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Comment by ramesh31 | Hacker News Reader

I came to that realization this fall, as everyone started getting sick again. I played mine off as just a cold as well, but we all know it was COVID. It was always inevitable that this would become endemic. It just sucks being the generation that had to build the immunity.

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Most governments expected so from the beginning, and their strategy was all along to ride out the virulent variants and to meanwhile somehow prevent their health systems and economies from collapsing. And were called out for being too cynical about it. Zero Covid was a pipe dream all along, and only certain island countries had ever any hope of maintaining it.

The idea that we were ‘flattening the curve’ was extremely heavily publicized in most countries.

“Flattening the curve” has nothing to do with Zero COVID. The latter was used to describe authoritarian Chinese policy and the former is what countries in the west encouraged to prevent their hospital systems from getting overwhelmed before vaccination was widely available.

Yup, while the average person probably overestimated the possibility that the (then future) vaccines could eradicate covid, the messaging was pretty clear from day one that practically everyone was going to get it and that the goal of lockdowns was to stop a healthcare collapse.

It's interesting to me how much revisionism seems to happen with covid specifically. Did people misunderstand it at the time or has the perception changed after the fact?

receipts: https://www.google.com/search?q=flatten+the+curve&tbs=cdr%3A...

In the U.S., the initial promise was that it would be done to provide time to shore up capacity in the healthcare system ("15 Days to Slow the Spread" as the mailers that were sent out described). And then no capacity was added and the bait-and-switch of "lockdown until vaccine" was rolled in states where it was politically viable. And then even after the vaccines were available to everyone, the completely ridiculous idea took root that "the pandemic was still ongoing because of the unvaccinated," which required everyone to keep masking and absurd rules like children eating physically separated lunches outside, as long as there was some nonzero number of new infections.

Basically through much of 2021 a great deal of public health policy was still predicated on the idea that it was possible and essential to prevent as many people as possible from ever having an initial SARS-CoV-2 infection. Only Omicron's complete immune escape put an end to it.

>And then no capacity was added

That's because capacity in the West was never lacking.

Italian and New York hospitals were overwhelmed because a) both places put sick elderly into old age homes. (42% of US COVID19 deaths in 2020 occurred in old age homes!) b) Like elsewhere early on, doctors put everyone serious onto ventilators in a mistaken belief that they should treat patients like they do ARDS cases based on blood oxygen levels. This damaged healthy lung sacs and caused long-term dependence on mechanical respiration that doctors found almost impossible to wean patients from, and other side effects like deep vein thrombosis; Nick Cordero is an example. (This article from April 2020 <https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/08/doctors-say-ventilators-...> was completely vindicated in retrospect.) Neither happened after the first few months.

And no, none of those field hospitals built in parking lots and stadiums everywhere were used, either. In Wales, for example, Millennium Stadium was converted into a temporary field hospital with 300 beds and capacity to expand to 2000 beds. It was such a big deal that a public contest was held to name it Dragon's Heart Hospital <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Heart_Hospital>. However, said hospital never had more than 46 patients at one time, and was closed in six weeks for lack of use!

Even in NYC, which really did see overloaded hospitals briefly in March-April 2020, USNS Comfort treated a total of 179 patients. USNS Mercy treated a total of 77 patients in LA.

> Zero Covid was a pipe dream all along

More recently, "Zero COVID" has come to mean something completely different from the original notion of "strict lockdowns" -

https://old.reddit.com/r/ZeroCovidCommunity/comments/11jvg19...

It's an individual choice that people can make to put their health above the demands of capital and other pressures.

> but we all know it was COVID

Did you test? I had a bad cold several weeks back and after 3 tests it's clear that it wasn't COVID.

>Did you test? I had a bad cold several weeks back and after 3 tests it's clear that it wasn't COVID.

I did not, but multiple family members did. Not much point anymore unless you're high risk. We've all got it, and no one's going back to wearing masks again.

Funny you say this, because where I work, we wear masks if we've had contact with someone with COVID and after coming back to work after being gone with COVID. Unless you're talking about masking all day everyday.

Yeah, wife and I just had covid and we broke out the masks for a few days. We'll probably do the same if we get the flu. I figure we've got 20 neighbors on our floor and maybe 10 are likely to get flu/covid in the next 12 months, so I'd be directly responsible if I got the 11th one sick in the elevator. That said, it wasn't that inconvenient since we're wfh, so I can see why people do different math.

I hear you, but it's maybe worth knowing if you end up with any post viral stuff even if that's kind of rare.

It seems that the at-home tests became less and less reliable for newer variants. I've had family and friends take tests repeatedly to finally get a positive one or never get a positive at home test, but then get a (PSCR?) test at the hospital that was positive.

No idea if tests were updated or variants changed again. There also was a variant were sampling from the throat was the way to go. It's a mess and clear information seems harder to come by than it should.

The one time I had covid about a year ago the tests all showed positive withing about 30 seconds, and continued to do so for about 9 days even though I never had more than some congestion and a light cough. YMMV I guess?

My colleagues have had this experience recently as well. Consistently negative on rapids, but then positive on PCRs.

It may have been the flu but it repeated false negative covid tests are possible.

"Just colds" are viruses too. Many of them coronaviruses. COVID is becoming just one of them.

Inevitable is too strong a word. I'll give you highly likely, but we stopped SARS-CoV-1, it was possible to stop SARS-CoV-2.

SARS-CoV-1 had different transmission characteristics. It was most infectious when patients were sick. Since SARS-CoV-2 is transmissible already during the incubation period, its spread is much more difficult to control.

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