Ian Welsh

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

Category: health care Page 8 of 35

Herd Immunity & Multiple Covid Waves Is a Monstrous Policy

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On August 24, 2021

58 Comments

Folks, what your leaders are doing to you (us), and what many of you think is necessary or good, is monstrous. Long Covid in people aged 16-30.

Researchers at Haukeland University Hospital in Bergen, Norway, have followed 312 Covid-19 patients for an entire year. 247 of them home-isolated, while 65 were hospitalized.

The results of their study were recently published in an article in Nature Medicine.

At six months, 61 percent of all patients had persistent symptoms, the researchers found.

Among those who home-isolated, 52 percent still experienced various symptoms after half a year.

Only sixty days, rather than six months, total population, not just 16-30.

Our team just published a paper on this subject out of our Arizona cohort, led by Dr. Melanie Bell. We found that 60 days post-SARS-CoV-2 infection, a total of 77 percent of participants were still reporting symptoms. None were hospitalized for their infection. https://t.co/qDTMx9boMR

For all that we squeal about China, and bad, and fascist, and so on, here is the Chinese response to their latest “wave”. (We wouldn’t even call this a wave, the number of infections are so small. Remember, Chinese population is 1.4 Billion.)

China’s health authority reported on Monday that there were no new locally-transmitted cases of COVID-19 for the first time since July, offering more signs that the current outbreak which began late last month may be tapering off soon.

The latest outbreak was driven mainly by infections first detected among a few airport workers in the eastern city of Nanjing on July 20. Since then, more than 1,200 people in China have been confirmed to be infected.

The outbreak has spurred local authorities across the country to impose tough counter-epidemic measures including mass testing for millions of people to identify and isolate carriers, as well as treat the infected.

No one has died in the current outbreak, which has largely focused on the cities of Nanjing and Yangzhou in the province of Jiangsu, near the financial hub of Shanghai.

Across China, new local cases fell to the single-digits last week, after peaking in early August.

But over the weekend, Shanghai placed hundreds of people under quarantine after infections were found in cargo workers at one of its two airports, sparking concerns of a fresh outbreak in the city.

Shanghai has reported no new local infections since then. (my emphasis)

This is what properly done zero-Covid looks like. You quarantine, lock down when necessary, and so on.

On August 23, 2021 (one day), according to the New York Times, the US had over 150K new cases. During the entire last outbreak China had under 1,300.

The “Fascists” in China take better care of their people in a pandemic than the “free” Americans (or Canadians or Brits or Germans.) Even places like Australia have fucked up, because they do not properly quarantine or close soon enough when quarantine fails.

Covid is a test of nations, and virtually no western nations have passed. We are incapable of collective group action to protect our societies, even from a plague.

And because this is not the cold, because it cripples a lot of people for some period afterwards (we don’t know how many, or for how long, but we know it is not a trivial number) the idea of just letting multiple waves rip through society until everyone is sort of immune, even if that would work, is monstrous.

Indeed, because immunity to Covid, both from vaccines and from natural infection wanes over a period months, herd immunity as a policy probably won’t work; all that’s really going on is praying that eventually the dominant Covid strain becomes one that is mild, and then we just live with it.

Your lords and masters run societies in ways mean to kill you or hurt you terribly. They are acting worse than the totalitarian CCP.

As long as this set of elites stays in power in the developed world, you can expect you and those you care about will suffer and die, so long as it makes elites richer (which Covid does) or helping you inconveniences you (which is why enhanced employment benefits were cancelled in so many states when bosses whined).

It’s you, or it’s your elites. So far, in vast numbers, it is you.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

 

 

Once More About Sending Your Kids Back to School

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On August 19, 2021

83 Comments

Last year I suggested not sending your kids to physical school when and if Covid was out of control.

This year, I’m saying the same. Delta is much easier to catch than original Covid was.

If Covid is out of control where you live, I suggest you do not send your kid back to school unless you really have no choice (criminal penalties and/or they absolutely need the babysitting.)

If Covid is still around, but not out of control, then I’d still be wary if the school doesn’t have a mask mandate and if they won’t let external windows be opened to create a draft. Covid is airborne and how likely you are to get it depends on amount + exposure. If there’s just one infected kid in a badly ventilated room, even with masks, everyone gets a strong dose.

Note next that even though Covid rarely kills kids, teenagers, in particular, can die. It won’t mean a damn thing to you if your kid dies that it was, “like rolling quadruple ones on four six sided dice.” Also, kids can get long Covid, and long Covid most frequently causes brain damage and/or heart problems. I have one friendly acquaintance with it, who has had to get voice therapy, he sounds like a bad stroke victim.

And, finally, note that kids can spread it to you, your family, and through you, everyone you come in contact with.

I know most parents hate the idea of spending time with their children. Some for good reason (need to work) others because, in truth, they may love their kids, but they don’t like them, but school right now in places without Covid under control, is way too dangerous.

It appears this will remain the case indefinitely. Covid resistance, either from having had it or from vaccines, wanes fairly quickly: It only takes a few months, as Israel is finding out.

Since no combination of Covid-Zero and widespread vaccination, plus traveller quarantine is being tried, and since no one is even pretending any more that they care about vaccinating people in poor countries, there’s no reason to believe that Covid won’t keep mutating. At this point we simply hope it mutates into a less harmful form. The models say it should, BUT so far the models have been 180 degrees wrong.

Protect yourself and your kids, and remember, most kids will have lost school time to Covid and everyone will understand.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

The Labor Shortage And the New Criminalization

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On August 12, 2021

51 Comments

The level of stupid in what passes for “discourse” in the Western world never ceases to amaze. Employers are shocked that they are having trouble filling low wage jobs and blame enhanced unemployment benefits, but even when half the states stop the unemployment benefits, still have trouble filling those jobs.

Supposedly a little over 600K people have died in the US from Covid (the actual toll is higher). The largest group is old people, driven by psychopaths like Cuomo killing them either deliberately or through vast criminal negligence.

But Covid has also hit the poor disproportionately, and it hit kitchen workers hard. If you’ve ever even seen a restaurant kitchen, let alone worked in one, you know why: they’re cramped, generally hotter than hell, and people have to be in each other’s faces.

While modern economics in its macro form is essentially astrology (but let’s not insult astrology), the core insight of marginal economics, that it’s the next customer, or widget, or worker that matter: the marginal cost, is important. If you go from having 2 people apply for every job to one person for every 2 jobs, the price point changes massively.

So there less people willing to work shit jobs at minimum wage (or below, for waiters, etc…)

It has been so long since the bottom end of the economy was hot in most places that few employers even remember it. The Massachussets Miracle of the 90s, for example. Local resource booms, etc… But for the majority of people there haven’t been tight markets for low-end workers since the 70s. In such markets you have to compete for workers; they set the prices,  you don’t.

Probably should have cared about poor people dying, if  you wanted to keep your wages down. Hard to have much sympathy for employers, who seem to have mostly not given a damn.

But most employers don’t realize that excess labor is something that was very carefully engineered, over two generations now, so that they would have low wages. It isn’t “natural” (or unnatural, to be fair) it’s a social choice. Cheap labor isn’t God-given, and it varies by place and time.

Meanwhile we have two other interesting events.

1) The decriminalization of marijuana, which is going to lead to a lot less people in prison.

2) The criminalization of homelessness, which is going to lead to a lot more people in prison.

The prison industry is a good gig for a lot of firms and people and even still provides a lot of jobs to towns that would otherwise have very few. You charge people huge rates to make calls, for anything in the commissary, even for books these days. Meanwhile you pay them a couple bucks a day to work, and on the back end, if you’re a private prison, you charge the government.

Any slowdown in the flow of prisoners is a slowdown in profits (and prisoners died in large numbers to Covid, too.)

America, fuck’yeah!

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

The Covid Idiot Shuffle

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On August 5, 2021

193 Comments

This is from the province of Ontario, in Canada where I live.

I’m going to enlarge and show the first graph properly:

Now what you’re going to notice is that Rt never went below about 80—that is 80 new cases per 100 Covid cases. Also, the general trend is UP. So you have a situation through stage one where case counts are gong down, but R is stubbornly high, even if not over 1. Then in stage 2 it actually burps over 1 and Ontario goes to stage 3 anyway.

Now, I know of a guy who lives in a rooming house (not me) who got Covid. He did the right thing: got tested, obeyed quarantine. Health authorities knew and followed up with him.

Great, but the problem is he lived in a rooming house. Not just him but everyone in the house should have been quarantined, and both is and there contacts needed to be traced (and ideally quarantined.) Nobody else in the house was even contacted. Ideally he should have been quarantined somewhere else than the house, probably everyone in the house (all exposed) should have been, since any rooming  house is a great place for Covid to spread.

There is no effective track and trace or quarantine in Ontario. There just isn’t. So  you don’t get below .8, and you don’t control spread, so every time Ontario reopens it is just a matter of time before the next wave.

Lockdowns and partial closures do not work without proper track and trace and quarantine. When a new outbreak is seen it has to be jumped on.

Of course, if you want poor people (like those who live in rooming houses) to obey the quarantine, you’re going to have to make up their wages while they’re stuck in quarantine, and you have to deliver food and other necessities. This is what effective quarantine regimes in other countries do: they make sure the quarantined are taken care of. It may be boring to be stuck at home, but they aren’t going to fall behind on the rent, or not be able to eat. (These poor people also tend to be the “essential workers” everyone praises then let’s die.)

This half-assing of dealing with Covid has been typical of most of the western world. There’s a refusal among elites to actually deal with Covid as a serious threat, and mobilize government and private resources (seize them, if necessary, yes it’s legal) to ensure that Covid is properly dealt with.

I’ve suggested and believe it’s because Covid has made rich people much richer in the West, but whatever it is, it’s killing and crippling a lot of people. About 15 to 25% of people who get even a mild case of Covid get long Covid, with a variety of nasty symptoms and we’re now seeing indications of some mental damage from Covid separate from long Covid.

You really, really don’t want to catch this shit.

Failure to do things right is mass murder by those with the authority to do things right. Premier Doug Ford, in Ontario, is an active danger to everyone in Ontario because he refuses to run the play that will actually get Covid (mostly) under control. Everyone who dies now or in the past almost year is  his fault. He is a mass murderer because the consequences of his decisions are obvious. He’s also crippling a hell of a lot of people.

Ontario isn’t unique, obviously, this is the typical play in almost all Western countries.

It is compounded by the point-blank refusal to do everything possible to ramp up  vaccine production as fast as possible and help other countries in every way. Every country where Covid isn’t under control is a place where it can mutate into a worse strain. Delta is WAY worse than original Covid and Delta is unlikely to be the last bad variant.

For decades the fact that our “masters” were incompetent psychopaths didn’t seem to matter all that much; sure some people were getting hurt, but it wasn’t you, right? And if it was, well you lost your power and money so  you didn’t matter and couldn’t do anything.

Now it’s you or grandmother or you kid getting a protentially life-long disability.

You replace your elites, by whatever method will work, or they will keep killing and crippling you.

Doug Ford, by any rational calculus is an ongoing threat to everyone in Ontario, including me. His actions and lack of actions stand a damn good chance of killing or crippling me and anyone I know in Ontario.

This is probably true of whoever the leaders are where you live.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

And The Mass Evictions are ON

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On August 2, 2021

44 Comments

So, the evictions moratorium expired Saturday at midnight.

Over a quarter of renters are behind in some states, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities think-tank.

Southern states are some of the worst affected, though some 16 percent of US households owed rent — about double the amount before the pandemic.

This wasn’t necessary, but the choice was made to not pay people to stay in place, and the money given for relief has mostly not been administered, presumably because the bureaucratic hoops are ridiculous.

only $3 billion in aid has reached households out of the $25 billion allotted to states and localities in early February.

Rental properties and single homes are being snapped up en-masse by private equity and other big investors. Eviction is in their interest, as it makes it easier to raise rent.

This is a watershed moment for real-estate in America: this is where it moves to being owned more by smaller landlords and individual owners (for homes) to just another corporate owned means of, well, rent extraction.

Remember that after 2008 banks deliberately held houses off the market to drive up prices, and you’ll understand what is going to happen to rent, which has already seen ridiculous rises. With large amounts of rental property now in a very few hands, it will be easy for a few people to decide to hold just enough properties off the market to drive up rents. It’s better for big institutional owners to have higher rent prices and some empty if that works out to more rent, and given shortages already exist, I’m betting that will be the case.

The era of cheap housing has been over for a while, but it’s going to be thrown in a coffin and staked thru the heart if big investors have their way.

We’ll talk more later this week, probably, about how wonderful and useful the homeless are and why they are treated so badly.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

Quarantine Matters

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On July 21, 2021

87 Comments

So, compared to a lot of other countries, Australia has done a pretty good job on Covid.

But they just had a Covid breakout in two major cities: Sydney and Melbourne. Those breakouts required them to then go back to shutdowns: closing and restricting businesses and movement.

Both outbreaks come from failures in the quarantine system: from hotel quarantine not working because hotels are not set up properly for quarantine due to not separately ventilating.

On July 7th I wrote that quarantine should be mandatory, with criminal penalties for violation, and…

We also do quarantine badly. Hotel quarantine is ridiculous in most hotels, because Covid is airborne and most hotels spread air between rooms.

This isn’t a difficult problem, however. Build a bunch of small huts in a field (you can even stack them), each with its own ventilation, and put people in there.

How has this been proved across the board in Australia?

I am tired of living in societies where we know how to do the right thing and simply refuse to do so because our elites are psychopathic, selfish and greedy and our population refuses to discipline or control the elites.

We KNOW what to do to stop Covid. We KNOW how to do it. We just fucking refuse.

This is goddamn pathetic. It’s just like climate change, but on a faster timeline so you can see it in weeks to months rather than decades. We may go extinct, we are certainly going to kill and impoverish billions and probably wipe out half the world’s species (which will hurt us terribly, not just them) all because while we KNOW how to do the good, non psychopathic, non criminally insane things, we REFUSE.

You discipline your elites, or most of  you and your children will die or be impoverished by their actions and lack of actions.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

The Decision to Let Covid Go Chronic

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On July 20, 2021

64 Comments

Has been made.

If I know that if I don’t do X, then Y will happen, and I choose not to do X, then I have chosen Y.

Our elites  have chosen not to control Covid. It’s tiresome to keep going through Pandemic 101, but they haven’t tracked and traced, haven’t quarantined, haven’t enforced vaccines, haven’t opened up vaccine patents and helped every country manufacture them, haven’t kept lockdowns going long enough, have opened schools, refused to acknowledge Covid was airborne for too long, and on, and on, and on.

There is a playbook for defeating pandemics, it is well understood, and only a few countries ran it.

Covid has made the rich much richer. It kills old and poor people primarily. Selling Covid boosters every year or even twice a year for $150/pop to everyone who can afford them is a lovely new sinecure for pharma.

Because Covid has proved to be a great boon to almost everyone important, i.e., everyone who actually makes decisions or influences them, there’s no reason to end it.

And so it appears it’s going to go chronic.

Even if there are some countries who keep it under control, there will be vast numbers who don’t, and they will serve as pools for Covid to continue to evolve. This is good, of course, if you are a pharma exec with stock options, because that means new booster shots! Vaccinated populations which do not reach crowd immunity are a thing of beauty, allowing Covid to evolve against the vaccines!

Life is wonderful. Modern neoliberal capitalism is the most amazing economic system ever created — one so finely engineered by two generations of intellectuals, bureaucrats, and politicians that it turns even a plague into a massive profit event for the rich.

And, really, as anyone who isn’t rich is obviously a worthless loser who doesn’t add value to society, because money obviously accurately measures value, this is as it should be.

Too bad about grandma, or that kid getting long-covid and losing the ability to speak properly — if they were worth keeping alive and healthy, they’d be rich, because that would show their merit.

Anyway, enjoy the new world.

And remember, if you don’t overthrow your elites, they will kill you or make your life unbearable. It’s you or them, and so far, it’s you.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

The Spread of New Covid Variants

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On July 7, 2021

102 Comments

There is a variant of Covid, called Lambda, which started in Peru in August, and is now showing up in multiple countries, including the UK and Canada. How dangerous it is is uncertain: It has some changes that might make it better able to avoid antibodies, but studies so far are inconclusive.

The spread of new variants beyond their initial country, however, is something which shouldn’t happen. Very few countries are quarantining properly. Where I live in Canada, quarantine is essentially voluntary: There’s a fine if you don’t, and people who can afford to travel can often afford the fine, plus not everyone gets fined.

This is ridiculous; quarantine should be mandatory, and if you break it, you get slammed back in with a guard on your door, and afterwards you get a trial and are thrown in prison. As a friend noted, if you aim a gun at someone and pull the trigger, but it turns out the gun wasn’t loaded, you still committed a crime even if you didn’t know it was loaded or not.

When the virus and virus variants spread, they have more chances to mutate further. It may be that Lambda’s changes in spike protein aren’t enough to defeat the mRNA vaccines yet, but the next variation off Lambda’s base might be.

Delta, likewise, should never have spread out of its country of origin.

We also do quarantine badly. Hotel quarantine is ridiculous in most hotels, because Covid is airborne and most hotels spread air between rooms.

This isn’t a difficult problem, however. Build a bunch of small huts in a field (you can even stack them), each with its own ventilation, and put people in there. Pre-fab companies and militaries are great for this. Build a fence around it and bring people food and have public health nurses visit every day. This is relatively cheap and keeps people from breathing each other’s germs, if set up with a bit of care. Have a few military police guard the place, that will keep most people from running.

We have a pandemic turning into a plague (in the words of Umair Haque) because we have refused to take this seriously, all the way down the line. I know someone in Canada who got Covid, was told to quarantine, and no one else in the shared house in which they lived was contacted or told to quarantine. This is kindergarten level incompetence — truly shocking.

None of this was necessary. If we had properly shut down and not reopened too early, if we had actually tracked and traced, and had supported every country in the world to do this, while spreading vaccine knowledge around (all the garbage about how long it would have taken looks stupider and stupid, now that we’re up 16 months or so), we’d probably have it down to a few pockets now, at most, and would be back to our “normal” lives.

Instead, we have a disease that looks likely to be chronic and to keep mutating, which vaccine makers like Pfizer and Moderna will offer expensive booster shots to for years or decades.

Back at the start of the pandemic, Moderna was worth 80 billion; it could and should have been eminent domained.

And, as I pointed out at the start of the pandemic, all loans and mortgages should have been put in abeyance, including interest growth, and everyone who wasn’t essential should have been paid to stay home. Rich companies should have subsidized poor countries to do the same.

Blah, blah, blah. We’ve fucked up everything — really simple things that are part of how to handle a disease, things which were understood 500 years ago. Well, fucked up if you aren’t in the top .1 percent and have made out like bandits.

New Covid variants are happening and spreading because, overall, and especially in the West, our leaders are acting to make them spread.

If someone you care about died in anything other than the first wave (and even that is questionable), then your leaders are almost certainly responsible for that death. They refused to take the necessary actions to stop it. There are some exceptions (outbreaks which were stomped on quickly), but basically, almost all dead people after the first wave are the result of political malfeasance, rich people’s greed, and sheer bloody incompetence.

Rich people and politicians kill and impoverish you for money and pleasure. Covid is just a particularly stark reminder.

(Virtually everyone dying due to climate change heat waves and fires is also a victim of politicians and rich people. More on that later.)

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

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