It’s unclear if the new subvariant causes any unfamiliar symptoms that haven’t already been documented by other Omicron subvariants.
As part of a new risk evaluation released Wednesday, the World Health Organization bumped EG.5 to the same standing as XBB.1.5 and XBB.1.6, which are also members of the Omicron family tree.
Christ, I’m actually frustrated that everyone’s stopped caring about COVID and that the US has started discouraging people from taking precautions (like COVID tests no longer being free). I know COVID will probably never fully leave at this point, and I’d be a bit more accepting if everyone had just come straight out and said, “there’s nothing more we can do right now” after making a real effort to fight it. However, I know they never actually made an effort to stop it, they just waited until enough people had become desensitized and then started pushing people back out into public spaces because fuck you.
It was such a an opportunity to normalize masking in public, especially when sick with any respiratory illness and the opportunity was squandered by selfishness and greed. The pandemic also served to gut my faith in humanity, so there’s that.
The pandemic ruined the phrase “Avoid it like the plague”, because obviously that’s not a thing people actually do, and I hate that they took that from us.
I remember having my mind blown back in 2020 when reading about a bubonic plague outbreak in the early 1900s in California and learning that wealthy businesses owners and investors tried to pull a lot of the same stuff that they were again pulling in 2020 to keep businesses open. It was the same political game, the same use of media to undermine the attempt at a public health response.
I guess it always was a bit of a fantasy that we would all respond according to our own self interest.
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