I believe Covid train has left the station, hopefully they concentrate now on actual/real diseases rather than this sniffle.
Diagnosing Cancer in the early stages would be our Trump card and will save lives.
I am truly disgusted at your audacity ridiculing COVID-19 as merely a “sniffle” and claiming it is not a real disease. It may have felt just like a common cold to you personally as well as to other people you know (so count yourself lucky), but the emergence of this tiny SARS CoV-2 virus has sadly forever changed the lives of countless human beings around the globe. I perceive it as utterly disrespectful that you are laughing in the face of millions of people worldwide who have lost loved ones to COVID-19, to the thousands still dying globally week after week, fighting for their lives in ICUs as I type this, to myriads of patients who are severely suffering from Long Covid, to immunocompromised or other chronically ill people for whom a SARS CoV-2 infection continues to be potentially life-threatening.
Just because the WHO has now officially declared that COVID-19 no longer represents a global health emergency - its highest level of alert - it doesn’t mean the virus is no longer dangerous, even though fortunately hospitalisations and deaths have continually declined over the last couple of months thanks to at least temporary immunity from vaccines and infections which has also slowed down the virus’s spread as well as better treatment options. I quote Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the WHO who said in his opening remarks at the media briefing on May 5th: “The worst thing any country can do now is to use this news as a reason to let down its guard, to dismantle the systems it has built, or to send a the message to its people that COVID-19 is nothing to worry about”.
COVID-19 will remain a significant public health problem in the foreseeable future and we still know much too little about Long Covid, which one can develop even after a seemingly mild infection. The Omicron variants that have evolved in recent months have not prompted concerns about a return to early pandemic stages, but surveillance measures such as genomic sequencing of variant samples and wastewater monitoring remain important. To quote Dr. Tedros (as he likes to be called) again: “The virus is here to stay. It is still killing, and it is still changing. The risk remains of new variants emerging that cause new surges in cases and deaths.”
And after all, it is just a question of time before the next pandemic will hit us (eg if the avian influenza virus evolved over time in such a way that the genetic reshuffling would result in human-to-human transmission, a pandemic with H5N1’s virulence and mortality would likely prove far deadlier than COVID-19), so both scientists as well as politicians should have learned from our experience over the past three years and be way better prepared for the next pandemic, but much leaves to be desired in this respect IMO.
Of course developing methods for spotting cancer early is extremely important, but that does not mean diseases should be played off against each other. COVID-19 testing continues to be vital in specific settings, and hopefully commercial breathalyzers like NaNose will one day be able to sniff out both malignant tumours and infectious diseases such as COVID-19 or influenza.
So in a nutshell: Dying from COVID-19 is no less a tragedy than dying from cancer and effective testing tools for both are needed.
Brace yourself for some further remarks in The Lounge‘s “Covid Vaccination” echo chamber oops I mean thread…