Welcome back, Shit Givers.

It’s a pretty pivotal week, so today’s essay is a little more technical and longer than normal. Please let me know your feedback!

⚡ Last week’s most popular Action Step was checking out PFAS Central’s PFAS-free brands and consumer products.

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TOGETHER WITH MILL

A new way to keep your kitchen — and the planet — clean.

Leaders from Nest and Apple created this smart bin so you can turn would-be food waste into food for chickens. Chickens! How cool is that. It shrinks and de-stinks kitchen scraps to keep nutrients (and methane) out of landfills.

Because food isn’t trash, friends.

⚡ Discover which websites are harvesting your data using The Markup’s Blacklight tool

⚡ Prepare your home for a wildfire using these resources from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection

⚡ Ensure everyone, everywhere, receives access to quality healthcare by donating to Partners In Health

⚡ With SNAP benefits getting rolled back, make sure more people have access to food and volunteer with or donate to Feeding America

⚡ Keep an eye on wastewater tracking data to understand the prevalence of COVID in your area

Or at least, the “way more influential on the past three years of your life than you can possibly imagine” COVID public health emergency has ended.

Let’s get a quick status check:

One week after the World Health Organization also called it quits on the COVID global health emergency, SARS-CoV-2 (the actual virus) and COVID (the disease) are very much still out there, though thankfully, drastically reduced in severity for most folks.

That is, folks who’ve been vaccinated who knows how many times, exposed a bazillion times, infected, tested positive, tested negative, fuuuucking tested positive again, who have taken at least one course of Paxlovid, rinse and repeat.

For the minority of (millions of) immunocompromised folks, COVID remains just as dangerous as ever. And they have much less of an idea of where it is than ever before.

Broadly, we have no real idea how many cases there are, nor levels of transmission.

Most people aren’t testing, no one who is testing is reporting it, and as of today, the CDC can’t make health departments collect or report what data they do get.

So what do we know?

We know US deaths have recently dropped from 4000 a week in January to 1000 a week in mid-May. That’s fantastic news, full stop.

And yet: 1000 deaths a week means a minimum of 50,000 people killed this year, leaving the disease a top-seven killer of Americans — mostly the elderly and medically vulnerable.

It was basically three years ago today that I pulled my kids out of school. If I’d told you three years ago that COVID would directly and indirectly kill a couple million people and then plateau into a new long-term top seven cause of death — would you have believed me? (I did advise some close friends that it might go this way, and those calls were very hard)

What would you imagine this day would look like and feel like?

You may or may not be ready for it, but it’s here. The government has postponed the end of the public health emergency more times than I’ve rescheduled cleaning out my shed (fine, and my attic), and a lot of folks and businesses and governors would very much like to move on.

Today I want to help you understand not just what policies and rules changed this week and how those changes will affect you, but also how fundamental these things have been to every day life the past three years, and how — not unlike the PATRIOT Act in 2001 — we’ve normalized the best and worst of them.