Wastewater-derived estimates suggest that 74 million people in the U.S. got infected during the summer wave.

That's 21.6% of the population, about 1 in 5 people. These infections are anticipated to translate into 3.7-14.7 million long-term conditions. #LongCOVID

sadness-abysmal

Text description of post image

Graph titled "SARS-CoV-2 New Daily Infections, Wastewater-Derived Estimates (U.S.)" which has days on the X-axis (with ticks for the first of each month for July through November 2025) and infections on the Y-axis. The graph highlights a peak of 1.4 million infections/day in early September. Additionally, it shows that 60 million infections occurred in the two-month span from early August to early October, and 75 million infections occurred in the three-month span from mid-July to mid-October. The graph is attributed to Mike Hoerger, PhD, MSCR, MBA (@michael_hoerger ) and links to pmc19.com/data

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] da_gay_pussy_eatah@hexbear.net 8 points 3 months ago (4 children)

Why don't many people seem to be dying directly from the infection anymore?

[–] JoeByeThen@hexbear.net 20 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Because we sacrificed the most vulnerable to the line, en masse.
Undercounting. Covid is just being flat out ignored in many cases. It's not just the lack of masking, many places don't even bother to test anymore.

[–] da_gay_pussy_eatah@hexbear.net 10 points 3 months ago

yea

[–] TheModerateTankie@hexbear.net 15 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

In the last year there hasn't been any crazy new variants (until this summer/fall anyway) so it hasn't been as deadly. As mutations are random, that's not unexpected. It will be like the flu, where there are good and bad years, but in this case it's more like periods of 3-6 months since covid isn't seasonal. After things were declared normal, covid has been killing about 4x as many people as a typical flu year. This past year has been an exception because the 2024-2025 winter was the worst flu season in 15 years, and this coming winter might be worse. (yes, that will be "worst flu season in a decade" two years in a row).

So this past year covid was just slightly less deadly than the worst flu season we've seen since the swine flu pandemic. This is being reported as if covid has finally become less dangerous than the flu, which I think is a bit misleading.

And while there are long term health conditions that can result from the flu, covid will always be worse and lead to more health problems due primarily to it's ace2 binding ability, along with the toll it takes on the immune system (opens you up to worse infections of other diseases, like the flu, because your body can't respond to it as well as it should) and increased risk of vascular problems. There is also no cure for long covid, which can be a wide array of problems due to covid being able to attack every organ in our body, but the worst form of it resembles ME/CFS and there are no current treatments for it.

[–] triplenadir@lemmygrad.ml 8 points 3 months ago (1 children)

[..] excess deaths. That’s the level of mortality above what it was before the pandemic. This metric has not returned to normal and remains significantly elevated […] 120,000 unanticipated dead people per year [in the US]. That’s roughly the equivalent of two fully loaded standard commercial jets crashing and killing everyone aboard every day.

https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2025/10/31/Physicist-COVID-Seriously-Enough/

[–] JoeByeThen@hexbear.net 11 points 3 months ago

And that's 2% on top of the millions of premature deaths that are now missing from present day stats. I know I'm a broken record on this stuff, but if for no reason you randomly killed off a million of your most medically vulnerable people, your excess deaths should running in the negatives for years.

[–] mononoke 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Are you personally keeping track? Is anyone else?

[–] da_gay_pussy_eatah@hexbear.net 5 points 3 months ago

I mean, there seems to be a significant visible difference in the amount of seriously ill patients in hospitals on respirators