I recently had a long conversation with a fellow Canadian about current events, especially Covid and the economy. He read a lot of newspapers: he’s well informed by normal standards.
But over the course of the conversation I realized he was terribly informed.
For Covid, he was convinced both that China had only controlled Covid thru very long lockdowns and that they were lying about results. In particular, he remembered Shanghai well, but didn’t realize Shanghai was an exception. Most Chinese cities have locked down much less over the course of Covid than we have.
When I mentioned that other countries had much lower rates than us, he dismissed that as well. He thought travel bans and quarantines were completely pointless, when they have worked very well for those countries which implemented them. Western Australia’s travel ban kept Covid low there for ages, and New Zealand had a wave almost immediately after as they released restrictions.
He believed that not doing zero-Covid style policies was better for the economy and that China’s economy was in free fall. It has issues, to be sure, but it also has a 2% inflation rate, among other advantages.
He was convinced governments could not just find money to support people in lockdowns, believing money comes from taxes (it doesn’t, most money is created of thin air, this is something the MMT people are right about.)
He believed that vaccines are the most effective anti-Covid measure. They aren’t: China has worse vaccines than us and much better performance, and Covid variants have optimized for vaccine and natural immunity evasion. BA.5 in particular laughs at immunity, whether natural or vaccine.
In general he felt that the economy must be prioritized, and that is done best by keeping it open at all times. There was no acknowledgment of long Covid as a factor, or of the fact that each infection increases the odds of long term health damage to victims.
There was a sense of hopelessness about Covid being international, and that it would just keep going forever as a result, without knowledge of us restricting vaccines for much of the world, not doing travel bans or quarantine properly and not supporting other countries to do the right things (not that we are ourselves.)
He wouldn’t acknowledge that if shutdowns are to be done, they should be done at the point where numbers start going into exponential growth, even though there aren’t a lot of cases then, instead of waiting for hospital ICUs to be overwhelmed, and that by doing so we’d actually have shorter lockdowns and a lot less deaths and disabled and sick people.
This isn’t a badly read guy; he knew about the things the media has covered at length.
And this is the problem with propaganda; it creates a world view among its victims that is simply incorrect, and if you don’t actually know what’s going on you can’t make good decisions or support good decision at the political level.
What I see is that the West, in most cases, is creating circumstances where 15-20%, or more, of our population will wind up disabled in some way. Repeated Covid infections are going to gut us: our society cannot run with that many people with long term health damage.
But the media’s coverage has been of the “what we’re doing is the best way and everyone else is doing it badly.” It’s not that there aren’t exceptions, but that’s the general tone and message, along with a huge push for vaccines at the cost of other measures like masking, quarantines, travel bans, and proper indoor ventilation which actually, in some combination, work better.
One could call this “learned helplessness.” My conversation partner was convinced that everything reasonable had been tried, that zero-Covid policies hadn’t worked where tried and that doing them was tyrannical, bad for the economy and worse than what we had done.
Nothing could be done, so Covid would remain chronic, with wave after wave.
In a sense he’s right, except that so far we have refused to do what works, so Covid will keep going.