In the USA, at least, according to the CDC, cases, deaths per week, and hospitalizations are the lowest it's been since the pandemic began.
In early 2022, when at-home testing kits availability became widespread, I was a bit worried that we'd see COVID cases being under reported, since people doing a test at home likely wouldn't get tracked in the statistics. You can sort of see evidence of it as the number of reported COVID cases in May/June/July flattened out, yet hospitalizations continued to rise, though deaths was almost flat.
The simple fact is, COVID, like the flu, will never go away. But it's followed the trend viruses tend to do: becoming less severe so they don't kill their host before they can spread it.
(Summary is that there was a "Russian Flu" epidemic in the 1890s that raged around the world for a couple of years and then faded. This was probably not really a type of influenza but instead OC43 which people still catch but it's just one of many varieties of a "cold".)
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In the USA, at least, according to the CDC, cases, deaths per week, and hospitalizations are the lowest it's been since the pandemic began.
In early 2022, when at-home testing kits availability became widespread, I was a bit worried that we'd see COVID cases being under reported, since people doing a test at home likely wouldn't get tracked in the statistics. You can sort of see evidence of it as the number of reported COVID cases in May/June/July flattened out, yet hospitalizations continued to rise, though deaths was almost flat.
The simple fact is, COVID, like the flu, will never go away. But it's followed the trend viruses tend to do: becoming less severe so they don't kill their host before they can spread it.
Rather than "like the flu" maybe more "like HCoV-OC43". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_coronavirus_OC43
(Summary is that there was a "Russian Flu" epidemic in the 1890s that raged around the world for a couple of years and then faded. This was probably not really a type of influenza but instead OC43 which people still catch but it's just one of many varieties of a "cold".)