One of the predictions I made many years ago was that Long Covid would slowly cripple workforces. Covid still exists, and that we deliberately don’t try to count cases any more doesn’t change that.
This is typical of our handling of all problems. We just pretend they don’t exist and won’t have serious consequences if we ignore them. While China is somewhat better, with their hard push on clean tech, their willingness to deflate housing prices and their policies reducing the number of billionaires, they too have ignored Covid.
Ironically this is because the Chinese government IS quite sensitive to public opinion. Zero Covid was the right policy, but it was done stupidly and as a result huge demonstrations occurred and the CPC backed down.
Shutdowns made sense in the early days of Covid. This is public health 101 during a pandemic. But as with everyone else the Chinese did them too late and too long.
The actual solution is the one we used for water borne diseases. We cleaned up the water, and we have to clean up the air. All public buildings and all apartment buildings and condos need filters and UV to clean the air. It’s a huge project, to be sure, but it’s more than doable, for less than we are spending on the insane AI data center push. The result would be a lot less Covid, less disabling and at the same time less flu, colds and other airborne diseases.
It’s simple. We have the technology, and we aren’t doing it. Insanity. Not even in most hospitals. Emergency protocols like masks and isolation make sense, but they are emergency protocols and not for long term use. Find out the vector and find a long term solution to the vector.
This solution was understood as early as 2021. Many voices were raised. Nothing was done.
Our predecessors did what they could. If you remember the old steam and hot water heating systems, you know they usually ran too hot so that people had to open windows to cool down, even in the middle of winter. This was deliberate, the designers wanted those windows open to increase ventilation, because they knew the great post-World War I flu pandemic had been airborne.
We have better tech, and better solutions and we’re just sitting on our thumbs and rotating.
Pathetic.
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Bob
What is “clean tech”? It looks like an oxymoron to me.
david lamy
Let me bemoan the sad state of affairs in dealing with COVID with this anecdote.
My wife is a Speech Language Pathologist (SLP) at a large Hudson Valley hospital. She is the only one in her department masking. She is the only one to be a novid.
A colleague has quite a bit of musical talent and gained a role in a musical directed by a notable with extensive Off-Broadway experience. That director contracted COVID. The entire cast of 25 came down with COVID. My wife’s colleague missed a week of work. Some shows were cancelled.
The last show went on yesterday afternoon. It was a small packed theater with woeful ventilation. (I took a CO₂ monitor.) There were no announcements about the casts’ recent encounter with COVID. My wife and I were the only persons wearing a respirator.
My wife’s talented colleague is off today. But two of her other colleagues called out today with COVID. Neither of them mask.
This hospital is a major stroke center in the lower Hudson Valley. SLPs provide drastically needed care for those who have just suffered a stroke. These outages will impact timely patient care.
Rinse, wash and repeat for other health care specialties and facilities. When care providers are out sick, how do you rate your chances when ill?
GM
>The actual solution is the one we used for water borne diseases. We cleaned up the water, and we have to clean up the air. All public buildings and all apartment buildings and condos need filters and UV to clean the air.
The transmission dynamics and mechanisms are completely different so the analogy is totally wrong.
This also gets the scales of the problems wrong too.
“Cleaning up the air” would have required a gigantic investments into new/retrofitted infrastructure that would have taken years, if not decades to carry out, and would have cost orders of magnitude more than proper total quarantine would have.
And it still would not have stopped the virus. Because you can have all the air filtration and UV lights in the world, but if you put 30 kids in a classroom, the one that has COVID will get those sitting immediately adjacent infected. Because the air in the close vicinity is just too densely packed with viral particles for the air filtration and UV to make a difference.
The proper solution was exactly what the Chinese were doing — total lockdown plus mass testing. No need to retrofit all physical infrastructure at a cost of hundreds of billions and timelines of years. Mass testing was the key investment, which is much easier to do, and it actually makes a real difference — you find everyone infected, you quarantine them, rinse and repeat till completion.
But only the Chinese did it.
And the lockdown is only a problem because of how fucked up our socio-economic system is, with its dependence of debt and growth.
GM
One more thing following from the previous comment that I forgot to note.
The “Clean the air” campaign was very convenient to the powers that be, because it distracted from the real solution while sounding good and making people feel like they had a magic solution, that if, you see, it was only implemented, it would solve everything, without the inconvenience of quarantine and masking.
But that is simultaneously magical thinking and, again, very convenient to the powers that be that didn’t want the problem solved.
And yet well meaning people carried water for the villains in the story by pushing for it and distracting from the real solutions.
Hard lockdown plus mass testing remains the only proven way of getting rid of this virus. It is too damn airborne and contagious for anything else to work. There will be others like it in the future, and the same will be true for them too. Thus the discussion about the socio-economic aspects of quarantine, i.e. the need to pay people not to work, which is an absolute anathema to the current ruling elites, as it undermines the whole power arrangement, and is the fundamental reasons we have endemic COVID now, has to be front and center.
Ian Welsh
Hundreds of billions is a gross exaggeration. A simple corsi-rosenthal box in every classroom and hospital room would make a huge difference. But even more expensive solutions aren’t that expensive. You put the filters where the ventilation systems already are, and you work to get more outside exchange. You prioritize places where people gather in large numbers or close quarters, and yes, it does make a difference even if the person next to you has Covid.
But even if it would cost hundreds of billions, we’re spending that on AI bullshit and printed trillions after 2008. The money is never the issue, priorities are. Hell, it would even be a great stimulus, since it requires actual people to do actual work all over the country. You can’t offshore it.
The Chinese solution was a stop gap. It cannot be kept going for years and years. They were also rather clumsy about it, as with everyone else they left the lockdowns too late, thus making them longer than they needed to be. And I say that as someone who praised Zero Covid. Nor did they end it because data showed improvement and it was thus no longer needed, they did so because of mass demonstrations.
The other solution, the one that really worked, was locking down travel. When Eastern Australia did this they reduced Covid spread to essentially zero. Did you really need to go to Eastern Australia? If not, no, you weren’t visiting Western Australia.
In a pandemic you do emergency measures while you find a permanent solution. Vaccines were never effective enough to be that solution, especially given the speed with which Covid mutates. (Though if we’d done the temporary solutions better there would have been less mutation.)
A few hundred billion dollar, or millions of people disabled. I know which I’d choose, even as a self-interested government.
Joan
My coworkers & I are hybrid and resisting the push by management to get back in-office. They can’t threaten our jobs because we’re unioned. We’ll see what tactics they try in the future but so far they’ve been saying we have to return to the office and we just haven’t been doing it. This is especially important right now because our workplace is super crowded so we’d just end up getting sick. My coworkers with kids are already dealing with sick kids coming home from school & daycare.
Stormcrow
I more or less figured the government was going to fail us before we were even one year into the pandemic.
As far as I’m concerned, you can heap as much blame on the government as you like, because it’s all deserved and then some.
But that won’t serve you for protection.
The only things that will, are the current crop of Covid vaccines, even though they’re not “sterilizing”, and masks that will actually filter particulates out of the air you
inhale.
Forget about the government doing anything useful. Biden made it clear he was washing his hands of the problem before his first year was out, and don’t even get me started about Trump.
IMHO, the previous comments and Ian’s post all discuss mitigations on the national level that might be worthwhile if our ruling elites were up to their jobs. But as Ian pointed in one of
his recent essays, our ruling elites are spoiled 4 year old children in adult bodies almost to a man. So you may as well stop expecting anything useful out of them if you haven’t done so
already.
The best thing you can do for yourself right now, besides getting vaccinated, is to (i) get yourself an industrial protection mask that fits your face without leaking through the seal,
(ii) fit it out with cartridges that filter particulates, and (iii) don it before you leave your domicile and keep it on until you’re back inside.
Sure, decent fitting N-95 masks will do as well as P-100 industrial protection masks. But they’re disposable by design. Nobody thought they’d get pressed into service to contain a
stunningly contagious disease for multiple years. And as I suspected several years back, Covid is turning out to be a very very long seige. And you practically have to use an axe on a 3M
HF-800 class mask to render it unfit for service.
And the best thing you can do for the other humans you share air with when you’re at home is to assemble one or more Corsi boxes, turn them on, and keep them on. Then, when the filters
start getting grungy, either replace the filters or replace the Corsi box itself. The only reason I don’t have one running within earshot as I type this, is because my entire household
consists of myself and two indoor cats.
Doing what you can on the individual level isn’t going to help your neighbors.
But trying to communicate about this to those neighbors, or to nearly anybody else, is like talking to the wind. Waste of effort.
OTOH, if you actually mask up before you open your front door, and stay masked until you’re back inside, you’ve actually done something that improves your odds of getting through this
mess.
I ought to know. I’m the guy whose shitty lungs kept him out of the tail end of the Vietnam debacle. And if I were crazy enough to try living in a climate where asthma, bronchitis, and/or
chronic respiratory tract infections were “normal” for me, I probably wouldn’t be still around to write this.
If masking + vaccination managed to keep me more or less intact, they can probably help anyone reading this.
Failed Scholar
Why would the overlords care if you get disabled/die when they can just import new
slaves“citizens”. As Lambert used to put the neolibtard rules, 1. “Because Markets” and 2. “Go Die”.I do wonder what the endgame for this will look like. I’ve noticed in stores and places around here I’m often the only person still wearing a mask. Amongst my friends I am the only one left that wears a mask regularly. I’m pretty sure they think I’m nuts, lol.
Carborundum
A large majority of the increase depicted in that graph is due to increased labour force participation by the disabled, which went from 33.6% in 2020 to 40.7% in 2024.
There has been an increase in the fraction of the non-institutionalized population (i.e., including those not in the labour force and over the age of 65) reporting a disability, but it is more modest (about 1 percentage point). A meaningful portion of the population-wide increase is attributable to normal population aging, but there do look to be some increases in the disability rate among those in younger age groups. I’d have to do more in-depth modelling than I have time for to to see what portion of the increase in these demos is driven by increased labour force participation, but I’d bet that there is something going on there – however, it is much, much smaller than depicted in that visualization.
On the ventilation front, there has actually been a significant amount of work done on this (at least in Canada) but people aren’t talking about it publicly because they are tired of having to deal with triggered whack jobs (as an example, every lecture hall in the University of Toronto with the exception of, I think, three where it just wasn’t possible has been retrofitted with enhanced filtration).
Oakchair
slowly cripple workforces.
—
Anyone think that for the oligarchs this is a feature not a bug? This is the group that flooded the inner cities with crack, the deindustrialized areas with opioids and vacationed with Epstein.
Look at that graph. Notice when that increase in disability starts? Not in late 2019. Not in 2020, but in 2021. But hey the party commands you to ignore the evidence of your eyes.
—–
Zero Covid was the right policy,
—-
It was technically possible to isolate everyone, ban foreigners, kill animal reservoirs and repeat over and over forever and ever.
—–
Shutdowns made sense in the early days of Covid. This is public health 101 during a pandemic.
—-
Before Covid public health said the opposite. But alas we’ve always been at war with East Asia. There must be a ton of evidence to cause this 1984 history rewrite, right?
Well the UK government’s 200 million dollar Covid Inquiry only citied “a mathematical model(1)”
A conflict of interest laden 8 page model that plugged a bunch of estimates into a algorithm. The word estimate occurs 83 times. The authors decided not to include any estimates on harms because that’s how an accurate honest scientific cost benefit analysis is done.
Can’t imagine what could go wrong with all that… But I do know if you are a smart moral person you don’t question the ruling class.
(1) https://covid19.public-inquiry.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/16083739/INQ000212077.pdf
“If I want to understand something, I must observe, I must not criticize, I must not condemn, I must not pursue it as pleasure or avoid it as non-pleasure. There must merely be the silent observation” -Jiddu Krishnamurti
“One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.” –Brave New world
“Most deadly errors arise from obsolete assumptions.” –Dune
GM
>A simple corsi-rosenthal box in every classroom and hospital room would make a huge difference
Wishful thinking.
Even within those settings that would not get $R_e$ below 1, and you have countless other places where nobody would do even that.
ibaien
despite all the charts provided, there’s zero causal link between covid and disability; it’s at best a narrative. one could just as easily posit that post-capitalism has burnt out the means of production and they’re looking for an escape hatch. out of my entire broad social circle, zero people have had any lingering effects from what is just another respiratory virus. why are folks on the far left making this into some sort of apocalyptic mile marker? asking to mask up with industrial grade respirators in 2025 makes you look and sound like a kook.
Oakchair
there’s zero causal link between covid and disability
—–
Oh man, saying there is zero “casual link” makes me anticipate a flooding with “links” that do not meet the definition of “casual link” let alone a robust casual link.
——
why are folks on the far left making this
——
Remember in 1984 the daily 2 minutes of hate? In our society that occurs 24/7, and Trump was one of the major targets of that brainwashing. Then during Covid Trump was associated with downplaying Covid. Imagine a group that spent 2020-2021 demanding everyone’s right to peaceful assembly, control of their bodies, and free speech be removed.
In an environment saturated with propaganda it would take something extraordinary for someone to look in the mirror and go “maybe those people I’ve been calling evil, dumb, pieces of shit who should be denied rights were correct and I’ve been the baddy”
Astonishing despite Trump warp speeding the Vaccines and repeatedly saying he is responsible for them if you didn’t line up for a covid vaccine every year you were considered a Trumper.
capelin
@ Ian “The money is never the issue, priorities are.”
Exactly.
–
Interesting timeline on that chart. Wonder what changed in 2021. Guess we’ll never know.
different clue
@ibaien,
I doubt very many people here will offer you any support or validation for your fantasy-based views of covid being a non-problem and a non-serious disease. I certainly have none to offer you.
And if I want to wear an industrial grade respirator and look and sound like a kook, that is my perfect right; and if that makes you mad then that makes me happy. That’s because this is a Free Country – – and don’t you forget it. John Wayne said that once.
Curt Kastens
ibaien,
I offer you my full support, and so would huge numbers of people here in Germany if they knew about this site.
But that is because the covid story played out quite a bit different here in Germany than it did in the USA and other parts of Europe.
Why is that I wonder? Could it have anything to do with socio economic differences?
Could it have anything to do with the press in some countries lying more than the press in other countries?
Because i do not have the answer to those question, I wonder if the problem with COVID was a problem with the desease or with the socio economic problems of the United States and other western countries.
And because I am very sceptical of the entire COVID narrative the one should fear COVID I can think of a lot of different ways that I think that money should be used to make the world a better place.
But I did use a mask for a few days in September. The story is that I went to Ireland on a vacation. I was on the train and this guy was sitting across from me who kept coughing and not even covering his mouth. I thought for moment about getting up and sitting somewhere else. The guy was not Irish. He was from a part of the world where turbuclose is still common. But I decided to stay put and epose myself to what ever he had. 36 hours latter I was sick. I had a temperature of I would guess of 100° or 101° F. I stayed in bed for a day. The next day the fever was gone but I still had cold symptoms for a week. My wife got sick about 2 days after me. So the last part of our vacation was some what ruined. I did wear a mask when I went grocery shopping, and maintianed my distance from other people while outside. I did not take a covid test so I do not know whether or not I had covid. But essentially it was just a cold.
I think by this point in time peoples opinions about COVID have hardened. Very few people are going to chage their mind about what happened from this point forward.
My take on why almost no one wears a mask anymore is that they realize that the COVID pandemic was a case of mass hysteria that has not occured since the burning of witches in the middle ages, and now people just want to forget that they have fallen in to this mass hysteria.
But of course my take on this is due to my position. We were feed all kinds of stories about overflowing emergency rooms in Germany. But then the following year it came out that emergency room visits had dropped in the year. And there were all kinds of excuses offered as to why this was. But none of the explained why if emergency room visits had dropped why where we told all kinds of stories about emergency rooms being overwhelmed with sick people.
So someone above made a good point going around with masked all of time is going to make you look like a kook. You should only mask yourself when you have a cold. And if you have to flu you should stay home. Ah to better define that, if you are not throwing up it is a cold, if you are throwing up it is a flu.
Stormcrow
ibaien wrote
You need to be badly out of the loop to be able to simply ignore Long Covid. That’s where the lion’s share of Covid-induced disabilities come from these days.
But not quite all of them. The SARS-CoV-2 virion has very catholic tastes: any cell with an ACE2 receptor. So it’s perfectly capable of infecting and destroying brain tissue all by itself.
ibaien wrote
Given a choice, I’d far far rather be considered a “kook” with an intact brain than a “normal” person with galloping virally induced dementia.
Am I correct in assuming you’ve met people who’ve been stricken by progressive dementia? I have, and the memory is still hideously strong after half a century. The only condition I’ve seen whose horror really compares is large area third-degree burns.
That’s only one of the ways that Covid can leave you more or less completely disabled. Another Long Covid trajectory strongly resembles ME/CFS. And the laundry list of collateral damage does not stop here.
Stormcrow
GM wrote
By mid 2021, nobody with any common sense was expecting it to.
Mostly because by that time, it had become clear that no single available countermeasure was really going to go the entire distance. From an epidemiological perspective, SARS-CoV-2 is the Pathogen From Hell: (i) as contagious as chickenpox, and (ii) whose normal modus operandi includes immune system compromise. That’s why you can contract the exact same strain of Covid multiple times, and it’s also why your vulnerability to other pathogens increases during and immediately after Covid infection.
This is a “hard” problem, like automobile accidents, for which no single countermeasure suffices. So you must play a numbers game, shaving down vulnerability a piece at a time by using multiple countermeasures simultaneously without expecting any one of them to be a “silver bullet”, the way sterilizing vaccines are for more conventional viruses.
Stormcrow
GM wrote
It’s not at all clear that cleaning up the air would be that expensive.
Think about what you really need to do, to clean up the air sufficiently. Bottom line is you simply filter the airflow to block all particulates above a certain size. Coronavirus virions typically lie within the 80-100 nanometer range typical of most viruses. But mesh sizes in the 300 nm range are typical of N-95 masks, and they clearly suffice. That involves some physics I don’t currently understand, but it also involves the fact that coronaviruses form aerosols with dimensions several times that of the virions themselves. Air filters capable of doing this job are rated MIRV-13 or better, and these are retail items in hardware stores. And they don’t cost an arm or a leg. Price them at Costco if you doubt me.
That’s why Corsi-Rosenthal boxes are something a half competent layman can run up with filters, a cardboard frame, duck tape, and hardware store box fans.
GM wrote
No doubt about that.
But the Chinese lay population lost patience after Omicron raised the stakes. February 2022, IIRC. Shortly after that, IMHO, the government threw up its hands. Even a strict dictatorship needs some degree of voluntary compliance. I think Xi Jinping simply found that tipping point, and then did the only thing he practically could. Everybody knew that the immediate result would be literally millions of Chinese fatalities, and that’s exactly what happened. IIRC, Ian wrote about it, here. But Xi Jinping could no longer steer the ship of state in the right direction, even with a firmly sitting dictator’s resources at his command.
The US was never going to get this right, after Donald Trump poisoned the dialogue about masking in his failed 2020 re-election campaign.
But Omicron, the Variant from Hell, broke every surviving Covid containment effort that was still operational at the close of 2021. Including New Zealand, which was still holding on with its fingernails.
You may have run across the suggestion floated in the Covid research community, to classify the Omicron variant of Covid-19 as a different species in its own right. Beside the point, but understandable under the circumstances.
That’s also the point at which I switched from 3M 9210 disposable masks to HF-800 series respirators. Long-service respirators for a long war. Easy decision to make at that point, because I halfway expected something might break and hand us a harder problem, and did my homework accordingly. Covid could have turned Mary Poppins into a doomsaying pessimist.
KT Chong
Maybe it’s not long covid. It’s just that people have been eating Danish butter cookies.
PSA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laNz-SYCqSU
🤢
Okay, no more Danish butter cookies for me.
Curt Kastens
Well in defence of the Indians the rat ran over the cookies before the cookies had been cooked and packaged. i imagine that conditions were like this in the US in 1880 and will be like this again in the US by 2030, except there might be more radiation background noise by 2030.