The entire political establishment is in agreement on the need to enforce the pro-corporate policy of “forever COVID,” in which the working class and broad layers of society as a whole are condemned to unending waves of mass infection, death and debilitation with Long COVID.
I think the government has a good handle on COVID-19 now with more-or-less mass vaccination, so it’s not going to cause mass deaths and disabilities.
I’m more worried about H5N1 bird flu, more currently the affect it’s having on milk and egg prices (over USD$12/doz. yikes!) and the potential to mutate to direct human-to-human transmission.
From https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/22401-bird-flu dated 12/5/2024
This is a good thing in immunology, actually. Diseases with extremely high severity rates tend to not spread through a population because it incapacitates their host too quickly- Ebola is a classic example. Fucking insane severity, but bad to the point where it hasn’t ever spread to epidemic proportions because it’s super easy to recognize then isolate. Ebola outbreaks have been (mostly, sans 2014) limited to small geographic areas of small populations.
This only matters if it incapacitates the host quickly enough that they don’t spread it, which isn’t necessarily closely related to its deadliness. In the 1980s, AIDS was a death sentence, but that didn’t make HIV less transmissible.
Fortunately you can just not eat eggs and not consume milk.
You can’t not breathe air.
Except it is causing mass deaths. Have you read the 2024 numbers? Much lower than a few years ago but much higher than zero.
Sure, I’ll bite:
In 2024 up to week 50, there have been 45,447 deaths involving COVID-19. This is compared to 159,940 deaths involving flu or pneumonia and 2,892,661 deaths from all causes in the same time frame.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm
For comparisons sake, traffic accident deaths in the first three quarters of 2024 were 29,135.
$12? Maybe at 711 or some shit, but Aldi by me still has eggs under $3
Depends where you shop and where they source them from. Once that source gets hit and they have to cull their entire flock, you’ll see the price increase.
Easy way to avoid high egg/dairy prices, drastically or completely eliminate your chance of getting it, and reduce the spread of it overall: just don’t eat 'em. Consider making some chili instead.
There is someone out there right now with a family recipe who is incensed at your implication that you can’t put eggs in chili.
I think you mean “for now” rather than “now.” Less than a month from now will likely be a very different story.