Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Covid–19 Page 7 of 21

The Covid Idiot Shuffle

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On August 5, 2021

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This is from the province of Ontario, in Canada where I live.

I’m going to enlarge and show the first graph properly:

Now what you’re going to notice is that Rt never went below about 80—that is 80 new cases per 100 Covid cases. Also, the general trend is UP. So you have a situation through stage one where case counts are gong down, but R is stubbornly high, even if not over 1. Then in stage 2 it actually burps over 1 and Ontario goes to stage 3 anyway.

Now, I know of a guy who lives in a rooming house (not me) who got Covid. He did the right thing: got tested, obeyed quarantine. Health authorities knew and followed up with him.

Great, but the problem is he lived in a rooming house. Not just him but everyone in the house should have been quarantined, and both is and there contacts needed to be traced (and ideally quarantined.) Nobody else in the house was even contacted. Ideally he should have been quarantined somewhere else than the house, probably everyone in the house (all exposed) should have been, since any rooming  house is a great place for Covid to spread.

There is no effective track and trace or quarantine in Ontario. There just isn’t. So  you don’t get below .8, and you don’t control spread, so every time Ontario reopens it is just a matter of time before the next wave.

Lockdowns and partial closures do not work without proper track and trace and quarantine. When a new outbreak is seen it has to be jumped on.

Of course, if you want poor people (like those who live in rooming houses) to obey the quarantine, you’re going to have to make up their wages while they’re stuck in quarantine, and you have to deliver food and other necessities. This is what effective quarantine regimes in other countries do: they make sure the quarantined are taken care of. It may be boring to be stuck at home, but they aren’t going to fall behind on the rent, or not be able to eat. (These poor people also tend to be the “essential workers” everyone praises then let’s die.)

This half-assing of dealing with Covid has been typical of most of the western world. There’s a refusal among elites to actually deal with Covid as a serious threat, and mobilize government and private resources (seize them, if necessary, yes it’s legal) to ensure that Covid is properly dealt with.

I’ve suggested and believe it’s because Covid has made rich people much richer in the West, but whatever it is, it’s killing and crippling a lot of people. About 15 to 25% of people who get even a mild case of Covid get long Covid, with a variety of nasty symptoms and we’re now seeing indications of some mental damage from Covid separate from long Covid.

You really, really don’t want to catch this shit.

Failure to do things right is mass murder by those with the authority to do things right. Premier Doug Ford, in Ontario, is an active danger to everyone in Ontario because he refuses to run the play that will actually get Covid (mostly) under control. Everyone who dies now or in the past almost year is  his fault. He is a mass murderer because the consequences of his decisions are obvious. He’s also crippling a hell of a lot of people.

Ontario isn’t unique, obviously, this is the typical play in almost all Western countries.

It is compounded by the point-blank refusal to do everything possible to ramp up  vaccine production as fast as possible and help other countries in every way. Every country where Covid isn’t under control is a place where it can mutate into a worse strain. Delta is WAY worse than original Covid and Delta is unlikely to be the last bad variant.

For decades the fact that our “masters” were incompetent psychopaths didn’t seem to matter all that much; sure some people were getting hurt, but it wasn’t you, right? And if it was, well you lost your power and money so  you didn’t matter and couldn’t do anything.

Now it’s you or grandmother or you kid getting a protentially life-long disability.

You replace your elites, by whatever method will work, or they will keep killing and crippling you.

Doug Ford, by any rational calculus is an ongoing threat to everyone in Ontario, including me. His actions and lack of actions stand a damn good chance of killing or crippling me and anyone I know in Ontario.

This is probably true of whoever the leaders are where you live.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

And The Mass Evictions are ON

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On August 2, 2021

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So, the evictions moratorium expired Saturday at midnight.

Over a quarter of renters are behind in some states, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities think-tank.

Southern states are some of the worst affected, though some 16 percent of US households owed rent — about double the amount before the pandemic.

This wasn’t necessary, but the choice was made to not pay people to stay in place, and the money given for relief has mostly not been administered, presumably because the bureaucratic hoops are ridiculous.

only $3 billion in aid has reached households out of the $25 billion allotted to states and localities in early February.

Rental properties and single homes are being snapped up en-masse by private equity and other big investors. Eviction is in their interest, as it makes it easier to raise rent.

This is a watershed moment for real-estate in America: this is where it moves to being owned more by smaller landlords and individual owners (for homes) to just another corporate owned means of, well, rent extraction.

Remember that after 2008 banks deliberately held houses off the market to drive up prices, and you’ll understand what is going to happen to rent, which has already seen ridiculous rises. With large amounts of rental property now in a very few hands, it will be easy for a few people to decide to hold just enough properties off the market to drive up rents. It’s better for big institutional owners to have higher rent prices and some empty if that works out to more rent, and given shortages already exist, I’m betting that will be the case.

The era of cheap housing has been over for a while, but it’s going to be thrown in a coffin and staked thru the heart if big investors have their way.

We’ll talk more later this week, probably, about how wonderful and useful the homeless are and why they are treated so badly.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

Quarantine Matters

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On July 21, 2021

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So, compared to a lot of other countries, Australia has done a pretty good job on Covid.

But they just had a Covid breakout in two major cities: Sydney and Melbourne. Those breakouts required them to then go back to shutdowns: closing and restricting businesses and movement.

Both outbreaks come from failures in the quarantine system: from hotel quarantine not working because hotels are not set up properly for quarantine due to not separately ventilating.

On July 7th I wrote that quarantine should be mandatory, with criminal penalties for violation, and…

We also do quarantine badly. Hotel quarantine is ridiculous in most hotels, because Covid is airborne and most hotels spread air between rooms.

This isn’t a difficult problem, however. Build a bunch of small huts in a field (you can even stack them), each with its own ventilation, and put people in there.

How has this been proved across the board in Australia?

I am tired of living in societies where we know how to do the right thing and simply refuse to do so because our elites are psychopathic, selfish and greedy and our population refuses to discipline or control the elites.

We KNOW what to do to stop Covid. We KNOW how to do it. We just fucking refuse.

This is goddamn pathetic. It’s just like climate change, but on a faster timeline so you can see it in weeks to months rather than decades. We may go extinct, we are certainly going to kill and impoverish billions and probably wipe out half the world’s species (which will hurt us terribly, not just them) all because while we KNOW how to do the good, non psychopathic, non criminally insane things, we REFUSE.

You discipline your elites, or most of  you and your children will die or be impoverished by their actions and lack of actions.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

The Decision to Let Covid Go Chronic

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On July 20, 2021

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Has been made.

If I know that if I don’t do X, then Y will happen, and I choose not to do X, then I have chosen Y.

Our elites  have chosen not to control Covid. It’s tiresome to keep going through Pandemic 101, but they haven’t tracked and traced, haven’t quarantined, haven’t enforced vaccines, haven’t opened up vaccine patents and helped every country manufacture them, haven’t kept lockdowns going long enough, have opened schools, refused to acknowledge Covid was airborne for too long, and on, and on, and on.

There is a playbook for defeating pandemics, it is well understood, and only a few countries ran it.

Covid has made the rich much richer. It kills old and poor people primarily. Selling Covid boosters every year or even twice a year for $150/pop to everyone who can afford them is a lovely new sinecure for pharma.

Because Covid has proved to be a great boon to almost everyone important, i.e., everyone who actually makes decisions or influences them, there’s no reason to end it.

And so it appears it’s going to go chronic.

Even if there are some countries who keep it under control, there will be vast numbers who don’t, and they will serve as pools for Covid to continue to evolve. This is good, of course, if you are a pharma exec with stock options, because that means new booster shots! Vaccinated populations which do not reach crowd immunity are a thing of beauty, allowing Covid to evolve against the vaccines!

Life is wonderful. Modern neoliberal capitalism is the most amazing economic system ever created — one so finely engineered by two generations of intellectuals, bureaucrats, and politicians that it turns even a plague into a massive profit event for the rich.

And, really, as anyone who isn’t rich is obviously a worthless loser who doesn’t add value to society, because money obviously accurately measures value, this is as it should be.

Too bad about grandma, or that kid getting long-covid and losing the ability to speak properly — if they were worth keeping alive and healthy, they’d be rich, because that would show their merit.

Anyway, enjoy the new world.

And remember, if you don’t overthrow your elites, they will kill you or make your life unbearable. It’s you or them, and so far, it’s you.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

The Spread of New Covid Variants

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On July 7, 2021

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There is a variant of Covid, called Lambda, which started in Peru in August, and is now showing up in multiple countries, including the UK and Canada. How dangerous it is is uncertain: It has some changes that might make it better able to avoid antibodies, but studies so far are inconclusive.

The spread of new variants beyond their initial country, however, is something which shouldn’t happen. Very few countries are quarantining properly. Where I live in Canada, quarantine is essentially voluntary: There’s a fine if you don’t, and people who can afford to travel can often afford the fine, plus not everyone gets fined.

This is ridiculous; quarantine should be mandatory, and if you break it, you get slammed back in with a guard on your door, and afterwards you get a trial and are thrown in prison. As a friend noted, if you aim a gun at someone and pull the trigger, but it turns out the gun wasn’t loaded, you still committed a crime even if you didn’t know it was loaded or not.

When the virus and virus variants spread, they have more chances to mutate further. It may be that Lambda’s changes in spike protein aren’t enough to defeat the mRNA vaccines yet, but the next variation off Lambda’s base might be.

Delta, likewise, should never have spread out of its country of origin.

We also do quarantine badly. Hotel quarantine is ridiculous in most hotels, because Covid is airborne and most hotels spread air between rooms.

This isn’t a difficult problem, however. Build a bunch of small huts in a field (you can even stack them), each with its own ventilation, and put people in there. Pre-fab companies and militaries are great for this. Build a fence around it and bring people food and have public health nurses visit every day. This is relatively cheap and keeps people from breathing each other’s germs, if set up with a bit of care. Have a few military police guard the place, that will keep most people from running.

We have a pandemic turning into a plague (in the words of Umair Haque) because we have refused to take this seriously, all the way down the line. I know someone in Canada who got Covid, was told to quarantine, and no one else in the shared house in which they lived was contacted or told to quarantine. This is kindergarten level incompetence — truly shocking.

None of this was necessary. If we had properly shut down and not reopened too early, if we had actually tracked and traced, and had supported every country in the world to do this, while spreading vaccine knowledge around (all the garbage about how long it would have taken looks stupider and stupid, now that we’re up 16 months or so), we’d probably have it down to a few pockets now, at most, and would be back to our “normal” lives.

Instead, we have a disease that looks likely to be chronic and to keep mutating, which vaccine makers like Pfizer and Moderna will offer expensive booster shots to for years or decades.

Back at the start of the pandemic, Moderna was worth 80 billion; it could and should have been eminent domained.

And, as I pointed out at the start of the pandemic, all loans and mortgages should have been put in abeyance, including interest growth, and everyone who wasn’t essential should have been paid to stay home. Rich companies should have subsidized poor countries to do the same.

Blah, blah, blah. We’ve fucked up everything — really simple things that are part of how to handle a disease, things which were understood 500 years ago. Well, fucked up if you aren’t in the top .1 percent and have made out like bandits.

New Covid variants are happening and spreading because, overall, and especially in the West, our leaders are acting to make them spread.

If someone you care about died in anything other than the first wave (and even that is questionable), then your leaders are almost certainly responsible for that death. They refused to take the necessary actions to stop it. There are some exceptions (outbreaks which were stomped on quickly), but basically, almost all dead people after the first wave are the result of political malfeasance, rich people’s greed, and sheer bloody incompetence.

Rich people and politicians kill and impoverish you for money and pleasure. Covid is just a particularly stark reminder.

(Virtually everyone dying due to climate change heat waves and fires is also a victim of politicians and rich people. More on that later.)

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

Siphon the System Thinking Doesn’t Work Against Nature

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On July 5, 2021

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We live in a very, very rich society.

Oh, many people are poor, and real poverty, whether in the “Global South” or first-world backwaters, but our society throws off vast wealth. We could, essentially trivially, feed, house, and clothe everyone and give them a decent life. We have that sort of surplus, and far, far more.

In healthy societies, or societies where elites are scared of outside forces (whether human or natural), the emphasis is on growing the pie, on making the society stronger and richer so that it can survive the forces of which the elites and the population (perhaps) are wary. Unproductive use of resources is frowned on, something you can find even in English common law, where if land or property wasn’t being used, after a time it could be taken by someone who would use it productively.

In fantastically wealthy ages, where elites are sure they are secure from all enemies, they concentrate on fighting over the wealth, or, the pie.

The Gilded Age is a good example. The Americans and Brits of the early to mid 1800s were concerned with growing the pie; they didn’t feel invincible or untouchable. But after Britain had secured its second Empire, and painted more of the map than any other nation in history, and after the US had its civil war, broke the natives, and crushed the Spanish and Mexicans, the US and Britain felt they had it made. There were no real threats left.

So, the countries turned inside. They concentrated on taking from others, on amassing wealth. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil empire was created by by buying out (often at terrible prices) the existing oil industry. It wasn’t creation of something new; it was consolidation in one man’s hands, of what was already there, so that he could reap the benefits.

England’s middle class in 1850 was the envy of the world. By World War I, the average Englishman had been so impoverished that huge swathes of potential soldiers had to be turned away from service in the armed forces. The rich imtiserated the middle class, crushed the farmers as best they could, and fought amongst each other to see who would rule the roost. (In this, they were less collegial than our rich are — far more willing to throw former members of the elite out entirely.)

To put it simply, there was far more money and power to be gained by grabbing a bigger slice of the pie than by growing it.

In the US, this wasn’t fatal; there was a lot of stolen land, and there was still plenty of room for elites to grow new things, even if it wasn’t the emphasis.

In Britain, it led to a fatal decline which is still ongoing; we can see now that Britain probably won’t even stay the “United Kingdom” —- odds are good Scotland will leave, and to add insult to injury, they’ll lose Northern Ireland as well. It is even possible, in the next 40 years or so, that Wales might leave.

From the behemoth astride the world, to a pathetic country that can’t even keep its heartland together.

For our purposes, however, the point is simpler: If you want to rule over other people, you must, in the words of Lois McMaster Bujold, rule their imagination. The greatest of men and women could lose everything tomorrow if their subjects simply stopped believing in their subjugation — and who has how much is entirely a matter of convincing other people to give it to you and let you keep it. Even when it’s a matter of force, you must convince the enforcing class to do what you say and to point the guns and use the prisons on the “right’ people.

It is true that growing the pie requires a fair bit of ruling over other people’s imaginations, but real increases in societal wealth require actually dealing with the world as it is; conquering people who resist, inventing and building steam engines, figuring out how to grow more food on the same land, and so on.

Just getting people to give you more of what already exists, what was created by other people and is produced by a system created by humans of the past, however, is pure imagination work. If people believe it is true, it is. You’re only dealing with human psychology and mass psychology.

Of course, a real world still exists; sometimes its people who don’t buy into your story. This is why China and the US are going to cold war and maybe real war, because neither is willing to live in the world created by the others fictions and ideals.

Then there is nature. It doesn’t matter if you believe that carbon and methane heat up the planet. They do and they will. It doesn’t matter what you think about Covid, if you un-mask and don’t quarantine people who have it, or came in contact with those who do, and if you don’t contact trace, and so on and so forth, then it will act like any other pandemic disease and keep mutating and spreading.

You can’t just manipulate other people’s beliefs about Covid and expect it to go away.

And so, people who have spent their entire lives doing nothing but manipulating other people’s beliefs are incapable of dealing with Covid or climate change. Covid doesn’t “listen to them.” Covid doesn’t care what they say.

Same with climate change. The forest will burn, regardless of what you say to the trees or to the weather.

Our elites, trained only to manipulate other people, are incapable of dealing with real-world events that can’t be controlled simply by controlling other people’s beliefs.

And so we will burn, and cough, and Covid will become endemic as the world slides towards collapse.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

How We’re Making Sure Covid Goes Chronic

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On May 30, 2021

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So, you may all recall, for much of the first eight months or so of the pandemic, people would natter on about how “viruses always become less deadly.” I never bought that.

You may have noticed that Covid variants are not less deadly, but more deadly.

I was wondering about this the other day, and got my answer, courtesy of a specialist in mass murder.

In a vacuum, sure, viruses evolve towards a situation where they reproduce more, which tends toward lower lethatlity and more chronic infection. What they want, like most lifeforms, is more offspring. But this isn’t a vacuum, they’re evolving against public health measures

The first big breakout variant, the UK strain, was specifically adapted against masks. It was much more contagious, so minor mask lapses were more easily exploited. It spread more evenly, relying less on super-spreader events, and was more infectious to children, who mask poorly.

The next big breakout was the South African strain, which was part of the family of Covid strains that contain a mutation colorfully labeled “Eek” which evades antibodies, especially from natural infection or weaker vaccines, because that was/is becoming a bigger impediment than masks.

Now that MRNA vaccines are becoming the tool of choice, if the virus is allowed to continue to circulate in a partially vaccinated western population, it is only a matter of time before that becomes the biggest impediment to Covid’s success, and viruses are selected for resistance to it.

I feel a little silly not realizing this myself, as it’s Natural Selection 101.

What this means is that half-assing a workable measure only allows the virus to adapt to defeat it. If you don’t mask/shutdown/quarantine/track-and-trace properly, if vaccines aren’t quickly spread to virtually everyone, Covid adapts.

By leaving large chunks of the population effectively un-protected, we have ensured Covid’s continued evolution into forms optimized against our half-assed measures. This means everyone has to be protected and quickly, and that includes people in other countries. Just protecting your own population is not enough — especially if you half-ass it and don’t insist on compliance.

This suggests a rather bleak future for us v.s. Covid: A chronic, but still fairly deadly, disease which also gives some people long-Covid, i.e., impairment long after the initial infection.

This will allow pharma to sell booster shots every year. Pfizer wants to sell them for $150 a shot. Small and medium businesses will continue to shut and large businesses will continue to expand their market share since they can use the internet and delivery to cut around retail distribution. Those retail businesses which pretty much have to remain will continue to put workers at risk, and the same will be true of production and distribution centers, where low-paid workers must come together in large groups.

Countries which wish to opt-out of this future will have to go to hard borders with mandatory quarantines (jail sentence for skippers; track-and-trace and quick shutdowns against any break-outs). Although the main transmission vector is airborne, such countries will probably want both robots to offload freight, and then temporarily isolate shipped goods (especially anything coming in by air.)

I do hope this is all wrong and that vaccines can get Covid under control by main force, but I fear my desire for a decent future is overcoming my analytical sense when I wish for such.

In some ways, Covid has been a perfect test of humanity, which most of the “West” has failed abysmally, and we’ll discuss that more in a future article.

(The more people subscribe or donate the more I write and the happier I am. So please consider doing so if you like my writing.)

CDC Decides to Just Not Count All Covid Cases

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On May 25, 2021

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If you’re vaccinated, you can still get Covid, but… (courtesy of my favorite Dalek.)

Now, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has stopped investigating breakthrough infections among fully vaccinated people unless they become so sick that they are hospitalized or die.

Now, this may seem reasonable, but people with breakthrough Covid can give it to other people, and they can get Long Covid from it.

And, yeah, you can still die.

Earlier this year, the agency was monitoring all cases. Through the end of April, when some 101 million Americans had been vaccinated, the CDC had received 10,262 reports of breakthrough infections from 46 states and territories, a number that was very likely “a substantial undercount,” according to a CDC report issued on Tuesday….(my emphasis)

Some 995 people were known to have been hospitalized, and 160 had died, though not always because of Covid-19, the new study said. The median age of those who died was 82.

So, we’re not going to count cases unless they wind up in the hospital, but the people with Covid are still infectious and can still die (looks like about a 1.5 percent chance, based on the numbers above).

This, along with the decision to stop recommending masks for people who are fully vaccinated (which, yeah, people who don’t believe in vaccination will lie about) smacks of “the pandemic is all but over, nothing to see here.”

“If we don’t measure it, it doesn’t exist!”

Neither the CDC, nor the WHO have covered themselves in glory during this pandemic. In fact, they have burned credibility like it’s ten cent oil, and they want to set the world on fire. They said masks didn’t help, then they changed their minds. They resisted evidence that the virus was airborne vigorously, and as a result, didn’t emphasize proper ventilation. They were wrong about schools, where, yes, children and teachers do get infected and pass it on.

What should have be a disease we stomped into the ground is now likely to become chronic (also because of refusal to share vaccine manufacturing information), which will, it must be admitted, earn Pharma tens of billions of dollars every year, so I guess that’s a win. And who really needed old people, or people who are immune-compromised? Think of all the saved money on pensions and healthcare for people who are mostly worth more dead than alive to governments and corporations. (Especially since the kids of old people can spend their money. It doesn’t require mom or dad or grandpa or grandma to be alive.)

Back in the Bush era, a joke I liked was: “Stupid or evil?”

“Why not both?”

It sure is fun to be ruled by incompetent psychopaths.

Over in Britain, the government is now trying to deny that they started off with a herd immunity strategy: “Let almost everyone get it and who cares if grandma dies?” But anyone with a memory span of more than year remembers that they did.

Psychopaths. The rich get richer if Covid isn’t stopped. The richest people in the world have seen massive increases in their wealth and income because of Covid. Life is fucking marvelous and Covid has been a blessing.

Understand this in your bones. The people making decisions not only don’t care if you die, if you dying will make them richer or more powerful, they’ll go with the decision path that leads to you or your mum or your best friend dying or winding up homeless. You are nothing to them, you’re meat. A prey animal.

Welcome to late-stage capitalism.

(The more people subscribe or donate the more I write and the happier I am. So please consider doing so if you like my writing.)

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