As the US enters the autumn, more than one million Americans continue to be infected with COVID-19 every day, with nearly every state registering high to very high rates of transmission. While transmission has declined slightly in recent weeks, it remains at the highest level for any September of the pandemic.

Modeling these trends, which are based on wastewater data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the PMC COVID-19 Forecasting Model predicts that a trough in infections will arrive in early November before climbing again during the winter holiday season. However, the lull in this scenario will remain a blistering 850,000 infections per day. Indeed, this 9th wave of infections has produced the highest rate of transmission for this time of year, underscoring that the virus that causes COVID is not seasonal and the ongoing pandemic has not set into a predictable pattern that could be described as “endemic.”

The latest PMC forecast notes:

The year-over-year comparisons suggest that we are experiencing the highest-level of transmission all-time during this time of year. The surge is both high and wide, meaning sustained high levels of transmission... Schools and businesses that lack multilayered mitigation (vaccines, masking, excellent indoor air quality, better-than-CDC isolation guidance, testing) should expect illness and absences. 

The authors warned about possible complacency upon entering the slow decline in transmission, noting:

Barring significant retroactive corrections, all evidence suggests that the 9th wave has peaked. However, remember that 50-60 percent of transmission often occurs on the back end of a wave, which is why ongoing mitigation remains important. Expect more than one million new infections per day for almost another month and most of the remaining year.

The fact that these warnings emanate not from the nation’s public health agency, but a collaborative organization based at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana—started early in 2020 with the mission of helping reduce COVID transmission—underscores the utter bankruptcy of the CDC and federal and state governments to address the ongoing pandemic. 

Fomenting complacency on the one hand, and obscuring the epidemiological landscape through willful omission of relevant clinical data on the other, has been the CDC’s primary strategy in ensuring the “forever COVID” policy is normalized and becomes the approach to any present or future threats from communicable diseases. Indeed, the 9th wave of this pandemic is passing without an iota of concern or trepidation on the part of any leading health officials.

A recent post by BNO News noted the complete collapse of pandemic surveillance, stating, “[only] 33 percent of hospitals in the US submitted COVID data this week, down from 91 percent in early May. This means actual case numbers and hospitalizations are substantially higher than reported.”

Partial data would indicate that this year more than 360,000 people have been hospitalized for COVID, while over 41,000 have officially died. This is the fifth week in a row with more than 1,000 new COVID deaths in the US. At the current pace it is possible that more than 60,000 people, mainly the eldest and most vulnerable, may officially lose their life to COVID, while more accurate estimates of excess deaths will be far higher. 

Compounding this criminal negligence, research into Long COVID is finding disturbing links between the manifestation of chronic debility and the development of chronic neurological diseases. As a recent report in Bloomberg explained,

More than four years after the pandemic began, researchers are recognizing the profound impacts Covid can have on brain health, as millions of survivors suffer from persistent issues such as brain fog, depression and cognitive slowing, all of which hinder their ability to work and otherwise function. Scientists now worry that these symptoms may be early indicators of a coming surge in dementia and other mental conditions, prolonging the pandemic’s societal, economic and health burden. [Emphasis added]

While imaging studies conducted early during the COVID pandemic from the brains of COVID patients, even those with mild symptoms, had demonstrated injury consistent with accelerated aging, more recent investigations indicate that the cognitive deficits appear to persist.

In particular, elderly patients who have suffered from severe disease and were hospitalized have shown significant cognitive declines compared to their uninfected spouses, in a follow-up study conducted three years post-infection.

The UK-based study recently published in The Lancet: Psychiatry found at the 2-to 3-year point, a group of elderly COVID survivors had seen their cognitive scores decline significantly across all measured domains, with an average deficit equal to a 10 point drop in their intelligence quotient (IQ). One in nine had severe cognitive deficits equivalent to a 30-point drop in their IQ. A quarter of the study patients had to leave their occupations after having COVID due to poor health associated with cognitive deficits.

Paul Harrison, one of the co-authors, stated, “The findings show that problems affecting attention and memory, as well as fatigue, depression, and anxiety, continue to afflict some people even three years after COVID-19 infection, especially those who had not recovered well by six months.”

It is important to note that these changes were not attributable to aging.

Harrison added, “These results apply only to people who needed acute hospital admission when they had COVID-19. We suspect, but do not know, whether similar kinds of problems might affect the much larger number of people who did not get hospitalized.”

People with known neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s have shown an acceleration of their memory loss after COVID. Healthy elderly adults face an increased risk of developing new onset dementia after their infections. Even younger people with what is called mild illness may face memory issues and brain fog that worsen during mental exertion or stress which has considerable impact on their ability to work and socialize.

Another study published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) earlier this year found that among nearly 113,000 people who completed an online cognitive assessment, those who had recovered from COVID before four weeks had similar small deficits in their global cognition as those whose symptoms persisted beyond 12 weeks as compared to those who were never infected. Those with persistent symptoms or who were hospitalized demonstrated larger deficits.

While researchers and investigators attempt to elucidate the underlying mechanism for COVID’s terrifying pathogenesis, these studies and findings corroborate the ongoing dangers posed by the pandemic. Furthermore, it provides concrete evidence of the utterly criminal character of the “forever COVID” policy that threatens every living person on the planet. Current estimates place the impact of Long COVID at 410 million, or five percent of the planet’s inhabitants.

The prevention of COVID is the only feasible solution for this social disease that impacts all of society, and this prevention can only be guaranteed through the fight for a global elimination strategy led by the international working class in close collaboration with trusted scientists.