-- Shares Facebook Twitter Reddit Email The 2024 Olympic Games are serving up some less-than-subtle metaphors for how poorly we handle public health. Just after winning a bronze medal in the much-anticipated men's 200-meter race, U.S.
sprinter Noah Lyles collapsed on the track in exhaustion — not just because he’d completed a brutal run in just 19.7 seconds, finishing third, but also because he was sick with COVID-19, a diagnosis that he’d concealed from others. He had been favored to take home gold, as he did in the 100-meter race a few days earlier.
But seeing an American Olympic star sprawled out and gasping on the track, and then taken away in a wheelchair, was more than a shocking image. It also represented the general “mission accomplished” attitude toward SARS-CoV-2: We think we’ve won against this virus and we haven’t. COVID isn’t just spreading like wildfire through the Olympic Village in Paris — we are undergoing surges across the globe , with the World Health Organization tracking steep rises in infections in 84 countries .
After more than four years fighting this thing, it is still knocking us out. Related Is America a death cult? From COVID to overdoses and suicide, it sure seems like we're comfortable with so much preventable death In some parts of the U.S.
, the amount of COVID is so high that experts are claiming this summer surge is on par with winter waves of the virus. But none of this should be unexpected at this point. This is no longer t.