COVID Won't End Up Like the Flu. It Will Be Like Smoking.

[Celerity]

Hundreds of thousands of deaths, from either tobacco or the pandemic, could be prevented with a single behavioral change.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/02/covid-anti-vaccine-smoking/622819/



It’s suddenly become acceptable to say that COVID is—or will soon be—like the flu. Such analogies have long been the preserve of pandemic minimizers, but lately they’ve been creeping into more enlightened circles. Last month the dean of a medical school wrote an open letter to his students suggesting that for a vaccinated person, the risk of death from COVID-19 is “in the same realm, or even lower, as the average American’s risk from flu.” A few days later, David Leonhardt said as much to his millions of readers in the The New York Times’ morning newsletter. And three prominent public-health experts have called for the government to recognize a “new normal” in which the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus “is but one of several circulating respiratory viruses that include influenza, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and more.”

The end state of this pandemic may indeed be one where COVID comes to look something like the flu. Both diseases, after all, are caused by a dangerous respiratory virus that ebbs and flows in seasonal cycles. But I’d propose a different metaphor to help us think about our tenuous moment: The “new normal” will arrive when we acknowledge that COVID’s risks have become more in line with those of smoking cigarettes—and that many COVID deaths, like many smoking-related deaths, could be prevented with a single intervention.

Read: Endemicity is meaningless

The pandemic’s greatest source of danger has transformed from a pathogen into a behavior. Choosing not to get vaccinated against COVID is, right now, a modifiable health risk on par with smoking, which kills more than 400,000 people each year in the United States. Andrew Noymer, a public-health professor at UC Irvine, told me that if COVID continues to account for a few hundred thousand American deaths every year—“a realistic worst-case scenario,” he calls it—that would wipe out all of the life-expectancy gains we’ve accrued from the past two decades’ worth of smoking-prevention efforts.

The COVID vaccines are, without exaggeration, among the safest and most effective therapies in all of modern medicine. An unvaccinated adult is an astonishing 68 times more likely to die from COVID than a boosted one. Yet widespread vaccine hesitancy in the United States has caused more than 163,000 preventable deaths and counting. Because too few people are vaccinated, COVID surges still overwhelm hospitals—interfering with routine medical services and leading to thousands of lives lost from other conditions. If everyone who is eligible were triply vaccinated, our health-care system would be functioning normally again. (We do have other methods of protection—antiviral pills and monoclonal antibodies—but these remain in short supply and often fail to make their way to the highest-risk patients.) Countries such as Denmark and Sweden have already declared themselves broken up with COVID. They are confidently doing so not because the virus is no longer circulating or because they’ve achieved mythical herd immunity from natural infection; they’ve simply inoculated enough people.

snip

[SheltieLover]

1. K&R!

[Mad_Machine76]

2. I'm confused

Isn't BA.2 running amok in Denmark at the moment? And there's new concerns that it can better evade immunity?

[Celerity]

6. this article deals with the long term, not the short nt

[Mad_Machine76]

9. I'm just surprised.

Denmark feels so confident.

[onecaliberal]

3. This is good, it's why I don't want to get it. Who knows what the long term is on the lungs.

I can't even get over that we are here.

[Ms. Toad]

7. A recent article indicated a significant increase in heart conditions post COVID for a full year.

https://www.science.org/content/article/covid-19-takes-serious-toll-heart-health-full-year-after-recovery

[CaliforniaPeggy]

4. Thank you for posting this excellent article, my dear Celerity!

It is so very well written. And it makes me weep for the losses we're sustaining because of the stupidity of so many people.

But that's the way it is, whether I like it or not.

We must continue to struggle to overcome all the evil that is making such a mess of our world.

[Pobeka]

5. A "few hundred thousand ... every year"

Hey, genius (not you Celerity, this Andrew Noymer fellow), You realize you are basing that number on a situation where lots and lots of people are not taking this normally, they are social distancing, masking etc in *addition* to being vaxxed?

I think the number is far more likely to be in the 1,000,000 range if we all "go back to normal". Hospitals will be overwhelmed even more than they are now, secondary deaths due to ICU's not being available will also go up, etc ...

Normal doesn't happen like they are postulating until a variant comes along far more infectious than Omicron, and far less deadly. No one knows how many iterations before that happens.

[Zeitghost]

8. At this point...

...the majority of us have had COVID. As time goes on, that number will get even higher. Once it's made a full pass through the population, there won't be enough potential victims to keep fatality rates that high. Those who were most vulnerable will have unfortunately passed and those who survived will have improved immunity. As it continues to mutate people will continue to get new strains and some will still die just as some still die from flus and colds despite having previous exposure due to being older. But death rates in the hundreds of thousands a year is simply not sustainable as the virus will no longer be novel.

[Pobeka]

12. CDC recently estimated 80 million americans have no immunity at all.

That plus the proportion of people with some immunity, who will nonetheless succumb to new variants with different infection properties could easily keep us at a million a year for a few years.

[Zeitghost]

13. Recently when?

Pre or post Omicron?

The fatality rate for reinfections is extremely low, both due to the improved immunity and the inherent selection bias. As I said earlier, death rates of hundreds of thousands per year in the US is not sustainable for this virus.

[Pobeka]

14. Couldn't find exactly where I read it, but here's an equivalent source:

https://news.yahoo.com/3-4-americans-immunity-omicron-134923810.html

Very recent, post-omicron estimate.

[Zeitghost]

15. As the article points out

We should be at 80% protected by mid-March. The article isn't super clear, but I do not believe they are counting early pre-omnicron infections or those not boosted because they specifically say "immune from omicron" and while those groups are not "immune", they are certainly protected to some degree.

The end-game is and has always been managing the healthcare system by flattening the curve while the virus runs it's course.

[JCMach1]

10. I can already see we are going to have to work not to stigmatize people with long Covid

there are millions of us out here who were damaged by the disease pre-vaccine.

[stage left]

11. People can be damaged by second hand smoke

But smoking is not @#%^ contagious. blast it all!