Getting a cold sucks. Sometimes you even think you are going to die. At least if you are a man. If you are a woman you soldier on as if nothing is wrong.

At least that is what women tell me. Men are babies, women are tough as nails. Who am I to disagree (if I value my life)?

NBC News: "Doctors say they're finding it increasingly difficult to distinguish Covid from allergies or the common cold"https://t.co/rqIdKvOlBn via @nbcnews

— Marc Morano (@ClimateDepot) September 17, 2023

As the CDC and the public health establishment keep pushing dire warnings out to the public and begging people to get vaccinated, the actual disease has done what almost all respiratory diseases do: become less dangerous.

That’s not due to some version of compassion on the part of the virus. There is no “Oops, my bad” thinking on the part of this nasty little strain of RNA or DNA. It’s just evolution at work. Some of that evolution is found in our immune system, and some in the virus itself.

Viruses that kill large numbers of their hosts are less fit than those that don’t, and Darwin himself will tell you that evolution tends toward the fitter varieties of organisms (or kinda sorta organisms, in the case of viruses). If a virus keeps killing off its hosts then it won’t spread well. This is why Ebola outbreaks don’t go very far, even in places with horrible healthcare systems. It kills too quickly to spread far and wide. There is an animal reservoir out there where the virus doesn’t kill at all, and that is the ideal host for it.

The 1918 flu wasn’t wiped out by antivirals or a vaccine; it mutated away from being so deadly. That is what happens.

What? Did you think some medical miracle happened? The 1918 flu was vastly more deadly than COVID-19, although you would never know it from the coverage. COVID was nasty and nobody wanted to die, but by any measure–the absolute number of deaths, the relative number of deaths, or pick some other metric, COVID was pretty mild compared to a really bad flu year. It just was.

COVID-19 killed 7 million people out of 8 billion. The 1918 flu killed 50 million people, out of perhaps 1.8 billion people. Do the math. COVID was nothing compared to the 1918 pandemic. And while the flu stuck around, the deaths plummeted.

This is a very inconvenient truth for the pundits, who need you to be very scared. It makes them powerful and important. A cold virus doesn’t.

But COVID has turned into a cold, almost indistinguishable from other viruses or even allergies.

“Just about everyone who I’ve seen has had really mild symptoms,” Eiting said of his urgent care patients, adding, “The only way that we knew that it was Covid was because we happened to be testing them.”

I went into an emergency room that was packed about a year ago. The wait was the longest I had ever experienced, by a factor of 6. When I was finally talking to the doctor I asked whether COVID was the reason and his answer was “sorta.” He hadn’t seen a COVID patient in weeks the hospitalization was so rare; it was the loss of staff that was killing them, and that dated to COVID layoffs.

Most people don’t know this but COVID policies led to massive layoffs of staff–most hospital functions ceased as nonemergency care was stopped. A lot of staff were laid off, and many never came back. It was a public policy disaster. If you think health care has gotten worse it’s because it has, and you can thank the shutdown fanatics for that.

Colds suck, but they are a fact of life. COVID, for most people, is a cold. Sometimes a cold can turn into something worse–a relative of mine got sepsis from Strep throat and died.

But when a virus is indistinguishable from a cold it is, in fact, a cold. A cold is caused by any number of viruses, and COVID-19 is just one of them. No vaccine will work to prevent infection or transmission, and the COVID-19 vax never did. It is not magic. Not voodoo. It is just a sad fact of life.

Get over it and get on with your life. Time is ticking.