Thank you to everyone who wrote about it last month. Though he may be getting access to the complete fire hose of users' data, you might worry about what he does next. The update is here.
Some of us know how to beat a Pandemic.
As the first queer editor-in-chief of WIRED, I am proud to present Maryn McKenna's new story on the Covid-19 outbreak, which made clear the resilience of the LGBTQ community.
It's possible that you remember the phrase "breakthrough infection" when you first heard it a year ago. Tens of thousands of people, mostly gay men, flooded the streets and filled the nightclubs over the July 4 weekend, and although most were vaccinations, Covid ripped through the town, infecting some 1,100 people.
The stigmatization of gay men in the wake of HIV/AIDS was similar to that of the outbreak. Maryn reported that this was a success story. Hundreds of thousands of additional cases would have been created by the wave. It didn't go well. Genetic analysis showed that most of the infections were not descended from the town. Massachusetts has a good public health and medical research infrastructure and the gay community is very transparent about infectious disease. A specialist at the Centers for Disease Control said it was amazing. Other CDC people will tell you that it was different than any other group they have dealt with.
It shows how hard it is to control Covid without those special circumstances. As we have reported, the US's ability to track and ward off future waves of the virus is diminishing as funding shrinks and testing data becomes more patchy. The evolution of the virus has begun to evolve much faster than we can keep up. We have accepted that we will keep on catching it. There is no guarantee that the disease will continue to get more deadly with successive subvariants. What public health measures do you want to see remain in place as our strategies for living with this disease evolve? What do you worry the US about? I would love to hear what you think in the comments.