It occurred to me that I haven't looked at COVID-19 lately, so I figured I should do that. Here's an old-school look at the daily rate of confirmed cases in various countries:
Cases are way down all over the world. The US case rate has increased slightly since April, but it's still below 250/day compared to a high of 2,400/day during the Omicron outbreak.
For now, things are looking pretty calm. That's great, but I wish it weren't making everyone so complacent. There's still a likelihood of further surges, and we should be spending the money to prepare for them. It's just dumb to pretend that COVID has gone away never to return.
Testing and reporting is way down, though, so I wonder. Why bother reporting a case to your county? I know people who haven't.
What does the sewage say? Better metric at this point.
Also, for months (years) now, Kevin has been harping that case counts don’t matter. Which is true, to an extent. If all the cases reported were for >70 year olds, the IFR and CFR wouldn’t be significant.
The important metric is hospitalizations, because that impacts all other reasons for hospitalization. Not sure why Kevin has forgotten that, especially considering his immune comprised status.
With SARS ability to infect every animal species it gets near it creates a huge reservoir of mutation. One of these thing is inevitably going to be really bad.
In wondering how deer managed to get it I think they get it from pets. Deer in urban environments are now almost as common as rabbits and they will often just give the cat or dog a sniff, or even make friends with them.
It has been almost 3 years. It's endemic now. Live your lives.
BTW. I am triple vaxxed and I just caught a case. So far it is less symptomatic than a bad cold. Still annoying though.
Your anecdotes sure prove your point. To you, at least.
Ron Howard Narration: "Lisa Gerlich" was not in fact triple vaxxx'd. & actually, she's David Leonhardt's "Alice from Queens".
I loved that show except for the 4th season, which was a disappointing wasteland.
Yeah, people mostly are. The OP isn’t advocating for any restrictions or changes, just observing data, so what are you on about?
Should have been a reply to lisagerluch. Damn, this commenting system is terrible. Is that Kevin’s plan?
I have encountered this problem & think that it may sometimes result from a lengthy post obviously not the case here - or a technical delay in posting, which has occurred with my sometimes-slow broadband. It somehow switches to a different spot -even a new comment, rather than response to one. If I exit the text box to check it in B&W, I double-check the line above the text box referencing the "to" designation.
it's cheap, which is probably a major feature if you're blogging for nothing ...
I have never liked WordPress. The OP did comment about people getting more complacent, which I took to mean that people and their children should continue to be masked. People should get a shot every two months (which seems to be the effective staying power of any current booster). People should continue social distancing etc. I pointed out that covid is a part of our lives now, like flu and colds. I took a look at the TX covid case/death rate charts, and while cases are up (and we know with the availability of at-home testing kits, many afflicted are not getting reported), the death rate in 2022 is on a completely different scale. On a demographic chart, the high mark in 2020 and 2021 was 12k; in 2022, it is 4K. Not sure how the death rate compares with the death rates of the flu for any given year before 2019, but my guess is the rate may not be much different. Maybe, I was too severe on the OP. Because while my covid symptoms are mild, they are annoying.
My county in Western MA is way up. Not as high as Dec. Jan, but moving pretty quickly.
The cases per million count has doubled over the past month. If you go by what things were like in January, cases are way down. So, it just depends on your point of reference.
Deaths are continuing to go down, though, and they are about equal to the lowest point last year (just before the Delta outbreak).
In the past, deaths have lagged cases by about three weeks. Of course, there may be some variance in virulence between the variants.
Also most deaths have been people 60 and up and that age group is mostly vaccinated and cautious. Also I suppose Paxlovid may have something to do with it.
Masking recommendations are back in NY, NJ and New England....and summer wave in the South???
More people at work have been infected in the past month or two--all vaccinated and cases weren't bad--then during the height of infections. Doesn't seem to have been spread at work though.
I'm still wondering when we're going to have a grown up conversation about Long Covid. Rarely mentioned in the media, and the average person just assumes that if they avoid hospitalizations then this thing a just a cold. Yet all along experts have been quietly freaking out, with studies at places like the VA painting a grim picture about what this disease is doing to a lot of people.
So WTF is going on? Is there something I'm missing and it really is no big deal? Or is this one of those "if we talk about it out loud the economy will collapse" things?
Long COVID is very serious. And the medical community takes it seriously. If you watch Fox then yes, there's something you're missing. But outside of the Fox bubble, it's easy to find articles about long COVID. Just google "long covid." Google is your friend.
Thanks for the brilliant advice, but yes, I read articles about Long Covid all the time. So why isn't this part of the broader conversation? Why isn't "a 10% to 30% of who knows maybe permanent disability, even in kids" causing any kind of panic whatsoever?
Why does the conversation, even on this site, seem to always stop at hospitalizations/deaths, which clearly makes Covid a much smaller threat to people under 60, when "highly contagious dementia" is the actual threat every young person is facing?
I’m not even sure what “long Covid” means. I’m way more concerned about several months to a year or more than I am a month or two, for instance.
Exactly! That’s what I’m trying to tease out of the available studies and data, and why I wish this was a broader conversation. It’s just not clear.
Are an absurdly large percentage of people developing permanent symptoms? Or is that extremely rare, and most Long Covid completely resolved in under 6 months or whatever?
You and I are on the same page on this.
Seems pretty clear to me:
https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/public-health/what-doctors-wish-patients-knew-about-long-covid
Yes, I've read that. Ok, great, since you're clearly the expert here, can you please tell me, based on current studies, what is the actual percentage of people who develop Long Covid who have ongoing debilitating symptoms that don't appear to be improving and are expected to be permanent? Bonus points for Omicron-specific data.
Note: Handwaving about symptoms that last "at least 4 months" or whatever doesn't actually answer the question.
Golack’s link to Katherine Wu’s article says it all to me:
“But for all we know now about long COVID, it is still not enough. Researchers still don’t know who’s most at risk, or how long the condition might last; whether certain variants might cause it more frequently, or the extent to which vaccines might sweep it away. We do not have a way to fully prevent it. We do not have a way to cure it. We don’t even have a way to really quantify it: There still isn’t consensus on how common long COVID actually is. Its danger feels both amorphous and unavoidable.”
Yea, I'd somehow missed these Atlantic articles, just read them all.
Ugh.
The Atlantic has a number of articles on this.
Ed Yong has an earlier overview:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/09/covid-19-long-haulers-pandemic-future/619941/
Katherine Wu has some more recent work:
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/03/long-covid-risk/627031/
and
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/05/long-covid-treatment-pfizer-paxlovid/629810/
Thanks for these. I've read a lot on this topic, but somehow missed these Atlantic articles.
Unfortunately they confirm what I've been so stressed about. 🙁
Not saying you're wrong, but how prevalent is long covid? I know probably 200 people that have had covid (including myself and my wife and kids) and no one has had any lasting symptoms. Other than one friend who got it early on and was in the ICU for a few days, every other acquaintance has had mild to no symptoms at all.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04569-5
Suggest that basically everybody that was infecte, even if not hospitalized, lost some their brain. The eefect is pretty small, but the fact that they can measure it at all already makes it scary.
Yikes. That is concerning.
That's what I'm struggling to understand. Anecdotally, I have one good friend in NYC who had a pretty bad case in the early days, and he's on disability now... been in bad shape for the entire pandemic so far. I know a couple others who have mentioned minor issues, but otherwise I just haven't heard much from people in my circle.
But then all of the research looks dire. So yea, very hard to make any sense of WTF is going on or how to manage it... clearly most people are pretending everything is fine, but then you have China panicking to prevent any of their citizens from getting infected. Do they know something we don't?
I totally agree about the severity of long covid. I suffer from ME/CFS, initiated by contracting a virus in my teens and never recovering. Most sufferers from ME/CFS can identify a specific viral infection as the trigger, and each virus epidemic around the world has seen a resulting surge in ME/CFS cases. Ever since the very beginning of the covid pandemic people in my world (ME/CFS researchers, doctors, patients…) have been fully aware, and terrified, of what would for sure be one of the horrible results of this pandemic, namely that a percentage of covid patients would end up with a ME/CFS diagnose. My ME/CFS clinic has been drowned in new patients during the last year and a half. (Obviously some, even most, long haulers get better or even completely well after a prolonged illness period, but for some, it never ends.)
One problem is that ME/CFS is a very debilitating disease. A very large percentage of patients have no capacity to fight for awareness and education about the disease; many can’t even leave their home to get to a doctor. Very little funding is given to research into the disease worldwide, though the US is among the best. Had this disease got the research funding it deserved, knowledge about it would have been vastly greater than is currently the case, meaning that the world would have been much better prepared for how to care for long covid patients.
Ironically, ME/CFS having been treated so dismissibly also means that when doctors encounter a long covid patient they don’t necessarily think ME/CFS, because they may not be aware of its existence, or recognize it. Another problem is that, at least here in Sweden, people with long covid are not always taken seriously. The same way people with ME/CFS have been dismissed, doctors saying it is all in their head, or they should just exercise and get some fresh air, this is now happening to people with long covid. There are horror stories of doctors previously having encountered patients with ME/CFS and not understood the severity of the disease, now finding themselves stuck in long covid hell and encountering the same dismissive attitude from their colleagues. This is particularly true for female doctors, since female patients complaining about symptoms that are hard to verify by simple blood tests or similar are traditionally dismissed. And long covid, just like ME/CFS, affects more woman than men.
Another issue is that since ME/CFS has a bad reputation because doctors don’t always take it seriously, long covid sufferers do not want to get associated with this disease. They are afraid of being dismissed the same way, hence they have an interest in being seen as suffering from something else, something with better “status”. This does not help any of the patient groups, which would otherwise have everything to gain from combining the knowledge gained in each field. Luckily most serious ME/CFS researchers are fully aware of what is happening, and are taking advantage of this opportunity to follow patients from initial (covid) infection through post covid and, for some really unlucky individuals, all the way to a ME/CFS diagnose.
Actually, today is ME/CFS Awareness Day, celebrated today since May 12 is the birthday of Florence Nightingale, who towards the end of her life suffered from something that seems very much like ME/CFS.
So sorry you've had to endure this crap. It really is inexplicable and infuriating to me how the general medical community has treated this. I'd always heard about how badly Chronic Fatigue sufferers, and even Chronic Lyme disease sufferers, have been treated, and now here we go again with Long Covid.
Thank you.
It seems to me the problem is general; "new" diseases are treated with suspicion until they can be proven by simple tests and/or are scientifically understood, instead of just trying to remedy as much as possible of the patient's suffering, regardless of cause.
In the case of post covid it is at least hard to deny, there are simply too many sufferers.
Well, we know (via MRIs) it comes from brain damage (Encephalopathy). There are some instances where this was triggered by brain inflammation (Encephalitis) via the immune system, but most tend not to show the chemical markers of inflammation. There have been conflicting studies of whether or not SARS-CoV-2 can infect brains.
I still believe the immune system is implicated in long-COVID. After all, it was just a few years ago that Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV) was implicated with immune cell presence in brains of Alzheimers patients and EBV is also implicated with post-infection Encephalitis, meaning one way or another, some viruses have many interesting (if unknown) ways to interact with your immune system to kill brain cells.
There is a wave in the US right now, driven by BA.2.12.1. A lot of it is hidden by at-home testing not being officially tracked, but it is nonetheless trackable in part by the rise in positivity, now at ~10% in the US. In the middle ages of the Pandemic, such a number would have triggered partial lockdowns and mandatory indoor masking. But because we're in the (reverted) dark ages of the Pandemic, we're hoping we'll be okay without indoor mask mandates. I asked a friend who caught COVID if she wore her mask, she said she forgot it at home. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You can also observe it in the rise in hospitalizations (in some states -- think NY -- there are more ppl being hospitalized daily than during the peak of Delta) and official cases, the wastewater surge in certain geographical areas, and of course, deaths. Overall the current wave pales in comparison to that first Omicron wave (cases) or Delta (deaths), but these subvariants are ~20-30% more infectious (covered by Eric Topol) than Omicron, so if you are in an indoor area without a mask, you will get infected.
Also, most experts (including the vaccine makers Moderna and Pfizer/Biontech) are predicting a biggish fall wave. Moderna is already in Phase-III trials of a bivalent (two variant targets) vaccine to address the Omicron subvariants.
Agree wholeheartedly.
Cases are not grossly UNDER reported due to at home testing
And WHO recently suggested based upon WORLD wide data that the deaths from COVID are probably triple what has been reported
The Atlantic did a piece within the last week that suggests that the speed at which the variants are now appearing makes it LIKELY that in the near future a variant with more severe outcomes along with increased transmissibility will come along.
This is not over
Herd immunity was NEVER going to be achieved with a virus that is changing this rapidly
Is there any news regarding the efficacy of at home tests with the new variant. My grandson tested negative twice with at home tests but since he had a close contact at school and had symptoms his parents had him PCR tested and it came back positive.
If there is a problem with the home tests that could lead to underreporting and more severe outcomes for people who don’t take precautions based on negative testing.
Accuracy (Sensitivity) is very high: https://bityl.co/CAuK
But, if you test too early it'll be negative (below threshold of virus count that can be detected). Many report that a throat sample in addition to a nasal sample improves (early) detection.
The minimum current incubation period is ~3 days for Omicron.
Thanks, good to know. I wonder what happened with my grandson’s home tests? He was symptomatic and the tests were over 2 days.
I have seasonal allergies and they are acting up now. When that happens I always get worried it might be Covid and self test. Used Binax tonight.
By chance, Derek Lowe, Science writer/blogger, on Wednesday:
I've read a small study suggesting that a daily antihistamine (allergy pill) may help to attenuate inflammation that expresses/presents as long-COVID. It's a reasonable expectation, particularly given how corticosteroids were used early on to attenuate cytokine storms and the inflammation damage caused to lungs.
My daughter works in a hospital in New Hampshire, and she says covid cases - and admissions - are suddenly going up significantly. This ain't over. I'm not particularly alarmed, as I'm vaxed and boosted and have since contracted covid with relatively minor symptoms, but as long as this goes on, there's a threat of mutation to something much worse. Also, some - including my wife - are susceptible to long covid, which can be problematic, depending on what lingers.
Lagging data. A month from now.....she will be reporting differently.
This wave is hitting a lot of people in my social circle who are vaxxed and boosted, often as their first infection.
Many are using only home tests, so I do wonder how many family members of the known positive cases are asymptomatic and have virus levels that are too low to be caught by a nasal swab test.
Covid is over. Time to take Col Green's advice from Star Trek: environmental protection is only what matters.
"The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation estimates that only 7% of positive Covid-19 cases in the US are being detected, meaning case rates are actually 14.5 times higher than officially reported." - https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/18/health/covid-at-home-testing-data/index.html
That doesn’t sound right to me. The current 7 day average case rate for the USA according to Worldometers is 81,572. If it were 14.5 times that we would be talking about over a million cases per day. Either those numbers are exaggerated or the current variant is extremely benign.
It's everywhere. Probably a downturn is coming though. The old rules of 2020-21 covid is over. No summer surge, but a summer downturn.
I agree this can't be correct - it would exceed the case peak of first Omicron wave by far, and half of my office was out with Covid in January. No one is out with Covid right now.
Wild guesses are often what result from incomplete data.
Interesting because among my social circle number of cases and exposures that require testing is a lot higher than at any other time in the pandemic. It is not even close. I have taken to calling it the pandemic flood because it is no longer just a wave. Then again in January almost everyone in my area was masking and now it is fairly rare.
I have read where it is 6 - 8 times the number published so the U.S. number 250 is more than likely 1500 - 2000 cases a day. I doubt most people who test positive at home bother to contact the CDC
Long covid is far less with omicron than Delta. Much like OC43, follow its evolution.......
Case reporting is going to be down. Not only is that more dependent upon the health systems, home testing is going to bypass any chance of reporting.
Deaths are mostly limited to the elderly too, and better treatments are reducing that as well, so that metric is useless as well.
Hospitalizations is the graph I'd like to see, specifically hospitalizations per capita. Although I'm open to suggestions.
I had another DNA test. 55% R1b 30%% R1a 15% Ia. Balti-Slavic must have been pale.
The USA Today COVID tracking page has a national cases graph that suggests we're at the beginning of what looks like a serious surge: https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/graphics/2020/03/10/us-coronavirus-map-tracking-united-states-outbreak/4945223002/?fbclid=IwAR0qbHBO1Hn7x8K7HHyr6SdMev9DL43JxlkhgLwKPXn3-KgY4DBZ7tFgxgg
Not really. The slope is relatively shallow compared to previous surges, and the omicron spike, despite its height, wasn't any worse than the previous surge in terms of overall impact. The coming surge will have relatively little overall impact.
We continuously UNDER estimate SARs Covid. Why?
2 reasons. One is political the other scientific
The political one is easy to understand. The GOP has a radical wing to it that WANTs to believe that science is all wrong all the time. Part of that wing is rooted in Christian belief that God will cure all diseases. Back in the time of Christ, right up until the 1940s and 50s MOST diseases didn't spread as rapidly or as world wide as COVID has. They had regional surges for sure, but globally there was far, far FAR too little interaction between countries to cause a spread like todays COVID. Then you have another part of "the wing" that believes anything that Trump said. Even when he changed course, THAT wing went with him. From injection bleach, to shoving UV light in your butt they believed EVERYTHING he said. Today even the so called scientists on his staff that were also his supporters are now singing a different tune.
Then there's the science of it all. We use comparisons like the Spanish flu of 1917-18 as a comparable disease yet the technology back then pales in comparison to what we have now, and what we will have in the future.. Then there's the population explosion of the 40s and 50s and early 60s along with huge levels of interaction between countries spanning the globe that has lead to the rapid advance COVID has made on a global scale. This higher level of interaction has lessened our ability to slow down this virus. The more interaction we have the more the virus spreads and the more it spreads the more it mutates into something different. The differences are sometimes slight, others are more egregious.
THIS is the problem. Our theories are based upon past experience when the world had less interaction. In 1917-18 you traveled on a slow boar usually with 1000 other passengers. Today its 300 passengers on thousands of jets PER DAY all of us breathing air that is recirculated within the passenger cabin !! But you are sitting elbow to elbow with strangers so even if you "treat" the air it's too late its already wafted through much of that cabin right through a passengers breathing zone on its way to get filtered and treated.
Trump did us a favor when he shut the economy down - it gave us time to develop vaccines. When new variants came out the pharma companies DID NOT CHANGE the vaccines even though they could because they believed it would work against future variants. This was wrong. The virus is evolving too fast, still.
Now we are faced with a dilemma that is based upon the economic impact the virus will impose on us. As cases rise to we go back to masks, social distancing and curtailed "party time"??? If I am running a food processing factory with 2500 employees standing elbow to elbow the LAST thing I want is for a highly transmissible NEW variant to come along that evades the vaccine or natural immunity that we had. That is exactly what is feared here.
The Omicron variant is so far removed from initial COVID that all immunity weakens too quickly.
But damn if we don't want to bury our heads in the sand eh? We WANT our bars and restaurants opened so we can relax with a meal. We want to travel on cruises and airplanes to our favorite vacation spots to relax from the stresses of life today !!!
We are our own worst enemy
There's not really a likelihood of further surges. By this point in time, pretty much everyone has been infected or vaccinated or both. And the variants are both highly contagious and relatively mild. So, yes, the uptick in cases will continue, but it won't approach the severity of the omicron spike, so mask mandates won't increase since hospitals won't be in danger of overflowing. There will be a surge in the U.S. next thanksgiving through new years, but it won't be high enough to change behavior. And we will start to see the return of normal flu cases that season.
This is interesting:
bc11.com/covid-deaths-breakthrough-cases-vaccine-vaccinated/11841569/
A growing proportion of COVID-19 deaths are occurring among the vaccinated, a new ABC News analysis of federal data shows.
In August of 2021, about 18.9% of COVID-19 deaths occurred among the vaccinated. Six months later, in February 2022, that proportional percent of deaths had increased to more than 40%.
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A growing proportion of COVID-19 deaths are occurring among the vaccinated, a new ABC News analysis of federal data shows.
In August of 2021, about 18.9% of COVID-19 deaths occurred among the vaccinated. Six months later, in February 2022, that proportional percent of deaths had increased to more than 40%.
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Comparatively, in September 2021, just 1.1% of COVID-19 deaths occurred among Americans who had been fully vaccinated and boosted with their first dose. By February 2022, that percentage had increased to about 25%.
Experts said the increase in breakthrough deaths is expected with more Americans reaching full vaccination status.
"These data should not be interpreted as vaccines not working. In fact, these real-world analyses continue to reaffirm the incredible protection these vaccines afford especially when up to date with boosters," said Dr. John Brownstein, an epidemiologist at Boston Children's Hospital and an ABC News contributor.
In addition, many vulnerable Americans are more than one year out from their primary vaccinations and have yet to receive booster doses.
To date, more than 220 million Americans have been fully vaccinated, 100 million of whom have received their first COVID-19 booster. However, about 91.5 million eligible Americans - about half of those currently eligible - have yet to receive their first booster shot.
The increase in breakthrough deaths comes as a growing proportion of older Americans enter the hospital for COVID-19 related care.
Last summer, after more vulnerable, older populations had been vaccinated, the share of Americans ages 65 years and older in the hospital had dipped to a pandemic low - with younger populations representing the largest age groups of people in need of care. However, throughout the omicron surge, the average age of those in the hospital with COVID-19 has steadily gotten older again.
More than 90% of seniors have been fully vaccinated, but a third of them have yet to receive their first booster shot. Even with overall high vaccination rates in older populations, in recent months, during the omicron surge, 73% of deaths have been among those 65 and older.
Health experts said vaccines and boosters continue to provide significant protection against severe disease. However, waning immunity re-emphasizes the urgency of boosting older Americans and high-risk Americans with additional doses.
"This trend in increased risk among the elderly further supports the need for community wide immunization. Older populations, especially those with underlying conditions, continue to be at great risk of severe complications, especially as immunity wanes. The best way to protect them is to make sure everyone around them is fully immunized," Brownstein said.
All Americans over the age of 50, immunocompromised people over the age of 12, and people who received two doses of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, are currently eligible for a second booster.
Approximately 10.5 million people in the U.S. have received their second booster dose.
"Given the fact that immunity is waning, we've got to get people boosted," Dr. Anthony Fauci told GBH News's Boston Public Radio on Monday.
In February, unvaccinated adults were 10 times more likely to die of COVID-19 compared to vaccinated individuals and five times more likely to require hospitalization, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Compared to fully vaccinated and boosted adults, unvaccinated people were about 20 times more likely to die of COVID-19 and seven times more likely to require hospitalization.
***********************************************************************
Immunity wanes over time - in the meantime the virus continues to mutate.
We SHOULD Be using the most up to date vaccines. If the CEO of Pfizer was correct in that he could bring a new vaccine to market in 90 days then we SHOULD be using the latest and greatest vaccine.
We made a strategic blunder by allowing them to use the initial vaccine against Delta and Omicron
I believe that Kevin Drum may be wrong about COVID
Even MOE sobering news:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/13/opinions/covid-19-210-mph-curveballs-osterholm-bergen/index.html
{snip}
I've heard people say over and over again, "This thing is as infectious as it's going to get," and yet it keeps getting more infectious. Obviously, there's a limit to that increasing infectiousness. It can't go to the speed of light, but surely, you can expect to see new variants that survive and capitalize on microbial evolution by being more infectious.
Also, the whole issue of waning immunity is really an underappreciated situation, but the key point is that we don't know what's going to happen six months from now. So, we could have 100 million cases, but on the other hand, if we don't see a new variant develop, maybe we won't. I think that that's the uncertainty that we have to convey to everyone and make clear that we've got to prepare for the worst and hope for the best.
The virus is not done with us yet. We are going to have an ongoing pandemic with this virus for some time now.
{snip}
After 2 years there's still a LOT of uncertainty
Then there's this:
{snip}
And so I think that we have to take a step back right now and ask ourselves what can we accomplish with our mRNA vaccines, ************and be prepared for the possibility of a brand-new variant*************. Will we set ourselves back if we adopt an Omicron-specific vaccine, only for a different new variant to emerge?
We're very fortunate that the number of deaths per number of cases has decreased dramatically, but if you are in high risk, if you're over 65, you're overweight, you have diabetes, you have hypertension, these are all risk factors for severe disease. Vaccinations will surely help provide some critical protection, but I know way too many of my younger, otherwise healthy colleagues right now who are at home, sick for seven to 10 days even though they have been fully vaccinated with the booster dose.
I think the additional challenge right now is that people want to get out and live their lives like they did before the pandemic. But my question is, what do you do if we see a new variant? Will people be willing to adapt, isolate or distance themselves again? I don't think they will at this point.
{snip}
A NEW variant?
Gee I thought COVID would be over when school started, then Thanksgiving, then Christmas, then Easter.
Now the experts are saying there may be NEW variants?