Every pandemic that ended up as a seasonal disease is still active.
You can try denying they ended in this way, but you will end up with an unusable language because most things are technically not over as they had a continuation in some form.
Almost every sickness you get infected with had its hayday of mass genocide. It will die down and then occasionally reoccur.
Dont worry about it, they are mutating heck of a lot. 2020 pandemic is a lot different than the current situation is with the completely different strains we now have.
The current strains of COVID are more infectious and more dangerous than the 2019 strain was. Up until the end of 2023, the only reason we didn't hear about it was because the vaccines were effective against them (and the corporations want to pretend that it's been over for several years now). The latest strain is resistant to vaccinations from before the end of September, and the US just saw the second biggest spike in COVID cases since 2019, with an estimated peak at 2 million daily new infections on the 11th.
Just because big businesses say that the pandemic is over so everybody goes back to work and buying stuff doesn't mean that the pandemic ended. There are plenty of immune compromised people who never left quarantine because they can't with COVID still around. The rest of society simply decided that their deaths were less important than going back to drinking in crowded bars.
I don't want to be that guy because it is a big number. However, in terms of the human population, there are 8 billion of us and when it comes to the difference between a million and a billion. It is about a billion. So about 0.04% of the human population. Terrible tragedy, yes however it is true.
Calculating impact by dividing the number of deaths caused by a thing that has existed for 4 years over a population size that includes people more than 100 years old won't arrive at any sort of meaningful number. That's why you use rates, or per capita, or some other way of adjusting for population size and time. COVID 19 is the third most common cause of death in the US in 2020 and 2021. Calling one of the most common causes of death a small number of people is grossly inaccurate.
The pandemic is still ongoing. The US literally just had the second biggest wave of infections since 2019 this past week. It's estimated that there were 2 million new cases on Jan 11th alone. The only reason it seems over is because they won't let people test for it/keep track of case numbers and because the vaccines were effective against the new variants, which have been more infectious and more dangerous than the 2019 strain was.
You're right that it's never going away, but that doesn't mean that it's less dangerous than it was 3 years ago.
I'll be honest, even without Trump most Americans proved they were too stupid or stubborn to follow instructions, so he didn't really need to do anything to slap the whole US with more infections.
I was terminally online during that time, and some reports of a truly awful pneumonia in China were going around as early as mid-November. It was definitely known to be a major outbreak by early December. A lot of the early reports were taken down; just CCCP CCP doing CCCP CCP things.
Edit: whoops thought it had that extra C in there. Should probably use CPC anyway.
Yeah, I remember seeing TikToks about it way before December. Lots of “there are a LOT of people sick in China right now with pneumonia, and it has actually started to hurt their economy. It’ll eventually make its way over here” types of things. The warning signs were there, for those who cared to look.
I mostly saw it on the finance side of tiktok, since lots of financial analysts were like “uhh this shit could crash the economy if it spreads.”
Considering there were quarantines in December, I'm pretty sure health officials were in the know. Though official international reporting may not have happened until Dec 31.
I was working in the hospital at the time from a big-picture perspective and it seemed pneumonia cases were already spiking in the US during December 2019. My sister and my coworker both came down with a nasty "pneumonia" during then as well.
I was living in Oklahoma and I remember some of the local media mentioning this "coronavirus" thing that was spreading in China. I also remember people joking about Corona (the beer) being suddenly less popular.
Then in February, March, and April it getting more and more serious, and this is about the time that people started claiming it wasn't real, and if it was, it wasn't that bad, and if it was, then it was from a chinese lab bent on taking down the US...
April-May had me re-adjusting my previous opinions of people around me that I thought were rational.
Guessing you mean in your post-2001 books, but this comment has me imagining a Black Mirror style thing where there's this future prediction in everyone's school books that all the teachers refuse to talk about.
I was in elementary school when 9/11 happened. My brother is 6 years younger, and doesn’t actually remember it. So yeah, I felt old when he was learning about it in high school history classes; And I was only in my mid 20’s at the time.
Are they going to leave out the part where the president called it a hoax while simultaneously spitballing ideas about UV light, bleach and horse dewormer cures all while thousands of Americans were dying every day. Or the part where he emptied the treasury with zero oversight?
When I was in school...I'm pretty sure the state history cirriculum was designed to be America centric, and pro-America. Any nation a boomer would remember being at war with? Not in the history books, or they appear out of nowhere, do something pro-America, and then disappear again, like Russia did from 1939 to 1945. And both World and US history classes end at 1950 because 1. to the limp dicks that actually make the policy, "The fifties are practically now" and 2. we haven't done much "being the good guys" since the jitterbug fell out of fashion.
So I'm not used to seeing something in a history textbook that isn't from at least two of my lifetimes ago.
We homeschool our kids, and are religious, but we are heavily opposed to Christian nationalism, and want our kids to learn what actually happened, not some whitewashed curriculum that downplays anyone particular people's ideological downfalls.
We found a curriculum, but it took a while. One of the first ones I opened to read through had a first chapter titled "God's gift to the world through America" noped right out of that one...
Definitions can range anywhere from "Effects a whole country" to "has spread to several large regions" to "threatens to affect the entire globe" but as a general rule the definitions shy away from saying global because then people will quibble about, like, Greenland not being effected because those bastards shut down the ports again.
So you could, for example, have a pandemic that spread through Europe and Asia but the swift and decisive actions of competent executives prevented the spread to the Americas.