Another great essay by Julia in Gauntlet News:

Emphasis from original.

“We are currently in a ‘lull’, but ‘lull’ is a relative term, and ‘low’ in 2024 isn’t the same as ‘low’ in 2020-2021. In 2021, shortly after vaccination, our summer low hit 12k cases a day. This year it’s never gone below 160k new cases a day- over 12 times higher than the low of three years ago.

Let’s bear in mind that in November 2021, nearly a year after the debut of the vaccines, when Dr. Fauci was asked when things could fully ‘go back to normal’ and mitigations like masks could be dropped, he projected that when new daily COVID cases were under 10k, we could expect to fully resume normal life. During the surge this winter, we had over one million new cases a day. Not only have we never for one day had under 10k new cases since Fauci made this prediction, we have never had under 100k new cases on any day since then.”

— Gauntlet News, COVID lulls aren't being earned by policy; they're being bought with infections and deaths