In a few years, we’re going to read a lot of op-eds and articles about how it was a mistake and “no one could have known.”
Like with the Iraq War, the housing bubble, Afghanistan, climate change, and everything else of importance, there are always people who got it right, and those people are generally the people who got other things right that those in the bubble don’t.
When you’re in the bubble, which includes the media, the most important thing is to not leave the pack. If you get something wrong, but almost everyone inside is wrong, you’re good. If you get it right, against the pack, your career can end and if it doesn’t it will be set back. (This is what happened to most public figures who warned about Iraq.)
Omicron is going to produce a huge wave of disabling, and a slew of downstream deaths. Children will get chronic damage from it which will last for years and, in some cases, for their entire lives. So will adults.
In Ontario, where I live, the government has decided to reopen schools this coming Monday, and said that it won’t tell parents about any Covid cases until 30 percent of students and teachers are out with Covid. (As most Covid cases are asymptomatic, this could mean as much as a 75 percent prevalence rate.) Wouldn’t want parents to protect their children from risks.
I’m really tempted to call this genocide. It’s certainly mass murder and mass-disabling. A lot of parents are complicit. Ontario originally closed schools, and I’d lay long odds that a blizzard of calls is part of why they’re reopening, also calls from business-owners and executives. School is mostly daycare, and if you don’t do a real shutdown with support, people need their daycare. (Though as a 70s kid, I’ll say that children can care for themselves during the day better than you think, younger than you think. Any reasonable ten year old, and many eight year olds.)
Anyway, we’re in the stupid season, just like before and during the first few months of Iraq, when fools opine about how it’s going great, kids will be fine, etc. As usual, we’ll have to wait for the damage to be done for the fools and psychopaths to admit that maybe some of them were wrong, but jeez, it was in good faith, and no one could have known, and since we were all wrong there shouldn’t be any consequences.
For the rest of my life, I will support bringing back the death penalty for any politicians and bureaucrats who supported sending children back to school during the Omicron surge. Hang them from the neck, every one — and throw in the business-people who forced workers with Covid to come in to work as well.
Meanwhile, New York has decided not to prosecute ex-Governor Cuomo for deliberately sending Covid-infected people to old-folks homes, thus killing huge numbers of old people, and then lying about them.
In this type of situation, you don’t take chances. You don’t expose the entire population including children to the new strain, waving your hands about how “mild” it is.
But this is barely “taking a chance,” this is odds-on a catastrophe unfolding as we watch, and those who do it either know it or should know it.