Category: Covid–19 Page 1 of 21

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.

Meanwhile, in Britain:

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.

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I’m going to keep this one brief.

At the start, Covid could have been stopped with travel bans, track and trace, mandatory isolation and lockdowns.

The problem with how everyone did lockdowns is that they did them too late. Instead of starting lockdowns when hardly anyone had Covid BUT R was over 0 (one case of Covid was spreading to more than one person) they would wait until the numbers were high. As a result lockdowns were long, but never actually crushed Covid and over time support for lockdowns was lost.

But the real problem is that controlling Covid spread required travel bans. Western Australia, which controlled Covid almost completely for over a year, did so by shutting down all non-essential travel. If this had been done worldwide, Covid could have been ended early.

I remember that the first lockdown where I live in Canada happened two weeks after I expected it. I kept looking at the numbers and wondering why weren’t in lockdown already. The only people wearing masks were asian-Canadians. All through the pandemic lockdowns happened three to four weeks after they should have, based on the numbers.

Vaccines were oversold (I’m not getting into the rest of the vaccine debate), economic support of businesses and often individuals in countries was insufficient and organizations like WHO and the CDC bungled their advice over and over again, starting with first claiming people shouldn’t wear masks and then later saying that Covid wasn’t airborne, but was spread by droplets.

The large country which handled Covid best may have been China, with their zero Covid policy. (Which I praised at the time), but they did the right thing stupid: zero-Covid could never continue indefinitely and even when it was done much of it was not done intelligently, like not moving to n95 masks. Most importantly, though, there had to be a transition plan.

China is the premier world industrial power. Covid is airborne. The trifecta of proper ventilation, cleaning air with HEPA filters, and UV light, along with air quality monitors, can be used, should be used and should have been used to make buildings safe again. (In China’s case they also needed to improve their plumbing. Most Chinese buildings don’t have the U curve (P-Trap) which traps smells and gasses.)

So the correct plan is to put air quality monitors everywhere, and to refit all buildings with proper ventilation: air filtration and UV light. Entirely do-able, if a big project. When you put all this in, and your building is inspected, your workers can come back to work even during outbreaks.

China could have done this easiest of all the world’s countries and didn’t.

Now, this is a collective action problem. It requires a correct diagnosis of a problem, a correct prescription of the cure, then taking unified social action. In other words, Covid is:

1. Airborne
2. Therefore we need to clean the air
3. So let’s mass produce the necessary filters, ventilation, sensors and UV and then install them.

Every society failed this.

Now if we can’t do that, what are the odds of us tackling climate change or environmental collapse? Those problems require us to reduce our consumption significantly (possible to do without large hits to standards of living, but that’s another article), which will require us to revamp our economies away from capitalist consumption and figure out how to keep everything running without an economy of planned obsolesence and everyone running on hampster wheels working, buying, selling and dying.

The transition is a hard problem to manage, while Covid was a simple problem with very few moving parts. We couldn’t even manage Covid.

Covid was a test. We failed. We can pass any time we want, its still a solvable problem. Until we do pass the test, there is zero reason to believe we can pass any harder tests.

Some countries did better than others, but none passed the test. When you’re running from a fire it doesn’t matter if you run faster than everyone else if you don’t out-run the fire.

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In Ontario, Canada:

Meanwhile, in China there’s a huge respiratory disease outbreak that the Chinese government refuses to give details on. Could be something new, but it equally it just could be standard respiratory disease: a LOT of standard respiratory disease.

I hate to keep hammering this issue, but it’s important. There is NO immunity debt, what there is is immune system damage from Covid infections. Every Covid infection has a chance to degrade your immune system and to damage basically every organ, including your brain.

Every additional Covid infection can and often does do more damage. This damage is often imperceptible (until it isn’t): your body is hurt, but you can’t feel it—yet. When you do, well, that’s Long Covid.

Meanwhile you get sick more often. We’ve also seen huge increases in children with heart and respiratory ailments, since schools are a primary vector for infection.

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When China stopped their Zero Covid policy, I said a lot of people would die and suffer. We don’t know the immediate death toll because China isn’t talking, but estimates put it between 1.4 and 2 million people in the first two months. But, as I wrote at the time, it was the long term consequences which would really matter.

They show up easier in China because China has fewer hospital beds per capita and it’s harder to conceal when hospitals become swamped.

We could still wipe out Covid if we really wanted to, though it would be a big and worldwide effort, but so far we’re mostly just pretending it’s over “because we say it’s over.”

Alas “because I say so” doesn’t work with respect to nature and the knock-on effects of the pandemic continue, and they are very very nasty.

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One of the most irritating things about writing this blog is making statements that are obviously correct which people, especially those with power and large platforms dispute, then later being proven correct.

Covid has been a masterclass:

First, Covid is not over. It will not be over till we either get very lucky and it mutates massively to be less dangerous, or we do what is necessary to end it. Remember that Covid is a pandemic. It moves in waves.

Second, Covid damages immunity.

Third, Covid damages a wide variety of organs, including the heart, lungs, circulatory system and your brain. This damage can be non-symptomatic, or it can be bad enough to be Long Covid.

Fourth, every time you get Covid, it has a chance of doing more damage.

Fifth, therefore getting Covid multiple times builds up damage to your body, including your immune symptom. This is why we are seeing significant increases in the number of people getting heart attacks and cancer, for example. (It’s also probably behind the significant increase in auto accidents.)

Sixth, other than masks the best way to protect against Covid is to constantly purify the air.

Seventh, Covid infections are and were driven by children at school. Not only do they give it each other, they take it back to their families.

Eight: Long Covid is more important than deaths, as it hits working age people.

Nine: Long Covid and, to a lesser extent deaths are are a huge contributor to the labor force tightness, and as such are helping with efforts to increase wages.

Tenth: that notwithstanding, so far Covid has mostly been used as a profit opportunity and excuse to raise prices, and as such has seen a massive increase in prices. Those workers who have the ability to raise their wages can keep up or maybe even get ahead, those who don’t are screwed.

Bonus: as I said a couple years ago, when children aren’t in school there are less suicides, because school (especially high school) is ass. Certainly there are children who need school to escape from abusive parents (I was one of them), but while large in number, they are a minority.

The official Covid mortality numbers are down, and pretty significantly, in most countries. But we also aren’t testing as much and  most countries aren’t collating and releasing figures as much either.

For now, however, we have excess mortality numbers.  So, a guy named Diego Bassani produced these two excess mortality charts for Canada.

First, age 15-64.

Second, 0-14.

Compare the 2020 line for adults and children, then the 2021. In 2020 we protected kids, in 2021 we gave up and threw them to the wolves. I said at the time that the idea that kids were going to be just fine if we sent them back to school wholesale without ventilating and filtering schools was nonsense, and it was.

Anyway, it sure doesn’t look like Covid is over, does it?

And really, why would we think it would be over since we didn’t do anything to end it except say it was over and stop most of what was done to slow it down, from masking and isolation to widespread vaccination?

I rather suspect most governments are gaslighting their populations. Lying. And step by step they will lie more by changing the excess death baseline (the UK is already on this) and so on.

“No, this is how it’s always been.”

Of course, not all deaths are directly Covid, but the excess are mostly because of Covid. If you get cancer and the hospitals are slammed and you don’t get care for months then die, it won’t show as “Covid”, but it’s because of Covid, or rather our response. In Canada I keep seeing stories about overworked hospitals and how emergency departments are having to shut down for the weekend or whatever. That basically never happened pre-Covid.

Covid’s here. It’s still killing and Long Covid is still stalking the land. And we’re just pretending, like some “New Emperor’s Clothes” that it isn’t

I don’t see how adding a semi-permanent pandemic and mass disabling to climate change and environmental collapse is anything but bad and complete malpractice by our ruling class, even given that they are the enemies of all humanity except themselves, since it’s going to hit them too.

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