Don't claim there is proof that it wasn't without providing said proof
As far as I'm aware, it is far from settled when cases first appeared in the US
You might live in a bubble, because covid is everywhere
Rapid tests that rely on nasal swabs are prone to false negatives, so a lot of people get mild symptoms like sniffles or an itchy throat, test negative, and then assume they don't have covid when they actually might
Mild symptoms don't mean mild disease, either -- there are people who never show symptoms and still end up with vascular damage. It's never a good idea to only judge a virus by its acute symptoms
Yet disabilities keep climbing, right in step with warnings about covid's long-term effects: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU00074597
From September 2022:
The number of reported Covid cases is currently a quarter of what it was at its peak last winter. But Chris Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, estimates that only 4% to 5% of infections are being reported, because so many are uncovered through at-home tests and aren't reported to public health departments, or they aren't being detected at all.
The decline in PRC testing and a shift to at-home tests also leaves public health officials increasingly flying blind with regard to the spread of infections because few at-home test results are reported to public health departments, unlike with laboratory tests.
Covid spreads pre-symptomatically and asymptomatically, and spreading it does harm people, so good luck with that logic
You missed that it was about the efficacy of mask mandates, not masks themselves
One of the smartest ways to win in the game Plague Inc is to make your virus have mild acute symptoms that are easy to dismiss or confuse as other things, and then really fucked up chronic symptoms later on. Symptom severity is not the same as underlying disease severity. The immune system doesn't always enter the panic mode entailed by a fever, in some cases because the virus has outsmarted it. HIV is a virus that starts as a cold, and then does all its damage silently. Judging a virus by its acute symptoms is one way to fuck around and find out
Not to speak for @jerome, but they were originally talking about the topics appearing in the trending news, which implies that they are referring to firefish.social's federation/lack of defederation from problematic instances, not the software itself