11 November

I know pandemic stuff bores some people. There's a fair amount of hopium around, that hoping it's over will make it over. But there are critical ideas that aren't making it into the public conversations. Take 'endemic'. Covid will be 'like the flu', 'endemic'. This is the current pattern of Covid cases in the world. It's actually what endemic Covid will likely look like. A high amount of Covid permanently in the community (at the moment about 40 cases per million is the baseline, from the graph). Then repeated epidemic waves, as the virus surges and retreats, over and over again. Not just in winter, like the flu - potentially all year, in every season. And vastly more cases and deaths than flu, because Covid is about 4-6 times as infectious, and much more damaging to our bodies. With businesses and schools constantly closing down to cope with these repeated surges. The thing people ultimately don't get is, endemic Covid isn't coming. What we're experiencing right now IS how it will be.