The entire political establishment is in agreement on the need to enforce the pro-corporate policy of “forever COVID,” in which the working class and broad layers of society as a whole are condemned to unending waves of mass infection, death and debilitation with Long COVID.
Eh, shifts on the stock market and pretty random political moments make the news all the time. Not to mention the weather and sports.
A little, “hey, contagions are about at the moment, if you’re vulnerable or just not keen, act accordingly” wouldn’t be misplaced at all.
Bottom line is we have a cultural problem with general illness. Something something capitalism something something.
Yeah, there’s an important difference between having covid and having covid with no herd immunity.
I caught covid during the pandemic, it was around a month after receiving the vaccine. So actually I never even got a fever. I had like a day of cold symptoms, never even showed positive on lateral flow.
But since my girlfriend did test positive, as per the rules here at the time, I did a proper lab test. That confirmed that yes I had covid at the time or close to when I had the test.
So at the very height of the immunity provided by the vaccine I still technically caught the virus. Which makes sense.
So, with the general increase in immunity there can be a lot of covid detected in wastewater, but many or most of those people putting that waste out may only be having cold level symptoms.
The problem with this answer is that you go from your anecdata to a sweeping statement about the relevance of public health information.
Plenty of people would really prefer to not get covid and for very good reasons. If you’re having basic cold symptoms, great, not everyone finds it that minimal. Just like how some have bad hay fever and some don’t get the news sometimes reports on pollen levels.
I’m not really downplaying the virus. Just saying that’s there’s a very big difference between contracting the virus now when most people have acquired various levels of immunity and for most it will be much less of a serious infection than it would be at the start when we had no real immunity to speak of, which caused much longer drawn out infections that were far more likely to result in hospital stays.
There are plenty of studies about the long term damage that even a mild infection can have. Vascular damage causing strokes, brain damage causing brain fog and eventually dementia, immune damage causing increases in other illnesses that aren’t fought off like they used to be, etc etc. So cold level symptoms give the impression it’s fine and nothing but that’s just some symptoms of immune response.