Imagine if we covered hurricanes like we do the pandemic. There would be massive headlines when a new one formed, then the nation's chief meteorologist would say (based on no evidence) that it looks mild to him, and we'd have no further mention of the storm until it made landfall
Right now we know from looking at data in South Africa, Scandinavia and the UK that we're headed for a very large wave of illness that will swamp the medical system in many states even if (as we all hope) the variant is relatively mild. We even know roughly when to expect it.
But the Federal response is... nothing. People are urged to get boosters that remain unavailable in many parts of the country and reassured that vaccines still work. The President is invisible. There's no effort to bring people together to mitigate the coming wave, and no energy
This idea that we've tried nothing and are all out of ideas would have been inconceivable at the start of the pandemic, when we all kind of thought that some combination of competence and fear would make us better at handling each subsequent wave of the disease. We were so wrong
Unlike in 2020, we have a good understanding of this virus, tracking is in place, we're watching its exponential growth in real time and can measure its spread. We even caught it early! But the political and public health response in the US remains "well, let's see what happens"
The inability to communicate the implications of exponential growth this far into the pandemic is also frustrating. The proportion of cases jumping from 0.4% to 2.9% in a week doesn't mean this is a variant to watch, it means that we're about to get absolutely slammed. 
Amazon should hire some of our public health officials to run the AWS system status board, they have exactly the right skill set.
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