• flooppoolf@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      I mean, so is the flu.

      As a species I think it’s a little bit arrogant that we’d think new challenges to our survival were over. Aside from the current major ones that we kinda look at with worry sometimes but leave be the majority of the time.

      • NightAuthor@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        I wonder if we’re going to start taking Covid and flu more seriously, or if we just start to blow of Covid as a nothing-burger like most (Americans at least) do for the flu.

            • pikmeir@lemmy.world
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              11 months ago

              They should be covered by your insurance. You can just go to any pharmacy at any supermarket to get it.

                • _dev_null@lemmy.zxcvn.xyz
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                  11 months ago

                  I went to my pharmacy to get mine, handed over my insurance card when asked. The techs got so frustrated trying to get the info to take, they just rang me up as a walk-in with no insurance, no added charge.

              • girlfreddy@lemmy.ca
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                11 months ago

                But that’s if you have insurance.

                I don’t understand why vaccines should cost money anyway. It’s to the benefit of the nation that people are vaccinated ffs.

                • shuzuko@midwest.social
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                  11 months ago

                  CVS participates in the govt program that gives the covid shots for free. I was between insurances when my husband left his corporate job and I’m immunocompromised, so I looked into it and while there’s a few schools and medical centers participating too, CVS is pretty much everywhere and it was absolutely zero cost to me.

                  • girlfreddy@lemmy.ca
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                    11 months ago

                    That’s a great thing to have. I’m Canadian so vaxes are free up here (except for travel). Yet our stats are similar to America (about 15% of the adult population got the newest vax).

          • NightAuthor@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            At a certain point, I think about March of 2022, most news regarding Covid was just sensationalistic. Every time I dug deeper into the science, the scientist were saying something like “be careful” and then the journalist took that and turned it into something like “half of us are going to die”.

            At that point, I pretty much checked out of the whole Covid news cycle. I figured, if there was some information important enough, it’d find its way to me. And I stopped actively consuming it.

            If anyone has a good mailing list or something to follow for just the most important Covid updates… otherwise, I’m just living my life… no mask, one vax and a booster.

          • Raiderkev@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            Ngl, I got 2 shots and the 1st booster. It seems like now they are just trying to get every dime out of this and make it a seasonal booster. I had covid for the first time this year (that I know of at least… had a crazy respiratory thing in 2020 before there were tests n I was 90% sure I had it then too) It was mild AF. Pretty sure the OG vaxx provides far better immunity than they lead on, and just want annual revenue. I’m done. Unless younger people start getting affected by it and dying in droves, I don’t need anymore boosters. Frankly, I was hesitant to get the MRNA vaxx in the first place, since we don’t know if there are any long term complications, and after having it earlier in the year, I’m really not worried about it, or trying to get a booster every 6 months.

            • cley_faye@lemmy.world
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              11 months ago

              they are just trying to get every dime out of this and make it a seasonal booster

              They’re not trying anything; that’s what viruses do when they are not eradicated.

        • Fondots@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          I haven’t looked at the most current stats for COVID, but I believe death rates from it are still quite a bit higher than the flu, and with more long-term complications.

          Long-term it is probably just going to be treated much like the flu barring some major breakthroughs in treatment/prevention, something that will always be around and you just have to deal with, so kind of a nothing-burger to use your words.

          It’s possile, maybe likely, that overtime it could mutate to be less deadly (it’s theoretically advantageous for the virus to not kill its host, someone who’s able to walk around go about their life is more likely to infect more people than someone in isolation in a hospital) as well as herd immunity increasing and as we make advances in treatment/prevention. I think we’ve definitely already seen those improvements in terms of how we treat it, probably in our immunity thanks to vaccines and people acquiring it through infection, and I can’t really comment on how the virus is mutating, that’s certainly way above my area of expertise and when I Google it I seem to get conflicting answers.

          Annecdotally, it does seem like the general public taking illness a little more seriously, at least around me, I occasionally still see the odd person here or there wearing a mask, there’s definitely more hand sanitizer, wipes, etc around than there was before the pandemic (though not as much as during the height of it of course) etc.

          • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            Statistics canada just released a report saying 1 in 9 Canadians suffered from long covid, and as of June 2023, half of those still had symptoms.

            People still won’t care though until it affects them.

          • NightAuthor@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            As far as mutations go, there were concerns about it being primed to become more infectious potentially, if it came from gain of function research. Though last I read on it, lableak theory was only regarded as a possibility, still not probable.

        • Socsa@sh.itjust.works
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          11 months ago

          I can confirm that a ton of otherwise reasonable people are now actively hostile to the very concept of public health after dealing with this immense collective trauma. Because people are fucking garbage.