I don’t consider this hyperbole:
Ontario's top doctor says people who test positive for COVID-19 no longer have to isolate for five days but should stay home until their fever clears and their symptoms have improved for at least 24 hours. https://t.co/QntmqPjHcb
— Toronto Star (@TorontoStar) August 31, 2022
Remember that ever since school openings, school infection rates have spiked before general community rates. Schools, as anyone who is a parent or was a child should know, are cesspools of infection even in good times. Kids get sick, pass it along, their families then get sick and in turn pass it along to co-workers and so on.
And letting people who are still infectious go to work is obviously insane. Note that 10 days was the original guideline, then it was dropped to 5, which was absolutely not enough. As for masks, they only partially protect other people, unless you have a respirator or properly fitted n95 and never take it off for the duration of the school or work day. If you’re with other people for hours in a surgical or cloth mask, forget it, you’re exposing them and almost no one wears a properly fitted N95 mask and also never takes it off or breaks the seal.
BA.5 is arguably the most infectious disease we know about, beating measles. It’s certainly in the top 5. If it doesn’t kill someone, it has a good chance of doing permanent damage, and that damage can add up to Long Covid, and be disabling. Every time you get Covid, more damage can be done, until symptoms appear that don’t go away after the infection. People who have had Covid are at more risk for heart disease, diabetes and brain conditions.
Researchers also found that rates of many conditions, such as heart failure and stroke, were substantially higher in people who had recovered from Covid than in similar people who had not been infected https://t.co/1fpWg5BCZr pic.twitter.com/mOIFG3rMY0
— Financial Times (@FinancialTimes) August 31, 2022
Now, some data from the US on Covid:
- Around 16 million working-age Americans (those aged 18 to 65) have long Covid today.
- Of those, 2 to 4 million are out of work due to long Covid.
- The annual cost of those lost wages alone is around $170 billion a year (and potentially as high as $230 billion).
The pandemic isn’t over. Covid keeps mutating into more infectious forms. Our society cannot survive this going on for years and years. Lost wages is the least of it, the economic impact and human cost go far beyond that.
different clue
If there is enough democracy left that a Long Term Survival Party would be permitted to organize enough to win seats and then power, a Long Term Survival Party might be a vehicle for addressing this Rush to Jackpot.
” Call off the Jackpot!” That means ” do ‘this’ and do ‘that'” and then explain what ‘this’ and ‘that’ is. And explain what Jackpot is.
Maybe just use a word ordinary people already know instead. Maybe ” Call off the Cull!” And explain that this is a cull, a deliberate cull on purpose arranged against us by the Overclass, and maybe an “anticull” party can Stop The Cull if it gets enough power to do so.
Or maybe Trevor the Sheep’s middle name is Cassandra. If so, then this is a tragedy we will all live through or die of along the way.
Troy
I’ve got a hunch the US is likely strong-arming a great many Western nations and client states into following American-style Covid-19 guidelines, which are hardly guidelines at all. In this case though, it’s just the Ford government doing as the Ford government does.
Regardless, I’ve been musing lately it’s not about the economy. If it were, then the US government would’ve done something about the virus. No, I muse it is about imperial motives. They—the US elite—likely believe stopping the economy stops their efforts against China and Russia. Never mind the death and carnage because to them it is stopping Russia and China that are important. Problem is, they’ll probably run out of bodies before then. Here and abroad, much as what happened to the Allied nations about the time of the end of the first World War. There were just no more soldiers to send out to the battlefields.
I spoke once before of the possibility of a “swiss-cheesing” effect on society. Where’s there’s gaps in the workforce even in critically important areas which cannot be refilled due to lack of training/experience. I imagine we’re near/at/passed the inflection point of how many people a society can lose before things just start breaking down indefinitely.
Astrid
I can only hope that we reached “peak stupidity” and it’s not going to get worse.
different clue
@Troy,
You have a more cheery view than I have. If it is just good old imperialism, then the deaths and disease are just “regrettable collateral damage” which in their own minds the imperators will stop when the imperial objective is achieved.
I don’t believe that myself. I believe the slow-rolling killoff is the entire point of the excercise and is the whole goal in itself.
Joan
I have been wondering whether a lot of the labor shortages are from people who don’t feel well and have condensed down from a double to a single income household. They may not show up in a statistic if they don’t qualify for disability. But the rich in the US are big fans of cheap undocumented labor, so filling the holes that way might paper things over and hide what is really going on.
different clue
@Joan,
If the elites shove the undocumented into covidanger zones, enough will get covid that word will spread back to source countries. If/when the common wisdom in the source countries becomes that ” to go to America is to get covid, get sick and die; or to get covid and live the living death which is Long Covid” . . . then undocumented work-seekers will stop coming. And the elite will have deprived themselves of that escape route for all the covid labor shortage they have engineered among their own captive-citizen workforces.
capelin
It is about the economy, and the pillaging thereof. It’s certainly not about Health Care, that should be obvious by now.
One only needs look at what has actually happened in the last coupla years: why, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer, faster. Community is tore apart, more little people (“useless eaters”) die from C19 (likely lab-enhanced), bungled/sometimes/on/purpose health care, and lockdowns; power concentrates upwards, yada yada.
2007, again, on steroids. A big, big play. All the people making the decisions are in the bracket that is benefiting from our current situation…
This article https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/a-self-fulfilling-prophecy-systemic-collapse-and-pandemic-simulation/ lays out this history, including the lockdowns and general chaos as a way of dampening inflation, and ensuring that the newly-printed billions stayed in elite pockets. I’ve not seen anyone else run with this analysis, but I’ve also not come across anything that challenges it. Ian?
There’s also a telling video of Karry Mullis (rip), inventor of the PCR test, saying “It should not be used as a diagnostic tool”. and “It can be used to see anything and nothing”. Which isn’t to say C19 isn’t a thing, or an issue; it’s to say that the data we are working with in regards to the pandemic is flawed, skewed, biased, incomplete, and suppressed, at every level. On porpoise.
Trinity
@DC
They would definitely do that (extract as much work as they possibly can without regard for worker health). When the original source dries up, they will merely look for another source to exploit. It’s what they do. And it’s easy to find new sources when so many countries are experiencing austerity (they create their own sources). And if all sources did dry up, they’ll go to the government for a bail out, and a change to policies that will provide new sources, and it all starts over again.
As Ian has mentioned, and in terms of complexity, this is the main problem. They now also control the means to eliminate such feedback mechanisms as you describe that would normally deter them from their destructive path. For them, there is no rule of law, another deterrent meant to prevent such things but one that they also now control. They control so much now that they benefit from both good things and bad. Who knows what it’s going to take to finally stop them.
different clue
@Trinity,
If the entire world lower class of every country all had a planet wide “Pearl Harbor Moment” of enlightenment, and all 7 billion lower class majority people all ran amok all at once, and overwhelmed all the layers of armed security protecting the world upper class from the world lower class . . . . and if such a world lower class run amok were to round up and mass slaughter every single member of the world upper class, and bury the millions of bodies in very large pits and trenches, and cover them over with bulldozer dirt, that would stop them.
Short of that, the only thing that would stop them is when they finally run out of things and people to kill and eat. They they will divide themselves up into the Lower UpperClass and the Upper UpperClass and the Upper UpperClass would kill and eat every member of the Lower UpperClass. And the Lower UpperClass would accept that because they believe in the Game of Upper Class Thrones.
Given that reality, our mission, should we decide to accept it, is to figure out how to make ourselves passively-deffensively inedible and unkillable in the meantime. Some few lower class persons may accomplish that survival mission here and there.
drumlin woodchuckles
Though now that I think about it, in China the lower class doesn’t yet have reason to run amok, because in China “people” are still “wealth”, and the One Party ChinaGov elites do not live by eating and killing the Chinese lower class majority people.
So the Chinese are not in a kill-or-die binary choice relationship with their elite.