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.)
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So our elites are fantastically incompetent even at finance. The vast majority are completely disconnected from actual production, at best they are distributors. All they are good for is playing court games, i.e., politics. They can’t manage the real economy, they don’t run it, they don’t live in it, and they aren’t subject to its rigors. They live in a Versailles, almost completely disconnected from society except in crises, when they print money to save themselves, and download costs onto the peasantry.