable to report on cases in any other way except by wastewater for one of them. And that means it’s impossible to get a proper comparison, but I’d say that it’s still a safe bet to guess that COVID peaks during the Christmas season and into the new year when people are inside more. Besides, the facts remain that not only is COVID still killing plenty of people - especially amongst those with medical issues that prevent them from getting vaccinated themselves or leave them immunocompromised - but every infection, regardless of severity, has a high chance of causing permanent damage to any organ. COVID has been found in every single organ in the body, from the brain to the testicles, and many long-term debilitating symptoms have been attributed to COVID infection. Things like brain fog, chronic exhaustion, sleep disorders, infertility, and many more.
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.
Read the links. The theory that diseases just get weaker over time is false, whatever your intuition is. Just because some diseases happen to have gotten less lethal over time doesn’t mean that’s how diseases work in general. Others have gotten more lethal.
And it’s not true that COVID has gotten weaker over time. Most of us have better immune responses now that they’ve gone through many rounds of vaccines and/or infections, but the disease isn’t itself weaker.
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.
