How can you stop catastrophizing thoughts ?

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I seem to feel like I dwell on thinking about the worst case scenario because there is a lot of uncertainty and we obviously can't predict the future. They said a year ago that 500,000 people will die and now we haven't reached that high although there have been sadly over 125,000 deaths in the UK from the virus. As a kid I used find reading about natural disasters fascinating but obviously when you going through one yourself such as this one (a pandemic) it is terrifying and traumatic for people. I know a year on, we now have vaccines but I'm finding very hard to be very positive because there still seems to be a sense of doom and scaremongering out there, yes nearly 30 million people in the UK have been vaccinated but Europe is going through another wave and worrying about that.

You are not catastrophizing.
You are being realistic.
And honest.
This pandemic is not over.
We really do need to mask and distance.
We need to honestly acknowledge that not a single one of those vaccines are 100% effective.
You are intelligent and observant.
Please continue to be careful.

If you are catastrophizing about things that are not really catastrophes, you can write your thought down and then write a rational reply to the thought. Such as "it might not turn out that bad after all, and it is usually good to be an optimist."

But as Sylkat pointed out, this pandemic really IS a catastrophe, and you must maintain vigilance. It's hard!

I have found the best technique for coping with it is distraction. I do follow the "rules" about distance, masking, vaccination, but other than that, I feel I do best with distracting myself.

As the others have said, it's not "catastrophizing" if you're actually just being realistic about a real catastrophe that really is happening.

However, I know many neurodivergents struggle with focusing on negative possibilities. And just because you're being realistic doesn't mean that your mind isn't have anxious meltdowns about something that you can't control or fix. I find that I have to keep away from the news because it's not actionable. Watching/reading news gives you a sense that something is important, desperate, and needs fixing, and yet the information is almost always wildly irrelevant to anything you can actually do anything about.

Teal Swan has a video called "How to Stop Catastrophizing." I highly recommend it. She also has a video called What to do When You're Upset, which you may also benefit from. The tips in those videos are far more deep and thorough than anything I'm going to type up off the top of my head for you, so I hope you watch and find her advice helpful.

The big question is “is the virus spreading among people who are fully vaccinated as well?”

I am not here to diagnose you
you may or may not be catastrophizing. To be honest, such a cognitive behaviour is quiet common among people with ASD due to the almost always present anxiety disorders, especially, GAD, which symptoms include catastrophizing.

People with ASD also are well known to find the unpredictable nature of life, extremely unsettling and stressful.
Due to other common traits of the ASD brain, we generally operate experiencing more stress than normal,
which reduces our capacity to experience stress in every day life.

In order to reduce our risk to being exposed to too much stress, we as ASD people generally like to create and follow routines rigidly so as to limit the amount of stress we are exposed to, keeping our stress loads within our known limit.

Such routines means that everything is predicted, and kept within our limits. We know we can cope under these conditions / circumstances and environments. We keep stress to a level that we can cope with as we are controlling what we are experiencing and know we can cope with what we choose to experience.

Problems arise when we experience the unknown, basically, because we don't know what we are going to experience if the experience is unknown to us. And due to trauma experienced in other circumstances that we know we can not cope with, we start to worry, in case the unknown may be one of these experiences.... unknown perhaps even including death...

Meditation, relaxation therapy.
Meds for OCD sometimes are also prescribed for people with GAD.
Some antidepressants are prescribed, including older tricyclic ones. I personally recommend Clomipromine.
Although regular GPs MDs wont prescribe this old gen med, psychiatrists should be able to though.
If you can find one that understands ASD that is....

Hope that helps.

I’ve had thoughts similar to what Chris has. At least according to the news, the Brazil variant is causing me stress. Like, what if the vaccines don’t work against that? Then, covid restrictions will just go on and on and on and on. I started driving for Door Dash last week and I have seen so many restaurants STILL not allow dining in. I feel like I can only deal with little things like that for so long.

It has been shown that the vaccines are extremely effective against at least most of the variants.

Despite the fact that we're not doing so great in the Northeast, things are loosening up pretty rapidly here.

I remember someone saying something like a pandemic makes us more aware of our own mortality and even in normal circumstances when everyone is going about their lives when there are people dying every day from car crashes, heart attacks, falls, old age and so on and those things make us aware our own mortality but they are just not being reported to the country and the world.

Yep.....people die from all those things all the time.