My generous interpretation of OP is that during the covid pandemic our precautions that kinda-sorta slowed down covid were adequate to basically remove influenza from the human population as indicated by being the least amount of influenza activity on record[0]
It's not widely agreed upon that this was due to mitigations, and there's unfortunately no evidence they slowed down COVID either. All claims that mitigations slowed COVID fall apart when examined carefully (often they aren't even real, they're just model predictions being presented as if that was the same thing as empirical evidence).
Rather, there seems to be some mechanism by which some viruses push out others. This can also be seen in how new SARS-CoV-2 variants would often rapidly exterminate the prior variant within weeks, instead of co-existing.
That doesn't make sense. If that were the case then the cold & flu wouldn't intermingle, though they very much do. And now, when fewer mitigations are around, we see people hospitalized with COVID, influenza, and RSV. Why, when mitigations are removed, is COVID no longer so dominate it's pushing the flu out?
> Why, when mitigations are removed, is COVID no longer so dominate it's pushing the flu out?
Because nearly everyone has had it already. The mitigations were removed because Omicron so visibly ignored them that everyone just gave up at that point.
Here in Alberta it's still killing at nearly 5x the rate as the flu, so it's still very much present. Unfortunately, it's impossible to argue further because of the lack of population testing (Alberta only tests those hospitalized), but more people here were found to have COVID this season than influenza[1].
If we're now largely immune to COVID why isn't influenza now pushing it out?
I'm not being clear. The interference appears to be related to how recently you were infected with something else. If lots of people around you are getting COVID, then they aren't getting something else. Once most people are immune to it, they aren't getting infected with it anymore and other viruses can compete again.
> it's still killing at nearly 5x the rate as the flu
The way they define COVID deaths make such numbers incomparable.
Whatever the number of dead, it wouldn’t be true for them. If we don’t take precaution X then Y more people die, but that doesn’t mean every X is worth it.
Very few. Covid mass infection events happened mostly through the air, much less so through touching a surface. We learned that early in the pandemic. Hand washing after the first few months was mostly kept as hygiene theatre and for preventing transmission of infections other than covid.
> Very few. Covid mass infection events happened mostly through the air, much less so through touching a surface. We learned that early in the pandemic.
No, "we" didn't. The CDC and, by extension, much of the coverage was insisting on surface sanitization even though there was plenty of evidence for airborne transmission already. I distinctly remembered going with the CDC recommendations until a friend pointed me out to a bunch of published articles with a preponderance of evidence for airborne transmission. It took many months for the CDC and other agencies to change their stance, by which time the whole 'surface cleaning' was already entrenched in everyone's minds.
It is not clear to me that any significant number of deaths were prevented by lockdowns once vaccines were available, only delayed by a maximum of 3 years. Everyone still got covid. Some people didn’t make it through the filter, that’s what new diseases are like.
A million dead people, sufficiently far from us in any particular dimension, don’t matter. It’s a funny piece of human psychology. Deaths years ago or years in the future, or in Africa or wherever. Just don’t matter to most people. Goes double when they are “other”.
“sufficiently far from us in any particular dimension” is where that falls apart, though. One million dead within the US alone means a lot of people were touched by COVID death.
I am really aiming for density here. I don’t think it’s weird (or debatable) that humans don’t care as much about other humans that are far away. They care about ones that are closer.
The thing is lack of density was sufficient to trigger this lack of care. Kind of interesting.
> Why would anyone out of the blue willingly make their personal area worse?
Because infrastructure has go somewhere.
The Netherlands has this issue: everyone resists any energy infrastructure in their area. Now there are many people who own new houses who can't move in because there's no electric power for them. Nuclear power is impossible because of NIMBY, so 85% of the energy is fossil fuel based.
How is it that someone purchased a home that can not receive electricity?
Was the home sold for much cheaper, since the electricity was, "up to the buyer" to figure out?
There is a huge housing crisis in the Netherlands, so people purchase homes before they are built, and sometimes a group of people get together to build homes that way.
In order to do this, you need to have all your permits in order. Unfortunately, the energy companies announced out of the blue that they didn't have enough energy to accommodate all their new obligations...
They said "own new homes". So it's not an existing house and was probably a development job.
And of course they probably never attempted to get electrical utility planning permission until they already sunk money into construction.
The same actually very rarely happens in the US, where utilities of all kinds have capacity planning that can result in a denial of services for new hookups.
Creating a reddit account took 25 seconds and they even generated a username for me. No email verification necessary, sorry to a@example.com if you're getting emails about reddit user "Agile_Rectangle729"
I remember getting a laptop with Windows 8 about ten years ago and upon turning it on, the Out-of Box Experience (OOBE) "greeted" me, something like 'Hi. We're getting things set up for you'
"Hi?" "We?" You are a piece of software. There is no "we" here. I can't even begin to express how infantilizing that sounds to my ears.
Anyway, I didn't last long on Windows for that laptop. /rant
I know. A few years later, I was helping my mom set up a new laptop and during the same OOBE, I made pretty much the same comment, and she seemed to think it was just fine or at least not weird-sounding.
Come to think of it, I wonder if it's for the same thing that gets people to refer to Google Assistant/Siri/et c. as 'she'. I've noticed that a lot also.
It's normal behavior, we assign gender to all sorts of objects be they made of metal and float on water or are just a series of electrons informing metal gates.
The message is fine for the true target audience which is vastly different from the audience of the 80s and 90s. Microsoft and Apple (well, Apple HAS been using friendly language since the 80s!) are smart to use friendly language.
Plus, it gets us all used to our corporate god-kings when we're dominated by the AI angels.
