Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Covid–19 Page 5 of 21

Omicron “Couldn’t Be Controlled”

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On February 3, 2022

20 Comments

All right, after this I’m going to write about Covid less, because “all Covid, all the time” makes Ian bored and Ian’s blog boring. But once more for the road:

If your country didn’t control Omicron (or any other variant), it is because your country’s leaders chose not to control Omicron. It is entirely do-able, and any competent leadership class that isn’t in a failed state can do it.

I hear the comments about the US as a failed state already, but… are all of these countries failed states by any useful definition of failed state?

In a sense, they are. They are states which can no longer govern: They are ruled by oligarchies on looting expeditions, and they have almost all completely gutted actual government capacity.

China isn’t on that chart, but I’ve followed its pandemic response more closely than Japan’s, and it is enabled by the fact that China has a lot of local government capacity. When they do lockdowns, for example, they can go door to door to every door with food and water. They can track and trace. They can put up a new field hospital in days. They haven’t outsourced their entire government to expensive and incompetent private enterprise.

Another country which has done atrociously (far worse than the official stats) is Russia.

Russia’s population declined by more than one million people in 2021, the statistics agency Rosstat reported Friday, a historic drop not seen since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Ongoing demographic woes have been exacerbated by the pandemic, with Rosstat figures showing that more than 660,000 had died with coronavirus since health officials recorded the first case in the country.

The new figures continue a downward trend from the previous year when Russia’s population fell by more than half a million.

The Covid-related fatalities figures published monthly by Rosstat are far higher than death figures released by a separate government web site, which is dedicated to tracking the pandemic in the country.

Those government web site figures only take into account fatalities where the virus was established as the primary cause of death after an autopsy and shows just 329,443 total fatalities.

[Ian – I’m sure India has even worse numbers per capita, though we may never know.]

This is complete government failure and puts the lie to the idea that Putin is fundamentally able to run domestic politics well. Russia NEEDS citizens. The government has been screaming at its population to breed for decades. It is not in Russia’s interest, nor its rulers interests, to lose citizens like this, and — more importantly — it isn’t in the ruling class’s perceived interests to have this many people die. (Then there are the affects of Long Covid, which Russia also cannot afford.)

Even if one says “herd culling,” and assumes a psychopathic government which wants people with co-morbidities dead, because of Long Covid, the long-term cost will be higher than the long-term benefits, as Covid produces health problems faster than it kills people with them.

At the end of the day, Russia lacks government capacity and will. It has never recovered from the collapse of the USSR, and it is still corrupt in the bad way. Good corruption gets things done, bad corruption makes it hard to do things. Russia has the second kind and China has the first, as did the US in the late 1900s. (The US now has bad corruption, not good, but it often isn’t recognized since it’s almost all legal and isn’t about petty bribes by citizens to low-level bureaucrats.)

Bottom line is that Covid has been a test of leaders, governments, and populations. It has revealed which countries or regions are still capable of operating. Some do so because of social consensus, some because leaders recognize that allowing Covid to run free is against their interests (Western Australia) and some because they somehow have leaders who aren ‘t psychopaths (New Zealand).

Covid can be controlled, even Omicron can be controlled. We know this because some countries have controlled it, and by controlled we don’t mean “half the US deaths per capita” we mean “actually had almost no deaths and not very many cases.”

We also could have, at least theoretically, done this worldwide, if the leadership of the major countries wanted it controlled and gave it the necessary aid.

So the pandemic is a choice, and about 99 percent of the deaths and suffering are the results of choices.

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The Most Contagious Virus in History Just Became 50% More Contagious

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On January 31, 2022

27 Comments

Omicron BA.1 was the most infectious disease in known history.

Omicron BA.2?

Yeehah!

Add to this the fact that Covid in general, and Omicron in particular, is a disease which creates very little immunity from getting it, and what immunity you have fades fast.

It is not possible for us to just declare victory on Covid, and go back to work and school, because Covid keeps mutating. If we don’t get lucky, and a dominant version doesn’t evolve that is all of much less virulent and doesn’t cause Long Covid, we’re just setting ourselves up for wave after wave, and vast numbers of people getting long-term damage or being crippled by this thing.

Nor, clearly, can vaccines alone work, especially because we refuse to vaccinate everyone in the world. Basic pandemic control measures (known colloquially as “Zero Covid”) are necessary.

The most infectious disease in history, if it can reinfect over and over again, and cause permanent damage to many people who get it, doesn’t have to be “Black Plague” level deadly to wreck our societies. If this goes on for a few more years, which it might, it could cause collapse — because, children, there is a real economy, and just raising and lowering interest rates and giving free money to the rich, which is the only type of “economic” policy most of the West seems to know how to do any more, won’t fix the holes that wave after wave, and mass disablities, will blow in the real world economy of growing, making, and distributing things.

We may get lucky, yes, but we are now betting on luck.

People who bet what they can’t afford to lose, in my experience, tend to lose more often than the odds suggest.

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Western Australia Proves Basic Pandemic Control Methods Would Have Stopped Covid

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On January 21, 2022

12 Comments

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.)

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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.

China’s Economic Plans Amount to Preparation for Cold War

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On January 17, 2022

31 Comments

From the Wall Street Journal:

The article itself is a bit foolish. China can’t, and knows it can’t, be entirely self-sufficient. But it can reduce its dependency, in particular on US and Western sources, and that’s what it has to do. Unlike with Venezuela and Iran, seizing Chinese freighters routinely is a no-go (and, if necessary, China can send military escorts). But US sanctions can bite, and hard, as they did with semiconductors, and the US showed its teeth under Trump and continues to growl under Biden.

What Americans don’t seem to understand is that China could easily retaliate: It is the sole source for a huge number of manufactured goods and is the world’s largest manufacturing power. So far it has chosen not to; it wants the status quo to limp on for as long as possible, but if the US decides to start a real trade war, it’s likely the US will be hurt badly. This isn’t the USSR vs. the US, where the US was the clear, superior industrial power. The US has the lead in a few areas, its allies in others (it’s Taiwan that makes semiconductors), but China is the lynchpin industrial economy.

Still, the Chinese have decided that the US is determined to have a cold war, and they are right, and they are preparing for it.

US propaganda has become particularly unhinged of late. My favorite being this from the NYTimes:

It seems more apt to describe the “herd immunity” policies followed in the West, especially since Omicron, as Holocaust-like, as official US death figures are 800K, and likely real figures are twice that and Covid isn’t close to over yet.

But “they are very strict at lockdowns and the work is exhausting but they’ve saved millions of lives” seems like an odd thing to criticize China for, but US elite lack of self-awareness continues to be the marvel of the world.

Western elites can’t admit basic facts. Covid could be controlled. They chose not to control it because letting it rip made them rich. Millions died as a result. They are responsible for more deaths than the Holocaust due to their refusal to handle the pandemic (and it will be many more by the end). The “evil, totalitarian Chinese Communist Party” are the ones who went all out to save lives, not the “good, wonderful, free democratic governments of the West.” (With, yes, a few minor exceptions.)

Western elites, through their actions and lack of actions, in effect, murdered millions of people. Covid could be controlled, China proves it, and so they hate China even more.

Hopefully they won’t let their hate reach such a peak they toss nukes around when the Cold War they are so determined to have goes hot.

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Calling My Shot on Letting Omicron Rip

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On January 13, 2022

29 Comments

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.

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Mass Democratic Legitimacy Loss from Mass Disabling

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On January 11, 2022

28 Comments

The figures I have seen for Long Covid start at about 10 percent. You can have Long Covid without knowing it; there can be organ damage, including brain damage, without you having symptoms, but that damage will effect your future health and lifespan. Ironically, it may create a co-morbidity if you get Covid again and you’ll be considered part of a vulnerable population.

For some, it is very severe. One acquaintance had enough brain damage to cause aphasia, and needs speech therapy. Others go from fit to out-of-breath walking down the street.

As the policy in most Western nations is “Everyone will get it, let’s just make sure it doesn’t swamp the hospitals,” let’s run some numbers. Assume everyone is 80 percent. The US population is 329 million, so 263 million people will get Covid. Of those, assume 10 percent (and I’ve seen double that number, but we’re going with conservative estimates), about 33 million people, will get Long Covid.

In the EU, numbers run to about 36 million. Worldwide, excluding China and Japan (who seem to be handling Omicron), there are about 5.9 billion people (with some generous rounding against Long Covid). 80 percent of that is 3.9, so you’re talking 390 million people with Long Covid.

These are VERY conservative numbers. Long Covid estimates go as high as 20 percent that I’ve seen, and there is the issue of re-infection. If you get Covid multiple times, do you have multiple chances to get Long Covid? Bear in mind that there will be new variants as well, so immunity will not carry forward that well.

So it wouldn’t be hard for those headline numbers to double: 780 million worldwide, 72 million in the EU, and 66 million in the US.

These are—staggering numbers, and their affect on our societies cannot be underestimated. The deaths are terrible, but the bad health and disabling of many (and remember, that organ damage will lead to disabling later in people who seem fine now) will require us to restructure large chunks of our society to support those who are injured. Many people will not be able to work, or their working lives will be reduced in length and intensity.

What’s worse about this is that, while people die only once, they can remain sick and disabled for decades. So unlike the Spanish Flu, say, Covid will be with us in ways we can’t ignore — every time someone looks at a friend or loved one who is sick because of it. No matter what people “feel” now, years to decades of watching the consequences will sour them.

Letting Covid run wild through the world was a choice. We made it. A few societies didn’t.

Ironically (or not?), the Chinese Communist Party decided to not let their population die in droves and acquire long-term health problems (the number for China would be 112 million at the conservative end). Most Western “democracies” chose to have mass deaths and Long Covid.

This isn’t just about the horrid consequences of our choice to let Covid rage and mutate, this is also a mass legitimacy loss event for the West and for democracy, though a very few democracies have proved non-psychopathic.

If “freedumb” means governments that let you die or get Long Covid, is it “freedumb” worth having? If being ruled by “commies” means that you live and stay healthy and so do your parents, grandparents, and kids, is “Communism with Chinese characteristics” so bad?

That’s a question a lot of people are going to be asking themselves.

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Again, on Omicron & “Just Give Up and Let Everyone Get It”

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On January 4, 2022

16 Comments

Start with this:

Omicron is more infectious than Delta. Its symptoms are concentrated more in the upper respiratory tract, which is one reason it is substantially less deadly, but upper respiratory tract infections are worse for children and better for adults.

Though it’s unclear how much less deadly Omicron is than Delta (because there are too many confounding variables like previous infection and vaccination), let’s do some clarifying math, as if you were back in school.

If Omicron is half as deadly as Delta, and four times as many people get it, how many people will die compared to Delta?

If five times as many people get it will more people die or less?

This is before we get into the question of hospitals being overwhelmed, meaning some people don’t get care, including people with problems other than Covid.

Then we have the multiplication of re-infection. Omicron appears to be optimized for re-infection. It’s not a case of “everyone gets it.” It’s a question of “How many times will you get it and does each time increase the chance of organ damage/Long Covid and/or death?” You can get the flu multiple times, then die from the last time, happened to one of my friends in his 30s.

Finally, a variant this widespread has many, many more chances to mutate. It might mutate towards even more mildness, but there’s no guarantee of that. Delta certainly wasn’t more mild.

Sending children back to schools during the Omicron surge is insanity.

I notice, also, that at least two nations are handling Omicron: China and Japan, so it isn’t a case of, “It can’t be done,” and gnashing, weeping, and pretending that we would do something — if something was possible. Something has always been possible and most nations have always refused to do what needed to be done.

That something has always been a mix of policies; not just vaccines, but track-and-trace, quarantines, lockdown, and improved ventilation. (Indeed it may be that one reason Japan is doing so well is that they acknolwedged Covid was airborne early and have taken that into account in their response.) US schools keeping doors and windows locked out of fear of shooters is an amazing case of statistical innumeracy, and every country which hasn’t been changing ventilation systems to deal with Covid is a country which is not serious about saving lives and avoiding a mass crippling of their population.

Covid has been a mass-crippling event. Millions of people will be disabled, for who knows who long, with affects on our societies and our sacred economies which will, themselves, be disabled.

Nor is there any particular reason to think that “herd immunity” from natural immunity will work, as Covid is good at re-infecting and immunity drops fast.

This is a brilliant and wonderful scenario for anyone who owns shares in vaccine manufacturers, with their boosters every few months (more often than every six, as we are seeing it), but bad for everyone else.

Covid is and always was a worldwide phenomena, which required a worldwide response. That could have happened if the major powers had agreed and done not only the right things themselves, but also assisted everyone else in doing the right thing. Instead, vaccine chauvinism, profit opportunities, and so on took precedence.

China’s leaders, totalitarian tyrants, apparently cared enough about their population to stop Covid, even at economic cost. Our leaders, seeing that Covid was a huge profit opportunity (billionaire wealth has about doubled), decided that mass death and disabling was a cost they were happy for their “free” subjects to pay.

Who are the barbarians?

And now it’s killing and crippling our children.

Your leaders kill and hurt you for money and power. That is how they have acted since Reagan and Thatcher took power.

They’re killing you. They’re killing your children. They’re crippling you. They’re crippling your children.

You make excuses for them, but the Chinese and Japanese leaders made other choices and so far, at least, they have avoided mass death among adults, elders, and children. Perhaps they’ll be overwhelmed eventually, I don’t know, but so far they’ve held the line.

Your leaders kill, cripple, hurt, and impoverish you for money. They’re doing it to your children now.

Is there anything they can and will do that will cause revolution?

Because removing them, en-masse, and trying them for their crimes is the only thing that will ever make the world better, or give  you even the faintest chance of dealing with climate change and environmental collapse in a humane manner.

Covid has been a practice run for when climate change starts really hitting. It shows which societies are able to respond to a collective challenge.

Most of our societies have failed and because climate change, like Covid, is a world problem, that a few societies haven’t failed is unlikely to matter much, even to them. They’ll just stay together under pressure longer than we will.

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CDC Jumps the Shark & Experts Die Another Death

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On December 29, 2021

57 Comments

So, days after American Airlines asked for a reduction in quarantine length, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) reduced recommended quarantine length to five days.

Remarkable.

The CDC, the WHO, and many other health organizations have repeatedly disgraced themselves. At the start, they advised against masks. Masks clearly do help, and because, at the time, they thought that Covid was spread by droplets, masks were completely indicated. The CDC took too long to admit that Covid was airborne, recommended children go back to school, and so on.

In general, health authorities in too many countries have not recognized that airborne spread requires improved ventilation and filtering. School boards have forced teachers to keep windows closed. Vaccine approvals have been political — Sputnik V was an excellent vaccine pre-Omicron, but it was Russian, so, not approved in most Western countries.

Health authorities in many countries have not tracked and traced, have not quarantined properly, and so on.

All of this has broken trust with public health organizations and with experts in general.

People want scientists in organizations like the WHO and CDC to be non-political, to say what the best science says, and they haven’t and now trust is broken.

In general, the idea of expertise has been broken over the last few decades, because experts acted badly or weren’t experts.

This requires a bit of unpacking and “expert” is a bad word. Economists are experts, but they are not scientists, they’re ideologues. They study how the world should be and try and force the world to be like that.

Economists are moral philosophers, in effect — or theologians. If they presented themselves like, “We believe in markets and utility maximization and utility is a metaphysical concept for us, and we think this is the best way to organize society,” that’d at least be honest.

If they were honest, you could sort of trust them. “Oh, so macro-economists are like Christian preachers who say that society should be based on their beliefs of what an ideal society is like!!” That’s not at all the same sort of “expert” as a biologist or physicist.

Over 99 percent of economists didn’t predict the financial collapse. They didn’t realize there was a housing bubble. When economists, and other fake scientists, presented themselves as scientific experts (whose advice, when followed, was CRAP), they discredited the very idea of expertise.

Then actual scientists let themselves be politically compromised and now, they have completed the job.

I read a lot of people who say, “Trust the experts.” Shut up.

The experts disgraced themselves. The economists, the psychologists, the biologists, etc, etc. Too many of them have either presented themselves as something they’re not (scientists) or are actual scientists whom have fudged the science.

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This even goes down to hedging things that are well agreed upon. Climate change, for example.

The consensus forecasts have almost been universally too optimistic, for decades, because scientists were playing political games and trying to be palatable.

Actual scientists need insulation from politics. People who are playing politics need to not be insulated from politics. Central bankers and economists are not scientists, they are political actors whose actions hurt some people & help others.

Central banks should be under direct control of elected officials. Scientists in the CDC and WHO should be heavily insulated from political power. Climate scientists need insulation as well.

Expertise has to be politically disinterested. For example, with the initial mask guidance, honest communication would have been:

The best science is that masks help protect us from Covid. Surgical and N95 masks are currently in short supply, so please use cloth masks right now. Here’s how to make them yourselves.

That’s honest, and it doesn’t break trust.

And that, along with not allowing people like economists, psychologists, and even psychiatrists, to pretend to be scientists is how you avoid loss of trust in experts.

Once you lose trust, you’re screwed. Real experts, who can be trusted, are now tarred with the same brush as those who have betrayed trust, and a plurality of the population has decided they don’t have to believe what the “experts” say, because in the past they’ve lied, been wrong, or perverted the science for political or business reasons.

 

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