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.)
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.
NR
The combination of greed at the top and stupidity at the bottom could very well spell the end of Western civilization at this rate. COVID is likely only the beginning.
GlassHammer
Ian you would of had to mobilize the U.S. military and occupy the 50 states to pull off a zero COVID (heavy lockdown plan) if you wanted even a modicum of success.
You couldn’t bribe people into complying (New Deal 2.0), it would require force.
And if that happened (assuming the military avoided fracturing) it would have sparked a wave of civil unrest.
The ugly truth is that the best COVID solution for United states is one just marginally better than what we got.
VietnamVet
This is a hard realization. The West has committed mass murder of its citizens so that the rich can get richer. For-profit vaccines are the sole US federal government tool to mitigate the virus along with mandates to increase the number of injections. Alternate treatments buried. Non-pharmaceutical interventions ignored. As a result, at least, nine new billionaires were created.
In contrast, the 1968 Hong Kong flu also had a case-fatality rate below 0.5%. The USA had an effective public health system, before privatization, back then. I don’t have any memories of that outbreak. But Australia will never forget 2021 when their federal government let coronavirus rip from practically none to try to match the USA’s 0.26%.
Way back, two years ago, I remember estimates of the number of predicted deaths in America ranged from a million to a million and a half. The US government had not significantly reduced this number. It is a failed state. Basically, everybody is on their own in the West.
different clue
The other thing that Western Australia proves so far is that a Western-Civilization-based society can suppress and contain covid if its leadership at every level is committed to suppressing covid instead of committed to spreading it ( and if the population shares that same commitment). The other requirement is that the self-contained Western jurisdiction under consideration have enough ready reserves of border-protective violence ready-to-apply that its neighboring covid-zombie enemy populations can’t muster the counter-violence reserves needed to breech that border.
If any American states had been comitted to a stop-covid policy, they would have needed the armed force to defeat covid zombie neighbor states and populations from deliberately breeching the border to deliberately spread covid. The only American states which “could” do that in the short term are Alaska and Hawaii, and possibly California if it was totally comitted to force America into a devastating Civil War as the price of invading California in order to spread Covid. I don’t think California would have been comitted enough to stopping covid to risk that.
Kfish
Queensland had similar numbers, until we opened up the border to New South Wales because we had to have the tourist dollars.
GM
I was very happy to see McGowan suspend the border reopening.
May their COVID-free situation long continue,
However, there are two wrinkles in it that need to be mentioned
1. Over the last few days they have had 1, then 2, then 5, then now 7 local cases, and they are not in lockdown to stop it (while previously they did lock down for 3 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 WA 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.
So I actually hope they are in scenario 2).
But it would nevertheless be a case of lives and health being saved not for the sake of saving lives and health but out of purely selfish economic reasons. Of course, there has never been any tradeoff between health and economy, and this confirms it, but the point is that it was never the question of the state of the overall economy that drove let-it-rip policies elsewhere, it was always the question of who is on top of the economy that did it, and in this case we have the same undesirable power structure, it’s just because of various special circumstances it might be driving a beneficial for all outcome in this particular situation.
BTW, mining is a direct link between China and WA — basically all of that iron ore goes to China and in turn 70-80% of China’s iron ore imports are from WA . So that’s a critical link of the world’s supply chain.
And there might be some pressure applied through that link too.
But whatever the reasoning is, we really need at least one beacon of hope outside China in the “West” that can show there is a viable alternative, so again, let’s all pray they clear the current outbreak and stay COVID-free
Ché Pasa
What’s nuts-making is that knowledge of how to control a viral outbreak like Covid is universal in the public health field. It’s not a mystery. Where the virus has been controlled, that knowledge has been applied. Where the virus has run rampant, that knowledge has been ignored or overridden by other more important considerations to our oligarchs.
If Western Australia has managed to keep cases low through all the machination of government and oligarchy, it’s likely not because of public health considerations so much as it is due to the desires and power of the oligarchs in charge there (as GM says) who see their own interests jeopardized by rampant disease.
Throughout the West, the attitude on high is “public health be damned” — unless it guarantees a profit to the overlords above and beyond their usual extractions.
Vaccines and treatments and such were developed initially as protections for the Overlord class. Even though a very few of them have been taken out by the disease (no doubt because of multiple co-morbidities) most are doing better than fine, richer and more powerful than ever, and utterly fearless in the face of the virus. Defiant, in fact.
Boris and Trump (oh and Bolsonaro), remember, were all deathly ill and survived as examples of how treatment alone in defiance of public health advice and protocols will protect Important People from death and ensure swift recovery. But the treatments aren’t available to most people (nor are vaccines on a global scale).
Apparently, as devastating as the disease can be, it’s not deadly enough to satisfy our rulers — who are themselves protected from ultimate harm. If they were subjected to the same risks and harms as the rest of us, they might change their minds. But they’re not.
Trinity
“Ian you would of had to mobilize the U.S. military and occupy the 50 states to pull off a zero COVID (heavy lockdown plan) if you wanted even a modicum of success.”
Glass, I agree in general, but not in the specifics, for all of the reasons that Che posted. People could have been paid to stay home early on while a prophylactic vaccine was being developed, with hazard pay given to essential workers and much, much safer work environments for them to work in. It’s even possible the economy would have eventually recovered.
The problem in the West is the narrative that has been spun that says poor people are lazy, etc., and need to pull themselves up without help. It’s a relatively “ancient” narrative, used to conveniently enrich the powerful so they can maintain their power through enslavement (nowadays it’s debt). The oligarchs cannot allow this narrative to change because history, and because they would be exposed. It would mean in the future poor people would demand the assistance (to which they have a natural right) to alleviate their poverty by simply citing this event. This would set a precedent the oligarchs cannot allow. They protect their future as well as their present.
But you are right in saying this was going to play out in the way that it did play out. Just as it will continue to play out as it is right now until their stranglehold eventually breaks.
The main difference we are observing in covid response is the difference between a collectivist society versus one focused on individualism (the self reliance narrative). The irony is that the western oligarchs act in a collectivist manner within their group. And they are allowed to do so.
GlassHammer
“The problem in the West is the narrative that has been spun that says poor people are lazy, etc., and need to pull themselves up without help. ” – Trinity
I would say the narrative carried by the working poor that government assistance is a loathsome and undesirable dependency akin to being a ward of the state is far more damaging to social programs than the bootstrap narrative. Many of the working poor would sooner lose the vast majority of their possessions before ever signing up for assistance.
Also, people forget that there a factions amongst the working poor and most of them look down at those on assistance programs. And it shouldn’t surprise anyone that this is the case, humans are status seeking creatures for the simple fact that it provides some degree of comfort to be above someone.
Lastly, any assistance program would probably have been watered down and means-tested into an utterly useless state before implementation. I mean just look how little was given out at the start of the pandemic when there was political momentum and public enthusiasm.
StewartM
As I await the results of yet another CoVID test (sick and the people downstairs have Covid).
Given the resistance from below (due to ‘freedumb!!!’) I doubt we could have implemented such a plan, payments or not. Not without that freedumb-robbing horrible coercion being used. The resistance to quarantines and masks and lockdowns and vaccines is at least equally the result of a bottom-up resistance as it is from top-down propaganda.
I see people here write that the corps want us to die. That’s not true, by my experience. Sure, they are delusional in that they want to keep underpaying employees and cutting their benefits and yet have lots of healthy young people begging for a job, any job, all who yet have plenty of income to buy their product(s), but insofar as I can see the corps *DO* want us to mask and get vaccinated and practice social distancing. Run a business that requires 24/7/365 staffing, and you realize pretty damn quickly if they all get wiped out by CoVID, your business is toast.
Why I think we have this problem is that the West (particularly the US, but elsewhere too) has embraced Ayn Rand’s unmitigated selfishness. There was a recent Politico article about consumers and re-posters of (obviously) “fake news” (obviously a lot of it Covid disinformation) and while it was largely conservative, it was a subset of conservatives who scored low on conscientiousness. Conservatives who have a “burn the whole fucking thing down” mentality. One would suspect that these are largely working-class whites and also small-business whites who have seen their economic futures gutted by Reaganism, people who hate “the system” even in a case where it’s trying to keep them alive, just for spite. (And of course, people who keep voting for even nastier forms of Reaganism, not that they perceive it will help them, but they want to hurt the people they hate, and they hate ‘the other’ more than they hate the elites screwing them).
In my years working for a large Fortune 500 corporation, I’ve seen this very same phenomenon play out again and again. Usually it involves someone who has done good work, but for some reason, accurately or not, they have ended up being underpaid and underpromoted. Then they get a supervisor who recognizes that they’re underpaid and underpromoted and deserve more, who argues on their behalf for them to higher-ups about them being rewarded more. Very often (prejudices running deep) this initial attempt fails, and the supervisor goes back to the employee proposing a ‘plan’ of sorts which is designed to address the rejection of the higher-ups.
When this happens, the long-sought-out reward is just around the corner (“Do X, and the next year you’ll get your reward”). But does this work? Usually not!! The aggrieved employee protests “Well, ‘A’ or ‘B’ or ‘C’ didn’t have to do ‘X’ to get promoted”–which is often a perfectly true and valid objection–and then folds his arms and does *nothing*. The employee will often turn on the supervisor who was *trying to help him/her*! They shoot themselves in the foot. I myself have gone to such people and told them “Yes, A/B/C didn’t have to do X, and you’re right it’s still unfair, but your supervisor IS TRYING TO GET YOU PROMOTED and just do X and you’ll be fine” but to no avail.
I would also add, in my experience–there is often a bit of ‘privilege’ at work here. I mean by ‘privilege’ in my Fortune 500 company still pays good wages and good benefits (as these things are measured in the US; and they’re not nearly as good as they once were). These employees generally have never had to work at a really crappy job; work with no status at near-minimum wage with no benefits of any kind, like I have. Often this was their very first job; they don’t know how bad a job in the US can be. I once told a straight-A student with a near-perfect SAT who asked me about a summer job to ‘be a janitor’ (I was once) just ‘because you’ll see how many people have to live, and the crap they have to put up with every day, and this experience will change you’. This student would also have found out that such people aren’t stupid; and in fact more than a few of them have college educations (I don’t think he took my advice lol).
So this is not a phenomenon of the truly downtrodden, but those in a better place, but in a place that’s deteriorating.
marku52
More proof that lockdowns –rather than “let her rip” –are the correct answer–the IMF scolds China for it’s lockdowns that inhibit growth.
I’m sure China is quaking in its boots. Another group of incompetent elites that are wrong about everything- If they are against controlling Covid, it certainly must be the right thing to do.
“The IMF chief also noted that arbitrary lockdowns have interrupted consumer spending”
This ought to be in the Onion….
ttps://www.republicworld.com/world-news/rest-of-the-world-news/imf-chief-warns-china-on-repercussions-of-lockdowns-asks-it-to-asses-zero-covid-policy-articleshow.html
Won’t someone think of the Economy?
different clue
@Trinity,
Do we need a catchy word for the “collectivism among themselves” practice by the oligarchs and the plutogarchs? Would a catchy word help normal people understand the OverClass-specific collectivism practiced by and for the OverClass and its essential minions, butlers and engine-room sub-kommandants?
I would suggest the word capitalectivism just in case anyone might find it useful.
If it is the mining plutogarchs in Western Australia who are driving the stop-covid policy for all of Western Australia for their own benefit, then Western Australia still benefits from the selfishness of the mining plutogarchs. If so, Western Australia should enjoy it even if it wasn’t really meant for them, and they should see if they can somehow prevent the mining plutogarchs from changing their mind in case they would want to.
Also, if the ChinaGov is blackmailing the W.A. plutogarchs into supporting a stop-covid policy for W. A., then this is some genuine good that the ChinaGov is doing in the world. And if that is what is happening, pray it keeps happening even while savoring the irony of the fact that it requires a foreign authoritarian regime to keep blackmailing a local plutogarchy into maintaining the public health of all its local human livestock.
In any case, most of the rest of the Western Leadership is committed to infecting everyone and keeping everyone re-infected over and over and over again. The West is under Social Class Enemy occupation, and the concept of “democracy” is derisory at any level above the hyper-local. So as Gandhi once said, ” we must all be the Western Australia we want to see in the world” . . . or something like that.
So those of us who have been infected less than the establishment wants, or not at all yet, will have to figure out how to stay uninfected in defiance of the Pro Covid Infection matrix force-field the OverClass keeps switched on all around us. I don’t think they care about any one of us by personal name and I D number. They just want to make sure that enough of us get sick and die over the next few decades to meet their basic goals. They don’t care which personal ones of us that is.
So perhaps we can find and share enough counter-covid anti-covid information on blog threads like this that we who read it and act on it can be among the Darwinners as against the Darlosers. And if we amount to a big enough serially additive mass of individdles, perhaps we can even raise the klektiv number of covid evaders overall.
And Ian Welsh has provided just few enough Covid posts and threads that any anti-covid evasion/escape/survival information brought to any one of those threads will be semi-easy to find until the establishment kill-switches the internet once and for all. Which could be any year now, so we are in a race against covid and time both.