Remember this?

We’ve lost 230,000 lives this year in the U.S. How many incalculables is that?

If we still took COVID seriously–and Biden’s recent comment didn’t help–we would be pushing boosters*, providing masks and testing, and giving people actual information about the prevalence of COVID (releasing asymptomatic hospital intake data). That’s an insufficient list which lacks community/societal-level interventions, but we’re not even doing the individual-level interventions.

It’s not that there will be no deaths, but it didn’t need to be like this (and, in D.C., about 22% of deaths have occurred among those who are up-to-date on their vaccinations, so it’s not just a pandemic of the unvaccinated).

As I’ve said since May 2020, a major concern is long COVID–and the best way to limit long COVID cases is to limit COVID cases, but we’re not even trying to do that. Instead, we’re conducting a very large experiment on viral-mediated disability.

Hopefully, that won’t lead to something incalculable.

*The conservatives on the Supreme Court really hurt–and they did Judge Aileen ‘Loose’ Cannon quality fact-finding in their decisions related to COVID.

**D.C., since the start of Omicron in March, has had eighteen deaths: nine hadn’t completed the primary series, five had completed the primary series but weren’t boosted, and four were boosted.