[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Is Covid over? Please tell me.
Rick Rosner: No, people are thinking and pretending it’s over because we are now three years and two or three months in. People are sick of it and nobody’s reporting results anymore. Testing is way down. Carol, my wife, works at a school and they still get a lot of cases and some of them are still severe. It’s not like Covid has become milder. Maybe the average case of Covid is milder because more people have either been vaccinated or have previously had it but that’s not necessarily true either because only 17% of people could get the booster of [00:59] the booster in America. LA went from reporting daily results to weekly results and the weekly results are not terrible. For a while, LA County population 10 million was averaging 3,000 new cases a week. The last couple weeks they’ve been down to 2800 and then to 2500 and change which is like 370 new cases a day on average which is not terrible except that testing is way down. So you can’t trust the numbers. The only numbers that I trust are wastewater statistics.
Jacobsen: Why?
Rosner: Because that is an aggregate of all the pee and poo of everybody within a sewage shed, an area that sends all its sewage to a plant like Hyperion in Los Angeles. So nobody is getting tested, it’s just that they’re sampling horrible sewage water to see how much Covid is in it and they’ve been developing this system in California and across the country for probably a year and a half and Covid is down-ish. It’s down as low as it was in October but not down as low as it was roughly a year ago. In a lot of sewer sheds or whatever you call them, measurable Covid levels were almost nil a year ago during the lull of the time. Now they’re down there and they’re staying down but they’re still much higher than a year ago even though the reported numbers which are as I’ve said crappy, say Covid is way down. So I tend to trust the sewage numbers but I’m hoping that they were just bad at reading sewage a year ago and they were getting readings of zero when it was maybe higher than that. So I can hope that we’re getting down to our lowest possible levels but I don’t think that’s the case. I think there’s still a healthy amount of Covid out there.
I feel like a schmuck wearing a mask every place but I still do. I’m forgetting my mask more when I go out with Carol and then she has to give me one of her emergency masks. So that to me is either a sign of hopefulness or stupidity on my part. The head of the CDC, Rochelle Paula Walensky, just resigned. She was kind of loathed by people on all sides for being ineffective on Covid though there’s no way for her to win because the two sides; the crazy side and the evidence side are in complete disagreement and the people in the middle are like let’s go back to normal already and quit bugging us. So, whoever will be the head of the CDC will probably be just as loathed as she was.
New studies are coming out about long Covid because we’ve only had it for three years. That’s the longest you can have Covid, so it makes it hard to study long Covid but it seems to be that the damage from getting Covid over and over can be cumulative. You can be fucking yourself a little more each time you get a new case of Covid. So the people who say “It’s just like a bad cold, I felt bad for two days,” well, if you’re on your fourth or fifth round of Covid, you might be doing a lot of damage to yourself. So that’s where we stand. Covid going from pandemic to endemic; just this low level continuing to bubble on and continuing to make people sick but at a low enough level that people who want to stick their heads up their ass and pretend everything is fairly normal.
I’m hoping that as summer comes and there have often been lulls during the summer because people are outside more and in school less and so they have less opportunity to spread it and I’m hoping that in June there will be low enough levels. People being outside will lead to a durable drop, a drop that’s hard for Covid to bounce back from. And so that maybe the endemic level will go from one person in 3,000 in LA county having it to one person in five or 6,000 having it and even when it peaks again it maybe triples up to one person in 2000 and it can’t sustain it but that’s optimistic.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at http://www.rickrosner.org.
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Rick Rosner 