All right, after this I’m going to write about Covid less, because “all Covid, all the time” makes Ian bored and Ian’s blog boring. But once more for the road:
If your country didn’t control Omicron (or any other variant), it is because your country’s leaders chose not to control Omicron. It is entirely do-able, and any competent leadership class that isn’t in a failed state can do it.
I hear the comments about the US as a failed state already, but… are all of these countries failed states by any useful definition of failed state?
In a sense, they are. They are states which can no longer govern: They are ruled by oligarchies on looting expeditions, and they have almost all completely gutted actual government capacity.
China isn’t on that chart, but I’ve followed its pandemic response more closely than Japan’s, and it is enabled by the fact that China has a lot of local government capacity. When they do lockdowns, for example, they can go door to door to every door with food and water. They can track and trace. They can put up a new field hospital in days. They haven’t outsourced their entire government to expensive and incompetent private enterprise.
Another country which has done atrociously (far worse than the official stats) is Russia.
Russia’s population declined by more than one million people in 2021, the statistics agency Rosstat reported Friday, a historic drop not seen since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Ongoing demographic woes have been exacerbated by the pandemic, with Rosstat figures showing that more than 660,000 had died with coronavirus since health officials recorded the first case in the country.
The new figures continue a downward trend from the previous year when Russia’s population fell by more than half a million.
The Covid-related fatalities figures published monthly by Rosstat are far higher than death figures released by a separate government web site, which is dedicated to tracking the pandemic in the country.
Those government web site figures only take into account fatalities where the virus was established as the primary cause of death after an autopsy and shows just 329,443 total fatalities.
[Ian – I’m sure India has even worse numbers per capita, though we may never know.]
This is complete government failure and puts the lie to the idea that Putin is fundamentally able to run domestic politics well. Russia NEEDS citizens. The government has been screaming at its population to breed for decades. It is not in Russia’s interest, nor its rulers interests, to lose citizens like this, and — more importantly — it isn’t in the ruling class’s perceived interests to have this many people die. (Then there are the affects of Long Covid, which Russia also cannot afford.)
Even if one says “herd culling,” and assumes a psychopathic government which wants people with co-morbidities dead, because of Long Covid, the long-term cost will be higher than the long-term benefits, as Covid produces health problems faster than it kills people with them.
At the end of the day, Russia lacks government capacity and will. It has never recovered from the collapse of the USSR, and it is still corrupt in the bad way. Good corruption gets things done, bad corruption makes it hard to do things. Russia has the second kind and China has the first, as did the US in the late 1900s. (The US now has bad corruption, not good, but it often isn’t recognized since it’s almost all legal and isn’t about petty bribes by citizens to low-level bureaucrats.)
Bottom line is that Covid has been a test of leaders, governments, and populations. It has revealed which countries or regions are still capable of operating. Some do so because of social consensus, some because leaders recognize that allowing Covid to run free is against their interests (Western Australia) and some because they somehow have leaders who aren ‘t psychopaths (New Zealand).
Covid can be controlled, even Omicron can be controlled. We know this because some countries have controlled it, and by controlled we don’t mean “half the US deaths per capita” we mean “actually had almost no deaths and not very many cases.”
We also could have, at least theoretically, done this worldwide, if the leadership of the major countries wanted it controlled and gave it the necessary aid.
So the pandemic is a choice, and about 99 percent of the deaths and suffering are the results of choices.
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