Thread by @DrEricDing

📍WISHFUL THINKING KILLS—It’s not fearmongering—“Wishful thinking on #COVID remains as dangerous as ever” best reflects how I feel. ➡️“Once people feel like they’re safe enough, the safety of others doesn’t really matter that much.” Thx @gregggonsalves 🙏
thenation.com/article/societ…

2) HELL YES— “Pundits urging us to treat Covid “like the flu” or pushing “the urgency of normal” are just variations of the siren song of surrender to needless death and preventable disease.” Well said @gregggonsalves

3) “Except the pandemic is not over by a long shot. We’ve been seeing 1,000 deaths a day in the United States for months now; over the past few weeks, as Omicron deaths catch up to the vast number of infections diagnosed weeks earlier, we’ve had far more than that.”

4) “The last day of January saw over 2,500 deaths in this country. Hospitals are still reeling in many places, and both health care and public health workers on the front line are just burned out and losing their shit.

5) “And that word—endemic—which in epidemiological terms connotes a pathogen that has stabilized at a long-term equilibrium in a population—hasn’t really arrived yet, with the pandemic still raging across the globe, even as Omicron numbers start to decline in some places.”

6) “I’m not suggesting that we need to be on a state of high alert forever. But we need to shape Covid-19 policies according to the data, not by wishful thinking among people who should know better. To imply that we can in the next few weeks is presumptuous at best.”

7) If we want to learn from history, we can simply look at the 20th century’s most fearsome pandemics for guidance. John Barry, the historian of the great influenza of 1918, reminds us that the deadly fourth wave of that catastrophe only occurred in 1920…

8) “when millions had already been exposed to the virus, when the lethality of the third wave was subsiding, most people had let down their guard, and no public official was interested in pushing mitigation efforts in the face of the indifference and weariness of a nation.

9) “Barry also reminds us that “natural immunity” and vaccination after the influenza pandemics in the late 1950s didn’t stop the virus from cutting a large swath of death in 1960 when it returned with a vengeance…

10) “A similar scenario played out in Europe in 1968 and 2009 flu pandemics, when, after a first round of infections and vaccinations, influenza’s second wave crested and washed over the weary continent.”

👀LEARN FROM HISTORY DAMNIT! Thx @gregggonsalves

11) This is such a great piece that I hope @gregggonsalves doesn’t mind me excerpting more from it— he has one of the deepest experiences watching the gaslighting that HIV/AIDS was “over”— all while it continued to kill millions worldwide. thenation.com/article/societ…

12) “some pundits were calling it the end of the AIDS epidemic. Andrew Sullivan wrote a piece in The New York Times Magazine called “When Plagues End” in November of that year. Of course, the AIDS epidemic wasn’t over for everyone.”

13) “The privileged gay men who had health insurance and easy access to health care certainly took the drugs and went home, abandoning the fight against the epidemic as it continued to ravage Black and brown US communities, particularly young gay men of color…

14) “as it moved from the middle-class urban enclaves of the North and West to become a more rural and more Southern epidemic.
What we’re seeing now is a combination of what we saw with influenza and with HIV.

15) “First, it’s capitulation based on misguided or at least premature hope, frustration, and anger that this has gone on for so long, disrupting our lives. It doesn’t help that America’s political leaders have never really stepped up to address the pandemic with the seriousness

16) “of other nations, nor provided the necessary social and economic support to help people survive these past few years. Instead, they have largely left us alone against a virus.

While pundits try to spin this as a debate about risk management at an individual level—

17) “claiming that some of us are being too cautious as we enter the golden age of endemicity—it’s far more like what happened with HIV: 📍Once people feel like they’re safe enough, the safety of others doesn’t really matter that much.”

⚠️Hell yes to this^—too many are selfish!

18) CHOOSE WISELY— many people only want to hear pleasant news that “COVID is over” — all the while countless scientists warn it is not at all. We are *not* at all near the end. #CovidIsNotOver

19) My latest warning about #BA2 subvariant of #Omicron. This is actually REALLY worrying. It’s surging in countries worldwide. This pattern in a new variant transmission OUTPACING the old variant in multiple countries has almost led to a new wave / prolonging current wave. See🧵

https://twitter.com/drericding/status/1491309163129237504

20) The mainstream media has also downplayed #LongCovid depicting it as just a “fatigue” thing. It’s not. It’s often brain 🧠 and blood clotting & heart abnormalities

https://twitter.com/laurieallee/status/1492304803824762881

21) “Let is rip” mass infection strategy is going to go down as the WORST policy idea ever. Not only will it maim millions of people but it will also further spawn more mutant strains. The worst near-sighted mistake ever. Again, my favorite genomic epidemiologist @K_G_Andersen 👇

https://twitter.com/k_g_andersen/status/1492265606128627712

22) Don’t fall for these GASLIGHTING red flags 🚩 by health officials! It’s wishful thinking and utter misinformation 👇

https://twitter.com/drericding/status/1449079854159343617