I'm not saying they gave more info about infectiousness - they gave some information about risk to others, because pre-vaccination (as I understood it) getting Covid put you and those you came into contact with at higher risk of severe symptoms, and at higher risk of placing demands on the healthcare service, than other "cold-like" viruses did.
The number of people at risk of the worst consequences isnt the same in the vaccination era as it was before but its still plenty of people.
Even the official figures for deaths 'due to' covid in England and Wales show 1500 deaths since the start of June.
And the number of people with Covid in hospital beds in England was well over 3000 during the peak of the latest wave in July. It got on the news, various hospitals reimposed restrictions involving masks.
As my previous posts today probably indicate, it can be hard to make like for like comparisons due to a lack of comparable testing and data for cold-like viruses etc, and of course all the other quibbles that people have reached for since the start are still in effect. But I would certainly caution against developing the sense that the repeated infections and vaccinations have made covid completely equivalent to colds when it comes to either death or healthcare burden. And the timing of greater risk periods isnt the same, because covid hasnt fallen into a tidy seasonal pattern.
As far as I am concerned the only completely safe claim is the self-evident one: The covid burden is clearly not the same as it was in the pre-vaccine era, otherwise we'd never have escaped acute risk of healthcare systems being totally overwhelemed with every wave, and would therefore not have escaped all of the restrictions and dramatic behavioural changes. The number of people infected in vaccine-era waves has often been way, way higher than the numbers infected in the first waves, but the number of people who suffered the most severe consequences has clearly been smaller than in those first few waves. But 'its just a cold with the same consequences as other colds' is too much of a stretch, the current reality sits somewhere in between these two extremes, and clearly closer to the mild end than the pre-vaccine waves end of the consequences spectrum. But I can only say that because the bad end of the spectrum was so very bad, and thats no consolation to those who still suffer the worst consequences in 2024, there are less of them but there is still a meaningful number of them, even in a summer wave.
Its good for people to feel some sense of responsibility when it comes to communicable diseases, it still makes a real difference to some people lives, jobs as carers or health care professions, etc. The stakes are not the same as they were at the start, obviously, and so a proportionate response is not considered to involve the same radical changes to behaviour as it once was. But there are still vulnerable people out there, no matter how many times they are vaccinated. Looking at it from the opposite angle, you are less likely to kill someone by being reckless now than you were in 2020 and 2021. But your actions and inactions can still make a difference to people you dont know and even people you do.
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