293
California county urges residents to wear masks again as COVID-19, RSV levels spike
(www.cbsnews.com)
this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2023
293 points (97.1% liked)
News
23274 readers
3012 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I haven't looked at the most current stats for COVID, but I believe death rates from it are still quite a bit higher than the flu, and with more long-term complications.
Long-term it is probably just going to be treated much like the flu barring some major breakthroughs in treatment/prevention, something that will always be around and you just have to deal with, so kind of a nothing-burger to use your words.
It's possile, maybe likely, that overtime it could mutate to be less deadly (it's theoretically advantageous for the virus to not kill its host, someone who's able to walk around go about their life is more likely to infect more people than someone in isolation in a hospital) as well as herd immunity increasing and as we make advances in treatment/prevention. I think we've definitely already seen those improvements in terms of how we treat it, probably in our immunity thanks to vaccines and people acquiring it through infection, and I can't really comment on how the virus is mutating, that's certainly way above my area of expertise and when I Google it I seem to get conflicting answers.
Annecdotally, it does seem like the general public taking illness a little more seriously, at least around me, I occasionally still see the odd person here or there wearing a mask, there's definitely more hand sanitizer, wipes, etc around than there was before the pandemic (though not as much as during the height of it of course) etc.
Statistics canada just released a report saying 1 in 9 Canadians suffered from long covid, and as of June 2023, half of those still had symptoms.
People still won't care though until it affects them.
As far as mutations go, there were concerns about it being primed to become more infectious potentially, if it came from gain of function research. Though last I read on it, lableak theory was only regarded as a possibility, still not probable.