This is pretty bad news for those with immunosuppressive conditions and those over the age of 65, as before COVID they already had to worry about an endemic disease that could cause serious harm to their health and long term illness, with low annual vaccination rates, in influenza/the flu. Now they have to worry about two illnesses simultaneously that can do this, in both COVID and influenza. A bad position to be in.

This is still a very optimistic take.

1. This is bad new for everybody. Covid MAKES immunocompromised peoples. There is nobody out there that it is safe to pile on Covid infections without repercussions.

Note: this is purely statistical for a given percent and does not take into account the cumulative damage of multiple covid infections.

2. Mass Immune Dysregulation increases the R-value for pretty much every communicable pathogen out there. Herd immunity is fucked. There is a whole slew of pathogens out there that has been prevented from spreading because the general masses were healthy enough to prevent outbreaks. That is no longer the case.

3. As we just discussed the other day. The US is still experiencing between 4-10% excess morbidity compared to pre-Covid despite millions of the most vulnerable already being socially murdered. In that same thread, I show Japan's excess deaths which are steadily hovering around 20 percent disabusing the idea that covid has gotten any milder or is in any way over. Unfortunately, while we don't have the data, I'd guess that China is experiencing something similar post-ZeroCovid.

In conclusion: Mask.

With COVID deaths severely under counted (who tests for COVID anymore), and lots of COVID causing pneumonia, it's a big weird for you to say that it has a "similar to slightly higher fatality rate" of combined two diseases.

This is not endemic yet. It's still a pandemic

the CDC currently has influenza and pneumonia deaths estimated at around 47 000.

sigh Remember when people masked up and quarantined, and the number of influenza deaths plummeted as a side effect? Remember when bottles of sanitizer were everywhere and people were actively health-conscious, and the knock on effect was a generally healthier and safer society? Remember Medicaid expansion and pop-up clinics and a national economy suddenly invigorated in pursuit of a comprehensive health solution for the entire population? And under a Republican President no less.

Gone. Gone. Gone. Like dust in the wind.

Humanity as a collective really did not perform well here. Only China, along with a few other countries like Vietnam and New Zealand, had effective lockdowns.

Given that China was ground zero for the epidemic, they achieved remarkable success. Longest time without a vaccine. Enormous urban populations. A host of hurdles for getting people protected without straight up strangling the economy to death. But they managed a national strategy for containment, treatment, and harm mitigation incredibly well.

Countries like Japan, the Koreas, New Zealand, Vietnam, Nigeria, Indonesia, and Pakistan largely outperformed their peers by delaying the initial onslaught of cases. They closed airports and limited the influx of residents from infected nations. Island nations did fantastic, entirely because of control over international travel. By the time they started to see cases emerge, the disease had mutated to a less-lethal state and enough treatment options were available to mitigate the effects.

Overall, it seems like humanity got out of this fairly well. Compare COVID to the 1917 Flu, for instance. Or the AIDS epidemic, which was far slower to spread but more difficult to treat and prevent. Information on the disease was accrued and distributed rapidly. Scientific investigation quickly nailed down the vectors of spread and yielded useful information on how to avoid contagion, which was (mostly) faithfully propagated internationally. We got a vaccine out in record time, using a totally novel technology that will continue to pay dividends.

This could have gone better. More lives could have been saved. But our performance relative to prior pandemics appears to have improved remarkably.

It's actually surprising how close the numbers are in the US,

Isn't that with Covid being wildly under-reported or just not reported in much of the US?