I sometimes think the defining characteristic of our age is reality denial:
I suppose 1.37% may not seem high, but the point is that Covid just keeps rolling along. Each time you get it, odds are that it’s doing some damage to your organs, including your brain. Most of that is sub-perceptual, it doesn’t qualify as “Long Covid”, but it’s there. Then you get it again, and again, and again.
I’m sure Labour’s program to get the back to work will do nothing but make people miserable. That chart doesn’t suggest “malingering.”
Spain’s numbers are particularly interesting
Now what’s visible here is that the numbers keep increasing. The long Covid continues to circulate, the higher the disability numbers. This is exactly what I’ve been predicting for years: as time goes by, people get Covid again and again. Eventually that causes enough damage to cause long term illness or disability.
I shudder to think what it will mean for kids, since those in school get Covid the most often. Since they’re young they have more resistance, but I’m willing to bet (and will not be wrong) that this will show up in very high illness and early death numbers as they age.
The solution to all this is fairly simple: we need to clean our air up: filtration, UV and so on. This isn’t that expensive, although it has to be done in all buildings. Numbers drop, once they’re fairly low, stop all non-essential travel for three months or so and track and trace. Do this is a group of countries and permanently ban travel from any country that hasn’t done it, until they do.
Yes, there is a cost to this, but it’s a lot less than the cost of having more and more disabled and sick people.
Covid is still a big deal, the only thing that’s a bigger deal (unless we have a world war) is climate change/ecological collapse. And we are failing to deal with an issue which is relatively simple because we won’t take a small percentage of our manufacturing and building capacity and refit all buildings to clean the air, then make such air cleaning permanent going forward. This is exactly what we did with water, in the past, to stop disease spread, but our current society is sclerotic and stupid.
This is true everywhere. China’s ZeroCovid policy was the right thing done STUPID. If any country had the capacity to clean air it was China, but they just stuck to shut-downs till the public lost patience.
It’s dismaying to live in societies where we know what’s wrong, we know how to fix what’s wrong and we simply refuse to do what is necessary.
Ian Welsh
No Vax/anti-vax.
Carborundum
If you’re getting repeated paired estimates from Canada and the US that are identical to the second decimal place, grab your wallet because there’s something systemic going on there. Whether the underlying estimates are right, wrong, neutral I don’t know, but I’ve been around long enough to know that the chance those are truly independent measures is miniscule.
capelin
“Do not discuss the pachyderm”.
Ok. However, I would note that Pachyderms are among the several animals besides humans that do Covid. Cat, dog, Canada Lynx, mouse, rabbit, deer, cattle…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_that_can_get_SARS-CoV-2
Oakchair
Covid was widespread and prevalent by the end of 2019 according to antibody testing.
In the UK economically inactive people due to sickness by year:
2019: 2 million
2021: 2.2 million
2024: 2.8 million
Spain percent of population with a chronic illness:
2015-2020: 30%
2022: 40%
2024: 50%
Long Covid discussion have a definition problem in that an individual with Long Covid is generally defined as someone with poor health who we suspect or know had Covid. It’s difficult to determine if it is long covid or just Covid being blamed for background health problems. This population data shows that the later proposition is not the case.
anon
First, thank you for still covering Covid when it feels like everyone else around me thinks we are no longer in a pandemic and Covid is a thing of the past. It pleasantly surprises me when I see a voice of reason on Covid in the news. Most recently it was Violet Affleck, the daughter of celebrities Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck. Amazing that a teenager has more common sense than the people running the country.
https://www.vanityfair.com/style/story/violet-affleck-against-mask-bans-speech-at-la-county-board-meeting
Second, not a single Western country will ever be willing to do the right things to fix the Covid problem because it isn’t politically or economically expedient in the short term. If any country can tackle this it’s China and I’m hoping the government eventually comes around to addressing air filtration, at least in new constructions.
Westerners are too short-sighted to ever want to go through the inconvenience of lockdowns and travel bans again. I knew we lost the plot when a lot of leftists that I generally respect were speaking up against masks, lockdowns, and school closings. Additionally, Western leaders are too incompetent to do lockdowns fairly and equitably. We saw how the rich and powerful were able to skirt Covid restrictions and they will do it again.
Bill H.
This is actually good news. Global warming (“climate change”) is primarily caused by an excessively large population. Covid was designed to reduce that population, and it is doing precisely what it was designed to do. At some point in the not too distant future Earth’s population will be reduced to what it can comfortably sustain.
GlassHammer
Ian,
I think “alienation” is the lived reality of our time, not “denial”.
Be it COVID, Climate Change, or Cost of Living we don’t see ourselves as using will to create direct action in the world.
At best, we create vessels to hold our will (idols for idolatry) in the hopes that they will create direct action in the world. When we have no vessel (no idol) for a given problem we treat the problem like bad luck and refuse to acknowledge it lest we catch that bad luck.
Jan Wiklund
I believe it is always like this, and has always been. Those who administers society are answerable to rich people who don’t care.
If I take the example from my own country, Sweden, where we had a reasonably intelligent and active government from 1932 and perhaps 20 years on.
Permanent Undersecretary of State Per Nyström has written about how they went on bureaucratically to solve problems, not shunning difficulties, for example how the newly appointed minister of education Tage Erlander tried to get the numbers about how many teachers, school rooms etc there were, and how many must be added to cope with population increase, and it was nowhere to be found. In this issue they reacted intelligently and did what was needed. So also when it touched on unemployment, and partly also housing.
But look what horrible idiocies they swallowed nevertheless! Modernist town planning (people stink, the more they are spread out the better)! Private car society! Maximizing GDP even if it meant shuffling people out of their home towns! The cold war!
Perhaps society is so complicated that most people never can get out of the discoursees nourished by the upper class. The ideas of a society are the ideas of its ruling class, as Marx said. We can just make a dent in it. If it is done at the right moment it can change everything, but if not, not.
marku52
It’s not a problem for rich people (look at all the air purification at the WEF) and we can always import more workers (open borders) so it won’t get fixed.
This era really looks like we are well into the opening phase of Gibson’s Jackpot.
In other news, I got what was probably covid a while ago. The Drug That Shall Not Be Named and the FLCCC protocol knocked it right down.
david lamy
The Tour de France is receiving the COVID is so not over message loud and clear. A slew of riders have had to withdraw. But the Tour’s medical staff must be taking their COVID protocols from the U.S.’s CDC. Geraint Thomas has tested positive, but is continuing to race as his symptoms do not include a fever. The current race leader, Tadej Pogačar just lost a very valuable teammate to COVID. He himself had COVID about a week before the race commenced. Visma-Lease A Bike have been wearing respirators as sign-in events before every stage. I bet this will aid their star, Jonas Vindegaard to repeat as Tour champion despite horrendous injuries sustained in a crash at the Tour of the Basque Country a few months ago.
I wonder if the coming calamity of a superspreader event better known as the 2024 Paris Olympics will clarify that current COVID mitigation policies are inadequate.
different clue
@anon,
Lambert Strether specifically at Naked Capitalism is also covering Covid 5 weedays per week on his ” Water Cooler” afternoon feature. He has been doing it since the onset of the covid outbreak.
Here is a link to the most recent Water Cooler to see the most recent example of Lambert Strether’s coverage of covid.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/07/200pm-water-cooler-7-12-2024.html
different clue
@ Jan Wiklund,
. . . ” I believe it is always like this, and has always been. Those who administers society are answerable to rich people who don’t care. “. . .
In this case I would say that those who adminster society are answerable to rich people who actively support maintaining the pandemic in hopes of a massive slow-rolling demographic collapse of the non-Rich majority, which the rich people themselves hope to benefit from in the long run.
bruce wilder
@ Jan Wiklund
If history can teach us anything, it is how random is the walk.
The philosophers of the state always want an automatic system to govern the governors with rules and roles and incentives and no such thing is possible to sustain in the very long term. Government and economy are social systems — sure, but they are what people do. People are schemers. There will never be a set of rules that will not be gamed and flouted and eventually undermined and subverted.
We really don’t know how to solve the most fundamental problems:
— who will guard the guardians?
— what is the general welfare and why should I care, why should anyone care?
— “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”
We have dim vision and short horizons. Our selfishness is natural, near-to-hand and strongly felt and always feels easier to figure out (even though probably it’s not that easy or simple). Society and the public good are abstract and distant from personal experience; specialized expertise, never mind wisdom, is difficult to judge from a distance or to trust.
I don’t think there’s much evidence that “we” ever knew what to do about COVID. Those assigned responsibility on account of expertise and authority certainly showed few signs of basic competence. And, the rest of us trusted much too easily despite the early signs of rank incompetence. Once the many strands of incompetence were loose, there was no uncorrupted apparatus to devise or apply control.
I think most of us have trouble accepting the full possible horror that those strands of incompetence were rooted with the geniuses who thought “gain of function” research would be ever so valuable.
Once our brains are broken, the rest is easy . . .
GM
>The solution to all this is fairly simple: we need to clean our air up: filtration, UV and so on. This isn’t that expensive, although it has to be done in all buildings
It actually is expensive and is very slow to implement. And it does not guarantee stopping transmission.
Hard lockdown plus diligent masking plus mass testing is the only thing that is proven to do the job, and it does it in a few months at a fraction of the cost.
But that ship has long sailed…
Ian Welsh
GM,
as you say, that ship sailed. Aside from shattering incompetence at the actual details, it requires multiple nations to do it at the same time as well as serious travel bans. The few places, like Western Australia, which actually kept Covid at bay, were fanatical about travel restrictions.
Stormcrow
Ian, you are one of the very few people still covering this issue. That’s one reason your blog is one of my “must-reads”.
But here is why I don’t spend much time in the Comments section:
Bill H., July 13, 2024:
bruce wilder, July 13, 2024:
Long story short, people here seem allergic to journal articles. If you want to find out what Covid does, how it does it, where it came from, where it seems to be going, and the extent to which proposed mitigations actually work, articles published in actual medical research journals are a tough act to follow.
Or perhaps Edward Holmes is actually part of the conspiracy?