C.D.C. Eases Covid Guidelines, Noting Virus is

‘Here To Stay’

The new recommendations are intended to help prevent severe disease, the agency said.

Which was weird to me since Cases are 108k/day average, Hospitalizations are 43k/day average, and Deaths 477/day ave., nowhere near their lows. But, C's are down 16%, H's down 2% (the C-H interval) and deaths are actually up 9% (all vis a vis two weeks ago).

“We know that Covid-19 is here to stay. High levels of population immunity due to vaccination and previous infection, and the many tools that we have available to protect people from severe illness and death, have put us in a different place.”-Greta Massetti, a C.D.C. epidemiologist.

Bit of 1984-speak there. Covid is "here to stay", bad, but immunity now so "high" that we're in a "different place" , um...good?  With Cases declining so much and with the certainty that H's and D's will follow, yes, although the "different place" we are in right now, when the ease of these restrictions was announced, is no different than the places we have been in every day (for Cases) since May 20 and H's have just begun to taper. The real progress has been that Deaths have really been suppressed by immunity (whether vaxed or natural). D's rose during the Omicron variants but they didn't bam! zoom! to the moon. This is the real beauty part:

Deaths for the fully vaxed have been flat line since March. The line for the unvaxed is way off anywhere near peak, did rise a little beginning in late April and has since plateaued (and will be on the way down). Look though at the caption: the unvaxed are dying at 6x's the rate as the vaxed. Goodness. It seems to me CDC has about given up materially increasing the percent of the population vaxed. Don't blame them. People who have remained unvaxed to this point, after all the pushing and prodding, are unlikely to get vaxed now. Fine, get sick and die, who cares, they're mostly orange elephants anyway.