Covid update
By 
About 45,000 people have died of Covid-19 in the US in 2024, which represents about 4% of the total official death toll from the pandemic in the country (1,215,000. Looking at excess death totals since 2020, it’s likely the real toll is in the neighborhood of 1,500,000, because of under-reporting).
As of three weeks ago, less than 20% of the adult population had gotten the updated Covid vaccine boosters, which have been available since August. It took me five minutes to get a booster, when I walked into a Safeway a couple of weeks ago without an appointment. I’ll admit I procrastinated about it, because it really has now become like a bad flu season, just like all the right wingers said it would be 1,500,000 or so deaths ago. But a bad flu season is still really bad: 45,000 deaths are actually quite a few, plus the whole long Covid thing is still out there and not very well understood. Huge numbers of people are missing work and school because they’re sick with Covid, and the vast majority of them haven’t been vaccinated in a couple of years now, if at all.
The two biggest long term effects of the pandemic seem likely to be:
(1) Working from home. Apparently 28% of the work force in Boulder is now working from home, which is the highest percentage of any city in the country. I expect that kind of percentage and higher will become much more common, and the pandemic’s breaking down of inertial barriers to remote employment will be one of its most significant legacies.
(2) The mainstreaming of anti-vax attitudes throughout the Republican party, and the related mainstreaming of anti-scientific thinking in demographics where it wasn’t as prevalent prior to the pandemic. Robert Kennedy Jr. going from pathetic crank with a famous name to Secretary of Health and Human Services is, as it were, merely symptomatic.