Ian Welsh

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

Category: health care Page 5 of 35

Does Zero Covid In China Work?

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On May 9, 2022

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So, we hear a lot of stories about Shanghai, where rolling lockdowns and administrative failures have lead to videos of people w/o enough food in lockdown, etc…

Shanghai is an interesting case, because Shanghai did not follow the normal Chinese zero-covid protocol. It didn’t shut down right away, but tried to do just do small shutdowns, and let the number of cases increase. This is not what other cities do.

I follow a maker account in Shenzen (the primary electronics manufacturing city in China and the world.) Since Covid they’ve occasionally written or done videos about the covid response in Shenzen, which has over 17 million people, plenty of trade, and lots of visitors from Hong Kong.

Wu says it better than I could.

I feel I’ve spent too much time on Covid recently, and do intend to move onto more interesting (if not always more important topics), but it’s IMPORTANT that people understand there were other options to dealing with Covid other than let’er’rip, whether or not most of the rest of the world’s actions were motivated by greed, psychopathy or incompetence, and regardless of how much 40+ years of neoliberalism have gutted our administrative capacity (it has been two years, we could have rebuilt a lot in those 2 years and we didn’t.)

Thatcher’s mantra was TINA (There Is No Alternative.) It has bred apathy and resignation. But if even the goddamn Chinese Communist Party can do better, then it’s obvious that there There Is An Alternative (TIAA?)

There are NO problems of any significance in the world today which are not a result of having a really, really bad elite and populations which are OK enough with them to let them keep doing what they do. There are also no problems we do not know how to deal with far better than we are right now.

As long as this is true, as a friend said just after Bush v. Gore, we’re going to ride this bucket all the way down to hell.

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Immune And Vaccine Escape Covid Variants

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On May 4, 2022

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It’s tedious to have to keep writing about Covid, but since we are absolutely determined not to use policies which will stop Covid, it’s necessary.

A new preprint study, published ahead of peer review, is pointing to why BA.4 and BA.5 are gaining ground: They can escape antibodies generated by previous infections caused by the first Omicron virus, BA.1, the variant responsible for the huge wave of infections that hit many countries in December and January. They can also escape antibodies in people who’ve been vaccinated and had breakthrough BA.1 infections, though this happened to a lesser degree than seen in people who’ve only been infected.

This is exactly as predicted here. Viruses adapt to challenges. To wipe it out we had to reduce it to nearly zero (as they mostly have in China, among a few other countries), so that it doesn’t have a lot of hosts. We chose not to do so (or our leaders did, as it’s making them fantastically rich), and so here we are.

Moderna has an Omicron booster coming out in autumn, which is to say at least four months from now, but because it was designed for the Omicron variant and not these new ones, it’ll likely be less effective than we’d like, though more effective than vaccines designed for the original (now essentially extinct) strain.

Given reports that Long Covid is far more prevalent than previously believed, it seems wise for those who can to keep taking precautions. There’s still a chance of death, but the chance of getting some sort of longer term health damage is not insignificant.

This mess could go on for years. We’re just gambling on a variant that does less damage becoming dominant, but given that Omicron Covid is already in the race for the most virulent disease known to mankind, and that it could keep mutating, that doesn’t seem like much of a hope, especially as viruses in general cause the sort of problems we see after Covid, just usually not quite as bad or widespread.

Long Covid research will be helpful, and perhaps we’ll come up with some sort of cure, and the best thing we can hope for is that that research and cure will be useful for effects from most or all viruses. If so, something good may come out of this mess.

As I, perhaps tediously, keep pointing out, this is a choice which has been made by our leaders — to let it spread, to make people go back to work, and to do nearly nothing to stop Covid’s ravages. Unless you’re actually in Ukraine, Yemen, Afghanistan, or a few other places, it remains your own leaders who are the greatest threat to your well being. People who are constantly doing things to make you sick or poor, or homeless or dead are conventionally known as “enemies.”

Worth a little meditation.

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Civilization Ending Long Covid Levels?

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On May 2, 2022

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So, via everyone’s favorite homnicidal Dalek, a study which finds that 51 percent to 80 percent of people who get Covid (pdf) get Long Covid. Often it’s asymptomatic, but asymptomatic cases still do damage to the body, just like you can have high blood pressure for a long time without knowing it or feeling anything. As the Dalek notes, this is potentially civilization ending now that we’ve decided to let everyone get Covid eventually.

The extra sauce on this idiot doomburger, is that each time you get Covid, you can get Long Covid and there is NO lasting natural or vaccine immunity to Covid. None. And each time you get Covid, any Long Covid you have can make it harder to resist Covid and can make your Long Covid worse.

The old figures for Long Covid ranged from 20 to 30 percent. Even those numbers, given repeated infections and compounding damage, were disastrous. These new numbers are catastrophic. Eventually, if we don’t control Covid (and remember, there have been multiple new variants since BA2) we may literally have billions of disabled people unable to work and needing care.

Probably you’ll know one of them, or be one of them. Probably someone you care about will have Long Covid. Then your government, which after all couldn’t be bothered to control Covid, will decide it costs too much to support them, will cut health care and disability care, and they’ll die. Probably miserably.

Welcome to the future.

Either replace your leaders, at any cost, or you and people you care about (I know most people don’t give a damn about strangers) will get sick, suffer immensely, wind up homeless in many cases, then die miserably.

Also India is having a heat wave in April/May which has spiked over 60 celcius (140f) in some locations, and where 40-50- celcius (104-122F) is routine. We’ll never know how many people it kills (India’s very bad at counting and doesn’t much want to), and on top of that, it’s causing crop failures. Given that we’re already in for a year with less food and higher prices than usual (thanks to the Ukraine war, Western sanctions related to the war, and various problems in China (and certainly other extreme weather events)), a lot of people are going to die from famine in the next year and a half, and there will then be massive political instability, probably including some revolutions and war.

We’ll talk more about this soon.

Your leaders are culling you. Deliberately. They know what they’re doing and they’re okay with it. Are you okay with it? You may not be able to do anything yet, but the first step is to understand, in your gut, that they are a threat to you; enemies of yours.

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The Pro-Death Lobby & Pro-Death Protesters

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On February 14, 2022

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No big post today, though I’ve got some things to say about inflation and policing soonish.

Just noting that the people who don’t want zero-Covid are, objectively, pro-death and pro-disabling. They’re the pro-death lobby and the pro-death protesters. This includes most Western politicians, who, if it were up to me, would be removed from power, tried for crimes against humanity — and in countries with a death penalty, hung from the neck until dead. Zero-Covid works when done properly, anyone in power who doesn’t do it is a mass murderer, and people who protest for the right to not even wear masks are either idiots, fools, or scum. (As with people who insist climate change is a hoax, or who know it is real and oppose doing anything.)

Your leaders, and people like the “truckers,” want you, your children, and your parents to die for their convenience and profit. They are pro-death.

Omicron “Couldn’t Be Controlled”

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On February 3, 2022

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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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The Most Contagious Virus in History Just Became 50% More Contagious

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On January 31, 2022

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Omicron BA.1 was the most infectious disease in known history.

Omicron BA.2?

Yeehah!

Add to this the fact that Covid in general, and Omicron in particular, is a disease which creates very little immunity from getting it, and what immunity you have fades fast.

It is not possible for us to just declare victory on Covid, and go back to work and school, because Covid keeps mutating. If we don’t get lucky, and a dominant version doesn’t evolve that is all of much less virulent and doesn’t cause Long Covid, we’re just setting ourselves up for wave after wave, and vast numbers of people getting long-term damage or being crippled by this thing.

Nor, clearly, can vaccines alone work, especially because we refuse to vaccinate everyone in the world. Basic pandemic control measures (known colloquially as “Zero Covid”) are necessary.

The most infectious disease in history, if it can reinfect over and over again, and cause permanent damage to many people who get it, doesn’t have to be “Black Plague” level deadly to wreck our societies. If this goes on for a few more years, which it might, it could cause collapse — because, children, there is a real economy, and just raising and lowering interest rates and giving free money to the rich, which is the only type of “economic” policy most of the West seems to know how to do any more, won’t fix the holes that wave after wave, and mass disablities, will blow in the real world economy of growing, making, and distributing things.

We may get lucky, yes, but we are now betting on luck.

People who bet what they can’t afford to lose, in my experience, tend to lose more often than the odds suggest.

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Western Australia Proves Basic Pandemic Control Methods Would Have Stopped Covid

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On January 21, 2022

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Western Australia:

Per Capita Cases, Western Australia: .11%.

Per Capita Deaths, Western Australia: practically none.

Per Capita Cases, Australia: 8.1%

Per Capita Deaths, Australia: .12%

Per Capita Cases, USA: 21%

Per Capita Deaths, USA: .26%

Australia is famous, or perhaps infamous, for its lockdowns, but Western Australia has essentially closed its borders since Covid. Australia has thus done far better than the US, with fewer cases and even fewer deaths per capita. Western Australia, on the other hand, essentially hasn’t had a pandemic, at least not in terms of deaths and cases.

Of course, all numbers will be under-counts, but I doubt the overall picture changes because of that.

What this tells you is something simple: Basic measures for dealing with a plague were required to control Covid and would have worked. If travel, except for shipping, had been shut down the way that Western Australia did (ship crews staying on ships), then Covid would be controlled, and most likely, over by now.

Simply stopping travelers (or at least forcing them into long quarantines) is probably the oldest method of plague control in history, used for thousands of years.

We didn’t even do that. Our leaders wanted us to die and get sick, and we did. Our media rains contempt on places which dare control Covid. In those cases where our leaders preferred we not die, and were willing to do what is necessary to ensure our health and well-being, we did not die.

Had we done things right, at the start, there would have been no Omicron and probably no Delta. It wasn’t hard, it would have spared the economy in the long run, and a lot of people wouldn’t be dead or have long Covid, with more to come.

Let NO ONE tell you that letting Covid run free as a plague was not a choice. It has more than doubled the wealth of billionaires, and so a choice was made: Their money was more important than your life or health, or that of your parents, grandparents, children, or friends.

People were killed so the rich could get richer. Every one of you who has Long Covid has it because that’s what the rich wanted, so they could get richer.

Had this been done properly, at the start, or even after a couple months, we also would most likely be finished with most Covid restrictions — except maybe a few travel bans to a few countries, so, ironically, clamping down hard would have made any civil liberties restrictions (the right to infect other people or force your workers to infect others) brief and not in danger of turning chronic, like Covid.

Your leaders kill you, disable you, and they do it to get richer.

Understand that at your core. They are your enemies, by any reasonable definition of enemy, with a few rare exceptions, like in Western Australia.

(Near the start of the plague I noted that if US states wanted to control Covid, those which did the right things (currently, so far as I know, none of them) would be required to close their borders to other US states. Western Australia shows the difference that makes.)

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Elevated from Comments: This comment, from GM, is important enough that I’ve partially quoted it here:

1. Over the last few days they have had one, then two, then five, then now seven local cases, and they are not in lockdown to stop it (while previously, they did lockdown for three days over even a single case). So there is a real danger that this is deliberately allowed to get out of hand and then McGowan says “Well, it is out of the bag now, we will reopen.” There have been mentions from the local government previously that if an outbreak gets out of control, they will reopen, and this would be following the script that played out already elsewhere (NSW, VIC, Vietnam, Singapore, etc.) that allows the government to both ease the population into endemic COVID and save face by putting a “Look, we tried our best, but there is nothing that can be done” facade over it.

2. There is a long-standing suspicion that the local oligarchs controlling the mining industry in Western Australia are the ones pushing for keeping COVID out. Not because of concern for the wellbeing of the general population, but because they want to keep it out of the mines. Of course, mines have been operating in the midst of devastating COVID outbreaks in Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, etc. But WA is a bit of a special case because of how remote from any significant population centers most of their mines are. So if you get all of your workers seriously sick at the same time, it will be a very problematic logistic operation to transport them from somewhere in Middleofnowhereville in Pillbara to Perth, which is the only location within a 1500 km radius that can treat them. And Perth’s hospitals are barely keeping up with their load even without COVID (due to many years of the usual neoliberal defund-and-crapify practices).

1) and 2) are mutually exclusive, unless there are, indeed, as is rumored, plans to impose intrastate borders in case Perth is lost, so that COVID does not spread to the mining regions.

China’s Economic Plans Amount to Preparation for Cold War

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On January 17, 2022

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From the Wall Street Journal:

The article itself is a bit foolish. China can’t, and knows it can’t, be entirely self-sufficient. But it can reduce its dependency, in particular on US and Western sources, and that’s what it has to do. Unlike with Venezuela and Iran, seizing Chinese freighters routinely is a no-go (and, if necessary, China can send military escorts). But US sanctions can bite, and hard, as they did with semiconductors, and the US showed its teeth under Trump and continues to growl under Biden.

What Americans don’t seem to understand is that China could easily retaliate: It is the sole source for a huge number of manufactured goods and is the world’s largest manufacturing power. So far it has chosen not to; it wants the status quo to limp on for as long as possible, but if the US decides to start a real trade war, it’s likely the US will be hurt badly. This isn’t the USSR vs. the US, where the US was the clear, superior industrial power. The US has the lead in a few areas, its allies in others (it’s Taiwan that makes semiconductors), but China is the lynchpin industrial economy.

Still, the Chinese have decided that the US is determined to have a cold war, and they are right, and they are preparing for it.

US propaganda has become particularly unhinged of late. My favorite being this from the NYTimes:

It seems more apt to describe the “herd immunity” policies followed in the West, especially since Omicron, as Holocaust-like, as official US death figures are 800K, and likely real figures are twice that and Covid isn’t close to over yet.

But “they are very strict at lockdowns and the work is exhausting but they’ve saved millions of lives” seems like an odd thing to criticize China for, but US elite lack of self-awareness continues to be the marvel of the world.

Western elites can’t admit basic facts. Covid could be controlled. They chose not to control it because letting it rip made them rich. Millions died as a result. They are responsible for more deaths than the Holocaust due to their refusal to handle the pandemic (and it will be many more by the end). The “evil, totalitarian Chinese Communist Party” are the ones who went all out to save lives, not the “good, wonderful, free democratic governments of the West.” (With, yes, a few minor exceptions.)

Western elites, through their actions and lack of actions, in effect, murdered millions of people. Covid could be controlled, China proves it, and so they hate China even more.

Hopefully they won’t let their hate reach such a peak they toss nukes around when the Cold War they are so determined to have goes hot.

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