From summer into fall, SARS-CoV-2, the COVID-19 virus, ran up another epidemiological spike just as the feds sunset their pandemic control program. While the virus continues along a loop of boom and bust repeatedly reset by its capacity for evolutionary escape, putting people in the hospital and out of work at a steady clip, U.S.

officials and well-connected epidemiologists have abandoned public health in both practice and concept. Alongside entrapping millions of Americans in a Long COVID vortex, such dereliction of duty places the U.S.

in danger should other diseases arise, including, but not limited to, an avian influenza strain that even now is moving beyond cow herds and poultry flocks and beginning to spread in humans. The COVID-19 pandemic that some of our most august epidemiologists pretend is over portends a broader decline in the very notion of the public commons upon which any functional society depends. What’s the present state of the U.

S.’s COVID-19 outbreak? The National Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS) reports a large majority of its data set of viral load in sewage plants tracked from September 9 to 23 to be in the orange and red zone of 60 percent or more of all the samples taken nationally since December 2021. That is, all those hot points on the NWSS map tell us the viral load in populations across the U.

S. is now as high (and widespread) as any previous COVID peak. On the other hand, the more acute NWSS measure of changes in SARS-2 sewage loads ov.