The number of people ignoring this is terrifying. Study after study keeps showing its a problem.

There's going to be a massive accumulated health crisis in 10-20 years where a quarter of the population has a wrecked vascular system. On par with diabetes, but in this case untreatable which is going to kill millions far earlier than they should.

At the beginning of the pandemic someone very correctly predicted that America was going to do the plague the same way we did Vietnam: enthusiastically for a little bit, then once we realize how expensive it is we were gonna give up, run away and loudly declare victory.

None of this had to happen. We could have had a real quarantine, just a month or two back in 2019, but that would require making slightly less money for a brief period of time, so instead we get to live in eternal plague world. The hobbling of any effective covid response by our ruling class in favor of more lucrative half-measures and non-measures is beyond a humanitarian disaster, it's a crime of unprecedented scale.

Yes it did. If all countries did this around the world many people would have starved to death. It's simply not ethical. Without eliminating it everywhere it would spread eventually - just look at Australia.

You can't even enforce a total lockdown in western countries without excluding "key workers" that would allow the virus to spread anyway.

Nothing you have suggested would work in the real world. The only solution to prevent this is new medicines and prophylactics. We have developed some of these in the form of antivirals but they are not used enough to stop the spread.

We already enjoy a level of health unknown to people 100 years ago even with COVID-19. There will always be new diseases and this is the nature of evolution unfortunately. Previous generations had to accept this, now we have to as well. I hate to say it but probably our current level of health and healthcare isn't sustainable without further advances thanks to antibiotic and antiviral resistance. We will need to change our approach going forward using things like bacteriophages, increased sanitation, healthier life styles, less cattle antibiotics, and new treatments to keep up.

Everything is beyond fucked man, I know, you're probably preaching to the choir. Theres no reload, no save, no do over. Find happiness the best you can and pray you die before we turn from sideways to upside down.

That's my plan at least.

the result of repeated cumulative reinfection damage from a still-poorly-understood virus that causes more and more damage to the vascular system and every organ connected to it

When I ask actual doctors, they disagree. Then we laugh about how anti-vax karen-convoy it sounds.

None of this had to happen. We could have had a real quarantine, just a month or two back in 2019, but that would require making slightly less money for a brief period of time, so instead we get to live in eternal plague world.

Even if you could have gotten an entire country to agree that this was a good idea and pull it off, you still have other countries to worry about. Stopping it in one country wouldn't have stopped it anywhere else.

Now, what I do agree with is that the response could've been a lot better, and many lives would've been saved as a result. But completely defeating COVID was always a fantasy.