Thread by @meghanor

It gets to me when public organizations frame flawed and convenient group-think as unimpeachable logic. The genuinely pragmatic, intellectual position on COVID right now is not being represented by the CDC guidelines or /1

by these quotes in @nytimes:

“We know that Covid-19 is here to stay,”

"This is a welcome change...it actually shows how far we’ve come.”

Well, yes, let's look at how far we have come in the pandemic... /2

-More than 1 million people dead, plenty of whom did not have to die. As @edyong notes here, US had largest life expectancy decline in 2020 compared to peers: theatlantic.com/health/archive…
and
medrxiv.org/content/medrxi…

/3

-something like 2-4million people out of full-time work force due to long COVID (see the work of @kathrynsbach)

-something like 7.5% of Americans with long COVID

-infections barely controlled with new variants that more easily infect vaccinated & previously infected folks
/4

What we don't have:

-an overhaul of our spotty sick leave
-revamped air filtration in public spaces
-a clear-cut path to disability support for folks with long COVID
-planned accommodations for kids/workers w/ long COVID
-enough science on reinfections

/5

I mean, the list goes on. COVID is definitely here to stay: Yep. That much is true. The question is, then what?

Do we pretend it's the flu because midterms are coming and it's hard to do the work of facing the reality that this virus does some scary longterm stuff?

/6

Before "easing" guidelines, the CDC should (to take but one example) offer some clear answers to @EricTopol's good questions in this thread:

https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1557805606957789185

and speak *meaningfully* to the crisis of long COVID, among many other things. /7