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Comment by wokwokwok | Hacker News Reader

> It is time to stop obsessing about Covid. It is time to stop politicizing Covid. It is time to stop tweeting about Covid. It is time to stop reading about Covid. It is time to start healing and it is time to start moving on.

Is it?

I mean, I’d like that to be true too.

…but are things not still a bit too screwed up to be pretending everything is fine quite yet?

> The current 7-day moving average of new deaths (1,749) has decreased 0.3% compared with the previous 7-day moving average (1,754). As of January 19, 2022, a total of 856,288 COVID-19 deaths have been reported in the United States.

(https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidvi...)

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Yeah that part was a bit weird; the Tweets preceding those seemed to indicate that after the omicron wave subsides it will be time to do those things. Then, however, it immediately switches to the present tense and implies that right now we should immediately throw all caution to the wind.

When hospitals are not choked with unvaccinated people, that's the time to stop obsessing. I'm still reading too many stories of people dying of non-covid reasons because they can't get medical care due to unvaccinated people taking up those resources.

EDIT: all parts of each country are not equal. In the Bay Area, the hospitals are doing (mostly) fine.

At what point do we blame our broken health care system that seemingly can’t handle something as mild as omicron? Now.

We can blame both. People talking about herd immunity and intentionally filling the hospitals are going to overwhelm any system, and european countries had problems like this too when COVID was at its worst there.

Current logic: There are hospitals that are forcing covid positive staff to work but not letting staff that has had covid already but isn’t vaccinated work.

Similar logic: shutting down nuclear power plants and then complaining that there isn’t enough power.

More similar logic: allowing decades of fuel to build up on the bottom of forests and then expressing befuddlement when wild fires burn out of control.

What’s the common thread here?

> What’s the common thread here?

Your consumption of only hard-right 'news' sources.

Why not look at it from the reverse? If our healthcare system that deals just fine with flu outbreaks etc every year can’t cope with Omicron… maybe it isn’t as mild as everyone says it is?

The political divisions over masks, vaccines, lockdowns, etc. are a feature not a problem to the political class. Politicians salivate when they find issues that can drive wedges between groups of people. COVID will be over when it's no longer politically useful (i.e. when everyone becomes tired of it and it no longer works as a wedge).

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