Category: health care Page 11 of 35

There is much moaning and wailing about how people in many Western countries, and in the US in particular, are not taking Covid seriously. Not wearing masks, not giving up Thanksgiving, not staying home, and so on.

This is to be expected. Part of it is that our elites are not taking it seriously. We are regularly told of important people going out to a restaurant to eat, or whatever.

Others, like Trump and many Republicans have downplayed Covid.

But the simpler explanation is based on one of the firm rules of human nature:

Whatever it is that we must do, must be good, because we must believe we are good.

People have no choice but to play Covid-roulette. The choice is to work, and take a chance on getting Covid, or not work and wind up homeless when you can’t pay the rent. Since Covid is only a chance, and homelessness is sure, you go work.

Since you must work, and since anything you do must be good, because you must believe you are a good person, therefore Covid is no big deal, because if it is a big deal, by working you may be putting other people as well as yourself at risk.

But you’re good, so therefore that can’t be so, therefore Covid is no big deal.

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This mechanic is one of the greatest sources of evil in human history and society. The correct response would be to shrug and simply note the calculus: “If I don’t work, I’m homeless, so I work and yeah, some people may die because of that, but the people who could easily afford to pay me not to work (the government/central banks) won’t, so, so be it.”

When choosing a lesser evil, admit “I am choosing a lesser evil.” Admit “I am still doing something bad, but I do not see a third option.”

If you don’t do this, you can’t move towards creating that third option, and by denying reality you make things far, far worse, as well as being a dishonest fool.

Anyway, the actual responsibility is on elites who don’t do the blindingly obvious: cancel rent and mortgages and pay small businesses to close, while providing actual essential workers with serious protecting. Get the pandemic down to zero, track and trace and outbreaks, quarantine and so on. Since it has been done, it can be done.

All of this Covid denialism, combined with vaccine fears, is going to cause a great deal of trouble as the vaccines come out and a lot of people refuse them. Vaccines provide herd immunity only if enough people take them.

Welcome to dystopia, courtesy of fucked up elites and the human need to feel that we’re good, whatever our objective actions are. (This need may be a human need that is somewhat culture bound, however. We can hope it isn’t invariable.)

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Back in August, when it became clear that schools were going to reopen in countries like the US and Britain that did not have Covid under control, and which never would control Covid until there is a vaccine, I wrote an article warning against going back to school while Covid was out of control.

I’d think twice before sending my kids back to school under these circumstances.

I was told this was wrong, that it’d be OK. So let’s revisit that (specific examples courtesy of the Republican Dalek):

1. Thirty-nine students and three staff members at Frank Wagner Elementary school in Monroe were advised to quarantine Thursday after they were potentially exposed to COVID-19.
2. East Baton Rouge Parish School System (EBRPSS) has announced it has closed Park Elementary School in Baton Rouge due to an outbreak of COVID-19.
3. Eighty-eight Utah schools with Covid outbreaks.
4. One-hundred and sixty-one schools and thirty-one colleges.
5. Thirty-six confirmed outbreaks with one hundred and fourty-six cases in New Jersey (Nov 5)

Here’s a nice little pie-graph from Toronto, Ontario:

Children get Covid. Most don’t have symptoms, but they can pass it on. Some, even though they don’t have symptoms, will have long term damage. Because they don’t have symptoms, most children won’t be tested, so the numbers above are surely significantly lower than the actual count.

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Once they get it, children, showing no symptoms, can pass it on to their parents, grandparents and any one else who comes into contact with them. They may be somewhat less infectious than adults, but that isn’t the same as not being infectious. The older the kid, the worse (high schools absolutely should be closed.)

Re-opening schools was moronic. But if you want the hoi polloi to go back to work, well the schools have to be open, because schools are primarily childcare. Note that high end workers are still isolating at home: the City of London is still effectively shuttered. Our lords and masters sure aren’t putting themselves at risk if they don’t need to.

Sending your kid back to school may be something you had to do, legally, or because you have to work, since if you don’t, you and the kid wind up homeless. So you play Covid-roulette. But as a public health measure it was stupid at best, criminally malign at worst and people who didn’t need to send their kids back shouldn’t have and often didn’t. Many schools don’t even make children wear masks, and schools, with kids locked into rooms for hours on end in close proximity, are near ideal for Covid spreading.

Our elites do the wrong thing, repeatedly, knowing it will kill or impoverish a bunch of us, and they don’t care. It’s that simple.

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Jonas Salk, who refused to patent the polio vaccine

Worldwide deaths from Covid-19 sit at 1.39 million, though that’s certainly an understatement, especially when one adds in people who died of other causes who wouldn’t have if Covid-19 wasn’t soaking up resources. (I recently read of a man dying of a perforated gallbladder in the US who wouldn’t have pre-Covid.)

We have vaccines coming out in the new year, and they are good vaccines, with 90%+ success rates and few bad reactions, so far as the current data indicates.

But the current timeline is that there won’t be enough vaccine until 2024 to vaccinate everyone.

There’s a way to speed it up, however. Release the information on how to manufacture the drugs so that any facility which has the ability to make them can.

The US, UK and EU, among others, are opposing that idea.

That’s going to kill a LOT of people and destroy a lot of businesses, throw a lot of people on the street, etc, etc.

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There’s no reason why every company with an effective vaccine shouldn’t make money, we can simply pool some money up and give it to them. That’s fair, that’s reasonable, that doesn’t destroy the economy and massive numbers of lives in poor countries.

I note, by the way, that China, which has three vaccines in late development is OK with this. They’re the bad guys, we’re constantly told, but in this case they’re doing the right thing, the moral thing. It’s the “good” guys who aren’t.

If you’re in the 1st world, don’ t worry, your government will make sure you’re taken care of. But in the developed world this could drag on for two more years than necessary.

I note, also, that in macro-economic terms this is stupid. Full vaccination allows full opening of borders and a return to trade, tourism and so on. Dragging the process out so that the economy can’t return to full power will cost far more money than any amount which can be earned by squeezing poor countries for as much money as possible.

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With rare exceptions like New Zealand and Australia, the Western response to Covid-19 has been beyond pathetic.

This isn’t a complicated problem. You do a lockdown at the start, then ease when cases are essentially extinguished. You build up track and trace, you put in support for businesses and for people who have to isolate. You test a lot, you track and trace contacts and you make people quarantine (fuck your rights. If you are have the goddamn plague, you quarantine.) If there is a local breakout during the second phase you track and trace.

You check temperatures and symptoms at the border and make travelers quarantine for 10 days, in a hotel room you provide. During lockdown and restriction phases everyone wears masks when indoors anywhere but their own homes.

This is not a matter that is open to question: countries which ran this playbook got Covid under control. They’re having safe pool parties in China now.

Moreover, the sheer stupidity of the idea that lockdowns hurt the economy is beyond embarassing. The plague hurts economies. Getting it under control is what saves economies. During lockdowns it is simple to deal with: cancel rent and mortgages for people and businesses and have the central bank make the lenders whole for the duration. Central banks routinely print trillions to bail out rich people, they can be used for this. Meanwhile, give people enough money to afford their other bills, like food.

The economy IS people and businesses. If you make sure they are all there when the plague is done, then the economy will be fine. Instead, there has been huge devastation of business in many countries so that even when the pandemic is done (because of a vaccine), the damage will linger for years, some of it will linger for decades, in industries like live music and theatre, where the venues have shut down and won’t come back easily. (It’s almost impossible to open new music and theater venues in many places.)

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Again: the East and a few western outliers handled this, and the rest of the West did not. This is a combination of sheer incompetence, psychopathic leadership, and incentives. The rich get tested every day, can work from home, and get the very best care AND their wealth has skyrocketed during the pandemic even as they assume control of a larger percentage of the economy (because of small businesses going under.) If you’re rich, the pandemic has been a godsend: it’s made you far richer, given you more power, and disempowered your workers, since there are nowhere near enough jobs.

Our societies in the West are simply not functional. We cannot manage the most basic of government functions (as the inability count votes in America just demonstrated.) Our leaders are buffoons, psychopaths or both (usually both, and this includes leaders people spew over like Angela Merkel.)

If our leaders wanted the pandemic handled, it would have been. It wasn’t because they didn’t, and in some cases because they are also buffoons.

This is not primarily on the population (except they keep electing these ‘tards). The reason America has a huge anti-mask movement, for example, is that powerful leaders like Trump and various GOP figures pushed it hard, so it became a tribal authoritarian marker.

The pandemic, as bad as it is, is a minor crisis. It is as nothing, nothing, compared to what is coming at as as climate change starts to really hit.

We can’t/won’t even handle a crisis where there is a playbook and all you have to do is follow it.

Our societies are broken. Virtually everyone in a leadership position, or who has great wealth (same thing) needs to be removed from power, have their money taken away beyond a standard middle class standard, and be forbidden from every running anything ever again. Our populations need to stop accepting psychopathic and incompetent leadership and learn that the only leaders worth having are those who actually put the people’s welfare first.

If we do not do these things, climate change and the problems which will come downstream from it are going to make the pandemic look like a picnic that was upset because there were too many ants.

This is where we are.

(I should note that the Australian and New Zealand governments are not “good”, they merely handled this well. Australia just let wildfires run unchecked, while New Zealand has one of the most overpriced housing markets in the world. I assume Covid was not in the interests of their elites, unlike in many other countries.)

So, American excess deaths as of October 3rd, were at 299,028. By today they are well over 300,000. In a population of 328 million, the US is at about .1%. The final number of deaths is hard to determine, because the course of the US epidemic is being determined by human decisions, and there’s some question of what Biden would do, as well as the matter of how effective the first vaccines would be. While the percentage seems small, it is more than all US war casualties since WWII.

Of, I think, greater concern to most people is the Covid damage phenomenon. For example, a recent study of 100 Covid survivors found 78 had heart damage (and the heart isn’t the only organ it damages.) There are going to very long and significant knock-ons. Current total cases are over 8 million. Assume 16 million by the end, and that 78% rate, and you’re looking at twelve and a half million people with heart issues they wouldn’t otherwise have had. Many of those people are young.

Opening universities has been a huge problem. Wisconsin’s cases, for one data point, are now more than half concentrated at universities. Data on schools is harder to find, but the UK data indicates a lot of infections, with them split about evenly between primary and secondary schools. Reopening schools and universities was a huge wrong doing (I originally called it a mistake, but I think decision makers understood the consequences.)

The reports I have are that the financial sector in England has not re-opened physically: the “City” is empty. The same pattern seems to exist in the US: the commons have been made to go back to work and their children to school, most of the elites still work from home. Watch what they do, not what they make you do.

In my own residence of Ontario cases started rising over 6 weeks ago, and the government waited till they exceeded the first peak to put in restrictions less onerous than at the first peak, while children are at school and most ordinary people working. We reopened too soon, and re-shutdown too late and meanwhile supports from the government have been cut back.

As other countries have proved, following epidemiology 101 can indeed break the back of the epidemic (there are packed pool parties in Shanghai, New Zealand is fine, etc…) However, the way Covid has been handled in the US, Canada, Britain and probably elsewhere where I haven’t dug up the data has made the rich richer. The rich have access to on the spot testing with results in  5 minutes and are tested every day. They work from home. Covid has been a huge windfall for them. (This is why I wonder if Biden will really change much, his donors are getting rich too.)

So we wait for vaccines, wonder how much they will cost and how many of us will get Covid. Most will survive at this point, but not unscathed. Tens of millions will be ruined economically.

This epidemic should have been mostly over by summer, with occasional outbreaks dealt with by local shutdowns. Instead it will crank on till sometime next year.

The reason, again, is that the rich and powerful are mostly not at risk (if they do get it due to bad luck, or like Trump, due to extremely stupid behaviour, they get care not available even to normal people in the hospital); are making a lot of money and are gaining control over a larger percentage of the population.

If you’re rich and not very very unlucky, Covid has been a huge blessing. The rest of us can just wait for vaccines.

So, it’s been a while since we talked about Covid. The United States has been in a long slow decline, which you can see in the graphs below (both based on CDC numbers, which will be understatements.)

Cases:

Deaths:

As the charts show, the death rate was highest at the start. This is both because the initial cases blew through old folks homes and because we have become better at treating cases.

The trend looks good, but a lot will depend on how school and university re-openings go. My guess is that we’ll see a spike in cases in about 2 to 3 weeks, then a larger spike about 2 to 3 weeks after the universities send their students home. It is also true that I’m seeing a lot of states starting to have an R over 1 (each case infects more than one person.)

The fundamental issue here is that the shutdowns were never done properly in most cases. Here’s an exception:

https://twitter.com/Cleavon_MD/status/1303164731092381696

The key to defeating this was always to do a hard shutdown, with no one but actual essential workers. Doing so in a widespread would have required actual income support, a cancellation of all mortgage, rent and and other payments, and actual organization to get people the food and medicine and other supplies they needed to genuinely shelter in place. Mandatory masks on leaving the house, etc, etc…

This has been done successfully by multiple countries, it’s not an unsolved problem, but it was never done in the United States and the result is an endless misery of cases, never ending. Openings from such shut downs as were put in place were done too soon, as well, and there are going to wind up either being reversals of many of those openings or a decision made to just suck it up and live with the cases.

Doing the latter, of course, means that America will be a pariah nation, with Americans unable to travel to other countries until there is an effective vaccine and Americans take it.

There are multiple causes for why the US has performed this way, but the simplest is that rich people aren’t scared any more (the truly rich get tested every day, and so do the people who interact with them, plus they can stay isolated) and Covid has thus been mostly affecting poor people and minorities, with some middle class folks getting hit. (Middle class to actual rich is poor, however,  you aren’t human to them.)

(Chart from Bloomberg. Now imagine the number for those who really matter, who earn, say, five million or more.)

In addition, the rich have become much richer during Covid as small and medium businesses shut down, they have consolidated.

So it’s all good to those who rule America, in fact it’s a once a decade opportunity to consolidate their wealth and power (the last one being the financial crisis, which, yes, did leave them richer.)

The rich were bailed out, you weren’t, they’re getting richer, and that will continue.

Keep wearing masks, take vitamin D3 every day, and hunker down, this is going to go on for quite a while yet. and there’s a good chance of another bad wave.

I’m sorry if you’re American and not rich. Your elites kill you for money, and there is nothing I can do about it but what I’ve been doing for a couple decades now: warn you so you can try and prepare for the next way their depraved greed will endanger your life, health and prosperity. To be sure, there are countries where the citizens have it worse, but few where it is more needless.