Ummm, yeah. “It’s not pandemic anymore, now it’s endemic” is about as far from reassuring as you can get. I will acknowledge that at this point, there is no point in talking about eliminating or even really controlling it. That ship has sailed. But anything that minimizes the impact of this thing is a disservice to the public. The field of medicine has been changed by covid, and will never be the same. Long covid is only beginning to make it’s impact felt. But yeah, it’s all good…
“Over” in the sense that “we lost”. 
Was “winning” ever a viable option?
We could have certainly lost more slowly.
At the very early stages, maybe. As soon as Il Douche opted to let it run wild as a political maneuver against the urban areas, it was over. Even then, it was not a given that it would have worked, but no, that ended it even as it started. Everything since has been part theater, part self-preservation.
I mean, the original plan was that people needed to stay home for a couple weeks, wear masks, and get vaccinated as soon as it were possible. I have to imagine that if we did that instead of politicians wanting to keep the casinos open and people having covid parties then we would have had a real chance.
Whether that counts as a viable option or not I guess depends, but we for once we did know.
And several countries consider limiting/denying arrivals from China.
The point he was trying to make in the original interview, AFAIK, was: we have an endemic situation in Germany, and (maybe) Europe. That does not mean the pandemic is over, but that it has progressed from pandemic state to endemic state regionally.
Basically, I understand this as a reiteration (i.e. if enough people are seropositive, we can assume that we don’t have to enter triage situations) and the observation that this is now the case in Germany.
What the German Minister of Justice now makes out of this is a FUCKING nightmare of a communication clusterfuck for political gain.
The Brazilian Federal Police today releases the conclusion of an investigation into the conduct of Mr. Jair Bolsonaro during the Coronavirus pandemic. The Report points out that President Jair Bolsonaro attacked public peace by spreading false news that linked the vaccine against Covid to the risk of contracting AIDS. And that Bolsonaro incited the practice of crime by encouraging the population not to wear face masks.
ETA the right link…
everybody knows that the fight is over… everybody knows that the good guys lost…
He should be in jail JUST for that shit. Fuck that genocidal nonsense.
That Supreme Federal Court judge has been in the news for other reasons.
A small business owner from the deep interior of Brazil, Baldin, 55, joined thousands of hardcore Bolsonaro supporters who had set up an encampment outside army headquarters, from where they were urging the military to stage a coup.
…
But by the following week, after Moraes ordered the arrest of a second camp-dweller who had questioned Lula’s victory, indigenous leader Jose Acacio Serere Xavante, their initial fear had turned to anger, sparking a violent rampage that left downtown Brasilia littered with burned-out buses and cars.
…
Xavante, an indigenous leader and evangelical pastor, is also from Mato Grosso. It was unclear if he and Baldin crossed paths within the Brasilia camp, which has fluctuated in size from 2,000 to 20,000 people, but has thinned in recent days.“Lula will not be inaugurated (on Jan. 1),” Xavante insisted at one protest.
I wonder how Bolsanaro’s anti-indigenous policies can both be ignored by and taken advantage of by this Xavante to be described as a “leader.”
At least since 2018…
Deja Vu kids!
I was thinking about an Italy trip…
Heck, even now, if EVERYONE wore N95 masks for two weeks, it could be mostly over. A reasonably-fitting N95 is enough to mostly interrupt the chain of transmission and reduce the R0 to below 1. Two weeks of that, and it’s over. Instead, we are getting this neverending nightmare.
My kid needs to see an orthodontist and I just spent two extremely frustrating days trying to find a single orthodontist that requires masking in the office and that wouldn’t throw a tantrum if we asked them very nicely to wear an N95 while treating my kid. I could not find one in the city where I live; all of the ones I’d called were mask-optional. And those are medical professionals who presumably understand how airborne pathogens are transmitted. I’m going to have to drive 100 miles to get to an orthodontist who requires masking in the office and who is willing to wear an N95.
Health officials entrusted Doroshin — then a 22-year-old Drexel graduate student with no prior health-care experience — to distribute some of city’s precious first doses at a mass clinic, only to sever ties after questions emerged about the group’s for-profit intentions and its privacy policy. Doroshin later admitted to taking home unused vaccines to inoculate his friends.
What this person did was bad and he should feel bad for it, but I’m more bothered that the writer treated inoculate as a synonym for vaccinate at this point.
On his LinkedIn profile, Doroshin now lists himself as a New York resident and a managing director at the Brooklyn-based Popularis Health, where he oversees “batch medical billing,” “pandemic response software,” and “spinal surgery drill guides.”
Looks like this is their site (Internet Archive, from March), claiming that they have an “open source platform.” Here’s a GitHub account with no public repositories.
I’m more concerned how the City gave a firm with zero experience, headed by a student; a no bid sole source contract for services where thousands of lives were at risk.
My suspicion leans towards a deep, personal relationship with someone high up in government.
What was it about the CDC no longer requiring medical professionals to wear N95’s? I just had an extremely frustrating encounter with yet another orthodontist, who flat-out refused to wear a N95 for working with my kid (I’d offered to provide one), stating that OSHA and the CDC only require level 3 surgical masks now. Has there been another rule change I’m not aware of? Or are we now making sure that every kid in this country pays their Immunity Debt to the Homeland, whether they want to or not?
Nearly half of the passengers on two recent flights from China to Milan tested positive for COVID-19
One of the key take-aways for me from Bob Woodward’s “Rage” was that 
allowed international flights from Wuhan, this after banning domestic flights early on in the pandemic. (Perhaps I’d known that, but I’d forgotten it.)
That’s not on.
It seems attitudes, be it negligence or malice, towards letting this spread internationally have not changed.
