One of the worst public healthcare disasters of our generation, perhaps even century, is the communication surrounding COVID-19. Namely, that COVID IS airborne, yet communicated by most public health officials with droplet precautions; and that COVID is no more harmful than the flu, which is also false. COVID-19 is SARS. The flu is the flu. The two shall never meet. The long-term damages of COVID-19, particularly in the vulnerable and those who continuously get the virus with repeated sickness, are mounting without clear tracking of both damages and scale in the population. Couple that along with cultural attitudes that the pandemic is over and widespread masking (or any masking for that matter) is no longer needed nor valued, and the continuation of a deadly and rapidly disabling disease continues to proliferate.
America has stopped releasing public data on the death and infection. Some countries like Canada still have some resources devoted to broad trends, but they too are slowly curtailing monitoring, especially in provinces with conservative governments keen on covering up the perceived danger. But we can extrapolate that waves of infection continue with waning vaccine uptake and virtually no public health precautions. Even hospitals have gone BACKWARDS in their health precautions, removing masking mandates even in departments that used to be mandatory before the pandemic like NICUs and oncology.
