I haven’t looked at the most current stats for COVID, but I believe death rates from it are still quite a bit higher than the flu, and with more long-term complications.
Long-term it is probably just going to be treated much like the flu barring some major breakthroughs in treatment/prevention, something that will always be around and you just have to deal with, so kind of a nothing-burger to use your words.
It’s possile, maybe likely, that overtime it could mutate to be less deadly (it’s theoretically advantageous for the virus to not kill its host, someone who’s able to walk around go about their life is more likely to infect more people than someone in isolation in a hospital) as well as herd immunity increasing and as we make advances in treatment/prevention. I think we’ve definitely already seen those improvements in terms of how we treat it, probably in our immunity thanks to vaccines and people acquiring it through infection, and I can’t really comment on how the virus is mutating, that’s certainly way above my area of expertise and when I Google it I seem to get conflicting answers.
Annecdotally, it does seem like the general public taking illness a little more seriously, at least around me, I occasionally still see the odd person here or there wearing a mask, there’s definitely more hand sanitizer, wipes, etc around than there was before the pandemic (though not as much as during the height of it of course) etc.
As far as mutations go, there were concerns about it being primed to become more infectious potentially, if it came from gain of function research. Though last I read on it, lableak theory was only regarded as a possibility, still not probable.
I haven’t looked at the most current stats for COVID, but I believe death rates from it are still quite a bit higher than the flu, and with more long-term complications.
Long-term it is probably just going to be treated much like the flu barring some major breakthroughs in treatment/prevention, something that will always be around and you just have to deal with, so kind of a nothing-burger to use your words.
It’s possile, maybe likely, that overtime it could mutate to be less deadly (it’s theoretically advantageous for the virus to not kill its host, someone who’s able to walk around go about their life is more likely to infect more people than someone in isolation in a hospital) as well as herd immunity increasing and as we make advances in treatment/prevention. I think we’ve definitely already seen those improvements in terms of how we treat it, probably in our immunity thanks to vaccines and people acquiring it through infection, and I can’t really comment on how the virus is mutating, that’s certainly way above my area of expertise and when I Google it I seem to get conflicting answers.
Annecdotally, it does seem like the general public taking illness a little more seriously, at least around me, I occasionally still see the odd person here or there wearing a mask, there’s definitely more hand sanitizer, wipes, etc around than there was before the pandemic (though not as much as during the height of it of course) etc.
Statistics canada just released a report saying 1 in 9 Canadians suffered from long covid, and as of June 2023, half of those still had symptoms.
People still won’t care though until it affects them.
As far as mutations go, there were concerns about it being primed to become more infectious potentially, if it came from gain of function research. Though last I read on it, lableak theory was only regarded as a possibility, still not probable.