At least 174,455 new cases were reported between August 19 and August 25, up from 169,217 the week before (+3%) and the highest since March 3. Those figures were collected from state health departments and, where necessary, estimated based on hospital admissions.
Actual case numbers are higher because many hospitals and states are no longer reporting detailed COVID data. Laboratory testing is also low as most people and doctors are using at-home tests which are not included in official statistics.
1,075 new COVID deaths were reported during the week, the second week in a row with more than 1,000 new deaths. It’s also the seventh week in a row with more than 500 new deaths and the 232nd week with more than 400 new deaths.
So far this year, nearly 4.8 million COVID cases have been reported across the U.S., causing at least 340,153 hospitalizations (limited data) and 37,301 deaths, according to BNO’s COVID data tracker.
We couldn’t even normalize mask use while sick.
It’s still very fixable on a physical level. There are multiple ways we could end the pandemic.
On a cultural level, I don’t think anything can change until there’s a major shock: a collapse of western hegemony over media or politics, or a series of particularly gruesome and visible covid deaths.
Sure on a physical level you could eradicate almost every disease known to man. But as you said that’s not really a viable possibility, society and humanity doesn’t work that way. If it did, disease would not exist. I guess the best we have on a systemic level is what China did, weather the worst of the COVID pandemic with lockdowns, and open up once the worst is over, avoiding the high initial death tolls and worst effects of long term illness/disability, and getting a large amount of the population vaccinated before opening up again. But that still leaves dealing with the virus afterwards long term, which there appears to be no visible solution for.
Physical solutions would include:
Do China-style contact tracing lockdowns forever, globally, forever (nowhere near as bad as it sounds; countries that did this succeeded until they reopened borders with countries that didn’t)
Massively invest in better air filtration and HVAC until the disease’s r-value dips below 1
Lock down everything globally for two months, eradicating covid, the flu, the common cold, strep throat, and a hundred unnamed seasonal cruds