COVID-19 is becoming more like the flu and, as such, no longer requires its own virus-specific health rules, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday alongside the release of a unified “respiratory virus guide.”
In a lengthy background document, the agency laid out its rationale for consolidating COVID-19 guidance into general guidance for respiratory viruses—including influenza, RSV, adenoviruses, rhinoviruses, enteroviruses, and others, though specifically not measles. The agency also noted the guidance does not apply to health care settings and outbreak scenarios.
“COVID-19 remains an important public health threat, but it is no longer the emergency that it once was, and its health impacts increasingly resemble those of other respiratory viral illnesses, including influenza and RSV,” the agency wrote.
The most notable change in the new guidance is the previously reported decision to no longer recommend a minimum five-day isolation period for those infected with the pandemic coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. Instead, the new isolation guidance is based on symptoms, which matches long-standing isolation guidance for other respiratory viruses, including influenza.
That’s not what people got shouted at for. It was for conflating it with a common cold.
People got shouted at for both things.
No they literally didn’t, stop lying. This scenario has been laid out by experts a long time ago because this behavior has been seen a lot of times in previous pandemics where once very severe pathogens end up becoming much less severe but also more contagious in the process. There’s even a freaking Wikipedia article about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endemic_COVID-19
People were shouted at for pointing that out.
People also shouted at the morons saying it was like the common cold.
Both things are true.
No. That literally did not happen. Stop spreading disinformation.
I’m missing the OP’s first message as context, but just a note that diseases don’t really have any particular trend toward less severe forms. That they would naturally do that was a debunked theory from the 1800s. They can’t simply kill or disable their hosts before they get a chance to spread, but most illnesses have plenty of room to transmit before symptoms get to that level and viruses frequent evolve into more deadly forms.
What changes is the population’s resistance. Omicron wasn’t necessarily less deadly than the original variant that killed so many people, it was just better resisted.