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.
Joan
I wonder whether covid has resulted in higher numbers of homeschooling households. In my case that would have been a nightmare. School was a reprieve from home. But I’m glad homeschooling is at least legal, and in a lot of states it’s quite regulated.
capelin
In addition to Covid, there’s also something else new that damages a wide range of organs, including one’s immune system, the more times you get it, and causes heart attacks. Besides Fear and Poverty; anyway, that’s old.
bruce wilder
NC today linked to a study in preprint from Australia that pegged Long Covid to 20% of those contracting COVID-19 in a highly vaccinated population (90% + vaccinated)
I mention it because authorities in government and establishment media acted for a long time as if vaccines protected people from contracting the disease and from transmitting it. Bill Gates’ dream of vaccine passports was adopted for a time. People who objected to being vaccinated were persecuted because vaccination was so damn important to ending the pandemic. And it was all lies by incompetent, untrustworthy “authorities”
The liars were wrong. But they didn’t stop lying. That is an 11th tenet.
Nobody knows anything much for certain about COVID except that responsible authority is so intent on gaslighting and no good that they cannot be trusted.
Trust in political leadership is gone.
Troy
Honestly, we’re likely gonna blow past the inflection point where Long Covid begins to disembowel society this Fall. Things will just suddenly be bad all around perhaps by Winter. We’re gonna zombie-shamble into the LC mass-disabling event.
Well, it was never really an event. It was more of a cumulative year-by-year frog-in-boiling-pot sort of thing. Although to be fair to frogs, they’ll hop out of a pot that’s getting uncomfortably hot. After all, they don’t have the imagination to convince themselves that the increasing heat is no big deal.
But we got rid of the tools we were using to reduce Covid last time, and getting them all back into place will take weeks, if not months. And that’s even if the current leadership even has any interest in instituting Covid mitigations. I don’t think so. They’re well-cowed by special interests who just want to keep pretending Covid is no big deal.
anon y'mouse
the attrition rate is fine for the overclass.
they will just import more workers, and the founder of this website will claim that is ok because “we need workers” and “people are retiring (and living somewhat after they do so)” and “replacement/fertility rates” and now because “higher disability rates” (what ya wanna bet no large increase in SSI/SSDI rolls though because most people won’t be able to sufficiently prove they have a real disability with such a vague categor of symptoms that have already, since the start of the covid injured, been portrayed as a mental health problem or malingering. how do i know? i have similar vague but chronic and near disabling illness going undiagnosed for years although i keep seeing doctors and taking tests for it. good luck getting through the 2 year SSI gauntlet when your doctor won’t say what you have that causes you to be unable to get out of bed).
even Ian, as good as he is on most issues, can’t see the contradictions inherent in his stances sometimes.
i guess this will be put forward as a plus by the PMC because they can replace “deplorable” lower class americans who “just weren’t smart enough” or “just weren’t motivated enough” to get ahead with the ambitious, industrious Others.
they deserve to take our place after all. since we’re so stupid we eat fast food and don’t grind the Peloton, watch teevee and still think we’re entitled to labor rights to some extent (albeit small down here and putting up with a lot of bullshit and lawbreaking by our employers. i know. i have had employers abuse me verbally, psychologically, and also some who stole my paychecks and fucked with my hours because they could get away with it, and i had to endure it).
what’s that saying over on NC? “it’s all going according to plan!”
StewartM
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by the drop in youth suicides; but then again, maybe that’s why our educational betters kept harping on how vitally important it was to get youths away from adults into peer-only groupings. After all, all that abuse you take as a teenager from your peers and from superiors while in school prepares you for the abuse you’ll get in your working life, no?
bruce wilder
unintentional accident or injury rates?
KT Chong
Nasal cleansing or sinus rinsing — i.e., “jala neti” — is a traditional ayurvedic routine of using a neti pot and saline solution — salt water — to clean the inside of your nose. (Use medical-grade salts, not regular salts.) Supposedly it helps with reducing risks of getting COVID.
I have been doing jala neti for over two decades because I had seasonal allergic reactions to outside air pollution. Twice a year during seasonal changes, I had flu-like symptoms for weeks that could last two months. Since I started regularly (once or twice a day) cleaning my nose two decades ago, I have not had an allergic outbreak.
Here are video explanations and demonstrations of jala neti:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpPAfbPjjc0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brjtPuOi4V0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXUyqna4QZA
As I wrote earlier, supposedly jala neti could reduce the risks of COVID:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYKyeCHKEw4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBYZXbMJuAc
https://jagwire.augusta.edu/twice-daily-nasal-irrigation-reduces-covid-related-illness-death/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2022/10/03/saline-nasal-irrigation-after-covid-19-diagnosis-reduces-hospitalization/
https://www.uclahealth.org/news/nasal-irrigation-may-help-wont-hurt-with-covid-19
When I started rinsing my sinuses, it felt very uncomfortable to pump saline water into my nose at first. Nowadays, it feels relaxing and soothing, and I am somewhat addicted to to the feeling.
I regularly order “Himalayan Institute Neti Wash Neti Pot Salt, 12 oz” or “Nasal Cleansing Salts, 8 Ounce” (the brand is Ancient Secrets) from Amazon , depending which one is cheaper (per oz) at the time of order. In addition, I mix the salt with of a solution called “Alkalol Nasal Wash”.
The first time I used Alkalol, the solution felt like it was burning the inside of my nose, but now it actually felt cooling and soothing. (I know that sounds weird, but that’s really how it has felt over time.) So, if you starting using Alkalol, start with just a few drops, and mix it with the salt water solution to reduce the burning sensation. After using it for awhile, you will get used to the feeling, and then Alkalol will give the inside of your nose a cooling sensation when you use it.
StewartM
anon’ymouse
“we need workers”
Because actually, factually, we do. US businesses are running chronically understaffed.
I dropped by a sandwich shop just the other day, and found just ONE worker present. She told me (flustered) that she had been pulling 70 hours plus a week the past week or so and she was on the verge of quitting.
I also had a bicycle put in a bike shop for repair, and ended up having to replace the entire drivetrain because the shop couldn’t get parts for a single compatible shifter. That made a repair that would have been < $100 in a few days to almost $600 and taking two months.
People who say that we can solve the worker pay problem and STILL leave the capitalist class in-charge are kidding themselves, and everyone else. We can import workers and pay them well, and pay our native-born workers well too. You have to take management of business firms away from Wall Street to force the investor class to eat the losses (as they should)*.
*- Of course since we've foolishly built our own retirement system on 'the magic of the [stock] market", doing much of what is needed will crash the stock market. That means along with this, we'd also have to double SS payouts so that the non-rich elderly will be correspondingly compensated. But that too is rather easily done.
What will happen if we try to use labor shortages to drive up wages, but leave the capitalist overlord class still in-charge, then our "retirements" will consist of us in our 80s and 90s hobbling up to some table to ask someone 'do you want fries with that?' Because the 'solution' that will be touted by our overlords will be that "there is no retirement". That is the logical, predictable, end game of the 'don't import workers' scenario. Does that sound worker-friendly to you, or anyone else?
Willy
Whenever I was all down about all the goings on I used to ask myself “What would Brian Boytano do?”
When came to realized that this was nonsense, I’d wonder “what would Finland do?” Seems a well-run place. But then I became a compulsive comparator of stats, trying to divine some theory or possibly conspiracy which I could discuss.
I noticed that both the covid incidence and death rates in Canada are around a third that seen in the USA. That’s a big difference between nations seen by everybody else as being “kinda the same”. So far, I have no theories or conspiracies.
Troy
Re: anon y’mouse
“they will just import more workers”.
Western nations are competing against each other for a dwindling resource. They aren’t going to new immigrant worker their way out of this.
Creigh Gordon
There are children who need school to get decent nutrition, too.
Purple Library Guy
@bruce wilder, either you didn’t describe very clearly what that study was about, or it doesn’t imply what you think it implies. There is no relationship between, on one hand, what percent of people who contract Covid get long Covid and, on the other hand, what percentage of the population is vaccinated, or with what percentage of vaccinated people contract either Covid or long Covid.
Like, what you SAID the article said could mean that 10 people got Covid, 2 of those people (20%) got long Covid, and none of them were from the vaccinated population.
Carborundum
The Australian study reports fatigue and difficulty concentrating as the most common symptoms, with a 51% response rate and a 90 day reporting threshold. How many folks without a Covid diagnosis in the modern industrial world would report similar indicators over the same defined period given some other random posited causal vector? Forced, I’d lay five figure money I could get statistically identical numbers from an instrument specifying any number of more benign environmental factors assuming similar response rates. The technical term for point estimates like this is “soft”. A more hard-assed practitioner tired of watching people fail to shape public opinion in ways that might actually serve their interests (wearily waves hand) would term it “mostly bullshit”.
The annoying thing is that if we have even 1 – 2 percent of the population with a significant constellation of symptoms over the long term (which seems to me to be quite plausible) that’s going to be a massive issue. Lofting softballs like the above study and headline numbers so self-organizing bobbleheads can discredit them and throw the baby out with the bath water is exactly how one gets serially owned by malevolent idiots.
capelin
@ “Purple Library Guy
@bruce wilder, either you didn’t describe very clearly what that study was about, or it doesn’t imply what you think it implies.
There is no relationship between, on one hand, what percent of people who contract Covid get long Covid and, on the other hand, what percentage of the population is vaccinated, or with what percentage of vaccinated people contract either Covid or long Covid.”
So, the injections do what, exactly?
“Like, what you SAID the article said could mean that 10 people got Covid, 2 of those people (20%) got long Covid, and none of them were from the vaccinated population.”
Yes, the article *could* mean what you suggest. No sense investigating the elephant, everyone knows he’s innocent, and we’ve got science to do.
That’s what really stands out to me; surely a novel intervention (2yrs since roll-out) by dubious players, affecting a super-complicated and important body-system (the immune), with lots of red flags, would be high-priority subject of ongoing scrutiny and critical re-evaluation by _everyone involved.
bruce wilder
@bruce wilder, . . . you didn’t describe very clearly what that study was about
No, I didn’t. I didn’t intend to.
My jumping off point was that the study claimed they were working with a highly vaccinated population. I was making an observation about politics, and not making any claim supported or unsupported by that study.
anon y'mouse
there is never a shortage of desperate exploitable people worldwide, and if the Climateocalypse happens as has been foretold, there will never be a shortage of desperate, exploitable people to replace the unworthy lower classes who are sick and damaged, either.
and you folks who can’t get a sandwich and are alarmed that there “aren’t enough employees” have to know that scam by employers is as old as time. they don’t WANT to have to hire another body and will delay it by any means they can, forcing their current desperate employees into an almost “well, at least i’m needed” mindset. this while they do not offer suitable job conditions (hours, pay, benefits, commute necessary to afford housing, etc) and roundfile almost all applicants digitally rather than having an employee like me do it (the olde days you had to hire someone to open envelopes and fend off phone calls for open positions you had little intention of filling, while telling your straining employees about what a struggle it is to hire anyone).
i also don’t buy that the Oldsters need the SSI ponzi to continue. the FedGov can just fess up to the scam that even FDR admitted privately (the FICA is unnecessary to “fund”) and just start giving it to every citizen of a certain age, without further “eligibility” and means testing and fake schedules and scales of benefits to pretend that people are “getting out what they put in for themselves”.
as soon as they can get a cheaper (from lifetime cost perspective) roomba that can grab a half-gallon of milk off the shelf consistently (and put it back), these lower crappy jobs won’t be needed. but because humans are so cheap, and the robotics still aren’t that fine tuned, they need poors like myself down here schlepping for nearly nothing (certainly not for enough to pay rent AND all of the other costs of living) while you complain about not getting a sandwich fast enough.
capelin
@ Creigh Gordon
“There are children who need school to get decent nutrition, too.”
For sure. And kids with special needs, etc.
Wealth gap accelerator; is the kid getting a tutor, or home alone with tictok? Does someone have to quite work to be home now?
All this disruption has knocked early childhood development back, and some of that is very age-dependent. Sarah Beth Burwick on twitter has a lot to say about this.
Carborundum
As indicated by my first positive test of the pandemic, COVID is very definitely not over. Just FYI, I would recommend the Paxlovid. Has cut the severity of the symptoms (and presumably any negative outcomes) significantly.
StewartM
Anony’ouse
and you folks who can’t get a sandwich and are alarmed that there “aren’t enough employees” have to know that scam by employers is as old as time. they don’t WANT to have to hire another body and will delay it by any means they can
You just admitted my point. Worker shortages don’t raise pay as long as your keep the “useless eater” capitalist class in-charge, as ‘shareholder value’ trumps not only employee well-being and pay but also actually making products/delivering services and customer experience.
Worker shortages are not new. They’re not just post-covid. There were pre-Covid too. Almost every business firm I saw well before Covid was running understaffed, insofar as actually the ability to ‘do their job’ in inventing, designing, producing, and servicing real products and services. They have been doing it increasingly since Reagan. This is the result of the “shareholder value’ meme that judges business success not by product or service, but merely by stock price.
Moreover, the CEOs of most firms see it too. However, like the good capitalist lemmings they are when it’s time to cook the books to make the stock price tick up, they all go running off the cliff together, to the detriment of the businesses they were supposed to be the caretakers of. This is also why US businesses are becoming increasingly less and less competent in actually doing real things, as that ability counts for less than keeping the stock price up. It’s also in the interests of the CEOs, who get rewarded for doing that personally (stock options) and also could face a shareholder revolt if any bravely try to buck the system.
i also don’t buy that the Oldsters need the SSI ponzi to continue. the FedGov can just fess up to the scam that even FDR admitted privately (the FICA is unnecessary to “fund”) and just start giving it to every citizen of a certain age, without further “eligibility” and means testing and fake schedules and scales of benefits to pretend that people are “getting out what they put in for themselves”.
How is wealth created Anony’mouse? Is it just poofed in from the thin air by decree either by the markets or by governments? If so, poverty would be an easy thing to fix.
No, I believe wealth is created by actual WORK. More WORK, more WEALTH. It’s definitely not created by MBAs sitting on their butts all day trading stocks and doing paper manipulations. If you want wealth, you need WORKERS. And with the increasing age and disability of the native population, the easiest way to get those workers is to import them. We can pay them, plus the natives, much higher than we currently do–just as indeed, we paid better and better wages and benefits during the rapid population increase from the Baby Boom, which also included women entering the workforce as well. By your perspective the Baby Boom and women entering the workforce should have driven wages down, but they didn’t.
Lacking that, the only way to create wealth would be to force our seniors to work until they drop (dead). Which is why I created the “do you want fries with that?” image of the future, a future we are likely to get if we don’t import workers. Japan in many ways is a more progressive society economically speaking than the US, but the Japanese (due to their xenophobia) are driving up the retirement age.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/08/japan-working-age-labour-shortage/
Again, that doesn’t sound very appealing to anyone who claims to be ‘pro-worker’. Yet it’s trivial to fix if we import workers while ditching the “useless eater” capitalist class from their position of firm leadership.
capelin
@StewartM
i also don’t buy that the Oldsters need the SSI ponzi to continue. the FedGov can just fess up to the scam that even FDR admitted privately (the FICA is unnecessary to “fund”) and just start giving it to every citizen of a certain age, without further “eligibility” and means testing and fake schedules and scales of benefits to pretend that people are “getting out what they put in for themselves”.
How is wealth created Anony’mouse? Is it just poofed in from the thin air by decree either by the markets or by governments? If so, poverty would be an easy thing to fix.
No, I believe wealth is created by actual WORK. More WORK, more WEALTH.
–
Wealth seems to be poofed from thin air pretty easy when it’ suits them.
Ian Welsh
FDR made people play because he believed that if people contributed it would be much harder, politically, to end SS.