Doing the right thing can get exhausting
President Joe Biden said as much in an interview with 60 Minutes in September. “The pandemic is over,” he said while strolling around the Detroit Auto Show. “We still have a problem with COVID. We’re still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over.”But the week Biden’s remarks aired, about 360 people were still dying each day from COVID-19 in the United States. Globally, about 10,000 deaths were recorded every week.
Public health agencies around the world, including in Singapore and the United Kingdom, reinforced the idea that we could “return to normal” by learning to “live with COVID.” The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidelines raised the threshold for case counts that would trigger masking .
Doing the right thing — from getting vaccinated to wearing masks indoors — didn’t always feel like it paid off on a personal level. As good as the vaccines are at keeping people from becoming severely ill or dying of COVID-19, they were not as effective at protecting against infection. This year, many people who tried hard to make safe choices and had avoided COVID-19 got infected by wily omicron variants . People sometimes got reinfected — some more than once .
A lack of data about how widely the coronavirus is still circulating makes it difficult to say whether the pandemic is ending. In the United States, the influx of home tests was “a blessing and a curse,” says Beth Blauer, data lead for the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center. The tests gave an instant readout that told people whether they were infected and should isolate.
Australia Latest News, Australia Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
The COVID-19 pandemic, Karens, crypto craziness: The 2022 things we're overThere's a lot to leave behind when 2022 comes to a close as uncertainty rules around the world.
Read more »
U.S. Deaths Drop in 2022, But Still Higher Than Pre-Pandemic LevelsDeaths are expected to remain about 13% higher than 2019 numbers for 2022. But they should be 7% lower than in 2021 and 3% lower than in 2020.
Read more »
15 of the best podcasts of 2022, according to expertsHere are some of the best podcasts of 2022, according to reviews from various publications, including The New York Times, Time Magazine and Vogue.
Read more »
The 100 Best Songs Of 2022 (100-81)The team at nprmusic made a ranked list of 100 songs that reflects the sprawling, energetic messiness of 2022.
Read more »
High inflation and efforts to tame it defined 2022 economyU.S. inflation, an afterthought for decades, resurged with a vengeance this year, reaching heights unseen since the early 1980s.
Read more »