Dr. Lucky Tran 
It isn't just about variants & surges. One of the major problems with COVID is that baseline levels of the virus are high for the majority of the year. That excludes many people, especially those at higher risk, from participating in society as most indoor spaces are unsafe.
It's infuriating to see minimizers keep saying that people don't need to worry because we aren't seeing a surge as large as Omicron. Without layers of public health protections a much lower (but still high) level of community spread can make many indoor spaces unsafe.
Of course this is all just deceit on the part of minimizers. Their real stance is that they don't care if people get reinfected over and over, and they don't care if the most vulnerable are excluded from society.
But minimizers can't say straight out that the real policy they support is unmitigated mass infection, so they keep repeating falsely reassuring statements like "don't worry about variants" or we "have the tools," so they can create the illusion of pretending to care.
The truth is that regardless of what's happening with variants, any high level of coronavirus spread makes many places inaccessible to many people. Because there's high levels most of the year, we are effectively locking higher risk people out of society. That's unacceptable.
And no, we don't have the "tools."
- pharma companies will be charging 4-5 times more for the new boosters
- we haven't sufficiently funded next gen vaccines that are better at reducing transmission
- we don't provide free N95s and we haven't educated people enough about respiratory protection
- we don't have regulations for clean indoor air and haven't sufficiently invested in it
- we haven't sufficiently invested in treatments for Long COVID, or engaged in a mass public infor campaign
sabik@luckytran
"we have the tools" is like the old joke about the mathematician waking up to a fire, noting that there's a bucket of water available, and going back to sleep
we do have the tools, we're not using them 😢
GreySkiesI mean...just to expand on this a little. We do *not* actually have the tools. At least not to treat Covid. What we do have is Paxlovid. That is literally IT. And even that (IF you get a prescription for it) only lowers your chances of getting LC by around 25%. Lots of people take it and STILL get LC. This is not even getting into things like long term organ damage of which we don't know whether Paxlovid helps or not at all, or people with severe lactose intolerance (like myself) being all but unable to take Paxlovid (because it contains a lot of lactose).
We DO have the tools to prevent infection however. Those are the ones we chose not to use because they are too inconvenient for us basically, so we chose mass infection over that. It's easier. Speaking purely from a population standpoint. There are more systemic reasons as well why authorities are not propagating infection control measures.
All around, a sad, sorry state of affairs.
@GreySkies @luckytran
Exactly, we have the tools to prevent infection; we even got a new one a month or two ago, ASHRAE 241
We have existing laws mandating their use, by and large (OH&S)
We're just ignoring the tools and the laws; and also the infection, reinfection, disability and death