Category: health care Page 2 of 35

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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And that, as of October 2022, 1.4 million adults had long Covid or had had it. There’s about 31 million adults in Canada, so we’re well below that 15%, which was actually described as ten to twenty percent.

My own take on Long Covid is that since it is more likely each time people are infected, that the maximum percentage will increase over time and that since many people have damage without it being symptomatic, far more people are damaged and will be damaged than the headline numbers.

The contribution this will make to our civilizational cratering is hard to overstate. Meanwhile we’ve just plugged our ears and are screaming “Covid is over, Covid is over, I can’t hear you!”

Again, each time you get Covid it has a chance to do more permanent damage to you, damage which is often asymptomatic. If you live in a society where the plan is “just keep getting Covid over and over again” for a lot of people, perhaps most, eventually you’re likely to take a hit and not recover fully.

Meanwhile our lords and masters are squealing about how there aren’t enough workers. Well yeah, you refused to deal with the plague because not dealing with it was making you filthy rich. Not dealing with the plague leaves a lot of dead and disabled people. That’s not good for the work force.

Imagine that. “Why can’t these sick and dead people work?”

Hmmmm. Lazy buggers.

(A little sick, though not with Long Covid, so posting may be anemic for a bit.)

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One problem with covering Covid right now is that it’s becoming harder and harder to get good stats, because governments want to pretend it’s over. In Canada, the best reporting provincial government is Quebec, so we’ll look at that and I’m quite sure this is effectively the picture everywhere, though the bumps may not synchronize. The important line is the orange one, that’s excess mortality. It’s over 35%. And these numbers are a known understatement.

This is typical of the charts I’ve seen tracking Covid—the numbers aren’t at peak, but they are as high or higher than they were for most of the official pandemic.

Meanwhile there is Long Covid. A Danish study:

As part of an effort to better flesh out the burden of long COVID, Danish researchers today reported a threefold increase in extended sick leave, defined as lasting longer than 30 days, in people who had recovered from COVID, compared to workers who weren’t infected.

From the Independent:

Some 1.9 mln people across the UK are currently estimated to be suffering from #longCOVID, or 2.9% of the population. The figure is up from 689,000 at the start of January and 514,000 in September 2022

From the BBC:

the number of children under 16 with self-reported Long Covid of any duration ‘increased from 77,000 in October 2021, to 119,000 in January 2022

So we decided to pretend the plague was over and stopped doing the anti-plague stuff like masking:

Covid is still a thing. What’s as bad, maybe worse, is the hospital crush. Politicians pretend Covid is over, but hospitals still have to deal with it, not just in terms of patients but in terms of sick doctors, nurses and other staff. Last year I went to a cancer clinic and had to wait many hours. I asked why? “Three of the four doctors are out with Covid.”

Oh.

Where I live wait times in emergency departments are often 8 hours, sometimes more. They were a couple hours or less before Covid and strangely, now that Covid is “over” they haven’t gone back to 2 hours.

Test times, surgery times, everything times are delayed, and as a result people become more seriously ill or die. Excess deaths from Covid are vastly overstated if they only include Covid and Covid-related damage, because patients with heart and cancer and other problems are dying due to delayed care.

The decision has been made to just live with the plague. If we want to do that, and we clearly do, then we have to adjust our society. We have to train more doctors and nurses and other hospital staff like technicians. We have to increase hospital budgets. We need more long-term care beds and we need to make support available to people with long Covid who can’t work: both financial and outpatient nursing care.

But to do that, as with doing anything, we’d have to spend quite a bit more money on healthcare, and since the only place to get money from is the rich, the poor and middle class being tapped out, that means taxing the rich, which is verboten.

The human propensity to just pretend that problems they don’t want to exist don’t exist in is full display now with respect to Covid, as it has been for generations with respect to climate and environmental collapse. The problem is that some problems don’t care if we don’t want them to exist, they still exist and they get worse (see those increases in people with Long Covid or all the fires and droughts and whatnot from early climate change.)

There is a real world, and sticking our heads in the sand doesn’t make it go away. But it does kill a lot of people and make a lot of other people disabled.

As usual, none of these problems can truly be dealt with while our current elites are in power. If we want them fixed, our elites have to go and be entirely replaced.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.