This is the second anniversary of the pandemic in Canada. If I understand the statistics correctly, Canada has done better than most countries but worse than many. We definitely could have done a lot better, but that could be said of most countries.
It seems that, relatively, we have had better odds at not getting the virus, but worse survival odds if we ended up in hospital. The latter could be laid to the very poor job the health system did at protecting the elderly in care homes. It might also have something to do with the poor state of our hospitals even before the pandemic arrived.
The low infection rate is mostly due to people in Canada generally having enough sense to follow basic precautions. Some good efforts by local governments and smaller provincial governments helped as well. It cannot be credited to the performance of provincial and federal government.
For two years provincial governments in Canada have fought against every effective means of controlling the pandemic, making it far worse than it needed to be. The rationale, such as it was, was that such measures were too hard to implement and could damage ‘the economy.’ The federal government seemed confused and locked into a ‘defer to the provinces’ posture, refusing to use the powers it had, which could have relieved the situation.
To look around the world, the handful of countries which held to an elimination strategy against covid were easily able to protect their citizens. In no way did a ‘zero covid‘ policy damage any economy. Countries which have done this have mostly done better economically. They learned better ways of doing things.
My latest worldwide scan of progress against covid confirms what I have previously noticed. Africa, East Asia, and the Middle East have generally done well at keeping covid at bay. Europe, North America, and Australia have generally failed. South Asia and Latin America are somewhat in contention.
In most countries, there is a fight between elements who want proper health measures employed, and forces which want the contagion to spread or are indifferent to its spread, and seek to halt or sabotage these measures. In some cases, one or the other tendency has decisively prevailed.
Where public health has prevailed, it is because there is either a government system which fundamentally works, or a powerfully organized public, or both. It is concerning that such conditions are seen to exist in only a fraction of the world’s countries.
But even dirt poor African countries are able to manage covid effectively. Covid could get no foothold in countries already under stress from foreign backed insurrection and economic blockade. Governments which caved in and adopted a ‘live with covid’ stance did so not from public pressure but out of intense pressure from outside economic pressure and corrupt internal interests.
Thus, from the perspective of Canada, within the western world that has generally given up, it looks like the so called ‘let it rip’ philosophy has won. But looked at internationally, advocates of ordinary public health measures are slowly prevailing. The key to this has been China, the driver of the world’s economy, which has refused to give in to pressure to ‘open up’.
This leads me to the endless, bewildered discussion of the motivations of the ‘let it rips’. There are two factions in the global elites which are often at odds but have partially congruent goals in this pandemic. Financialists would like the pandemic and pandemic measures to continue as they facilitate social control.
The tendency which is of more concern is ‘let it rip’ or ‘get back to work’, coming from industrial capitalists. These kinds of people refuse to see covid as a problem; it is just nature ‘culling the weak and useless’ . They want no interference with economic operations and the constant flow of profits.
But their motives are also deeper than that. They have had a long standing agenda of reducing or eliminating things they see as a waste of money or as interfering with their imagined control over the economy and the population. Measures to control the pandemic interfere with these aims.
These people hate everything ‘public’. To them this is ‘socialism’ which they think is a bad thing. Three public things they really hate are public health care, public education, and public transit.
All three of these things need funding restored to them in order to control the pandemic, as well as more freedom from political interference. Health care workers need to be paid adequately and their numbers built up so there is reserve capacity for dealing with public health events. Teachers need to be paid properly, class sizes reduced, and schools kept in repair. Transit needs to be funded properly, fares reduced or eliminated, and systems built out.
The industrialists have discovered that covid makes a good wrecking ball for all three of these systems. Adding to the stress of inadequate pay and facilities, they refuse workers in these sectors proper anti viral protection. They keep the covid waves coming.
Soon, nurses and doctors are walking away from hospitals. Teachers walk away from schools and the students are walked away by their parents, often to private schools. There is no mystery in that the private schools can continue to mask but public schools cannot. Riders keep walking away from transit and this creates the excuse for further service cuts.
No one should adduce from this that industrial capitalists are intelligent. This is no more than low cunning; these people are extremely short sighted and stupid. They think dealing with the economic consequences of covid is a matter of forcing everyone back to work. They think workers are interchangeable and in infinite supply.
This attitude swings the wrecking ball at the entire economy. Supply chains begin to break down as people simply leave workplaces where they are unsafe, ill paid, and disrespected, and find other ways to make a living. This trend is much more pronounced in the USA than in Canada, but it has global implications.
Thus, no one should have the idea that covid is over or nearly over. The pandemic has barely started. There is no way to predict how it will end or when. On various internet discussions those with a clue about it have identified the possible outcomes.
One person who has articulated these potential futures very well is Dr David Berger, emergency ward physician and air filter salesman, twitter handle aBsuRdiSTecROnickLeR@YouAreLobbyLud My apologies for plagiarizing the hell out of his twitter post but I strongly support his analysis. He has identified five scenarios.
First, the ‘base case.’ That is; “Successive waves, new variants, the agony grinds on for years, gradually people get sick of being sick, chronic ill health burden snowballs. Airborne mitigations gradually introduced, society eventually adapts and returns to basic public health principles of disease suppression. Elimination eventually occurs.”
Second, the ‘Worst case’. This is; “Rapidly accumulating chronic ill health burden +/- increasing lethality of new variants. Catastrophic, destabilizing effect on society leads to sooner attempts to eliminate. May or may not be successful. Serious effect on geopolitical uncertainty.”
Third, his best case is that a ‘second generation’ vaccine proves to be ‘sterilizing’ and the disease goes away. He is not optimistic about this.
Fourth is the ‘Wild Card’. The disease suddenly goes away on its own. He is not optimistic about this either.
Fifth, what he does not think will ever happen is “a scenario where ‘living with COVID’ is a viable, acceptable mode of life for the human race.”
He makes one dire observation which I do not support; that in the end the idiots who killed so many people by preventing public health measures will claim credit for defeating the virus, while those kept rightly predicting and calling for such measures will be demonized.
Instead, I am inclined more toward the ideas put forward by various ‘left’ platforms and commentators. In the end the “herd immunity” governments will be driven out by popular revolts in many countries. Serious restructurings of governments and economies, and even outright revolutions, will result.
The Trotskyites of World Socialist Forum fantasize that the pandemic will lead to this simultaneous world uprising of the ‘international working class.’ No, it will not. It will be a protracted affair playing out in a different time frame and a different way in each country.
In ‘base case’ and ‘worst case’ above, and in advanced countries like Canada, change will most likely be actuated by the professional/technical/managerial classes. They will get tired of the endless roller coaster caused by the incompetents in charge. They will have the competence and resources to be able to organize to put a stop to it.
Their revolt will not be a matter of storming the halls of power and abolishing the present order. The media and the public will be most likely to barely notice it at first. Elements of the financial capitalists will probably facilitate this as the turbulence caused by the pandemic starts to outweigh its benefits for them.
Elected officials and their business handlers will be told in effect; “Hello. We’re the committee to bring an end to the pandemic. Turn the controls over to us and get out of the way or we will simply pull the plug on everything until you do.”
Ending the pandemic will be a simple matter of using the powers the federal government has but has failed to use; the emergencies act, the public health act, residual powers, declaratory powers. It would take about three months and would be mostly about putting the systems in place which should have been there all along. After that it would be a matter of some short and local ‘smoke jumping’.
In Canada, the present campaign to convince people that the pandemic is over or almost over is despicable. ICU nurses are screaming on Twitter that they are still at 120% -130% capacity. A new and more potent wave is about to hit us.
It has become obvious that we will keep getting hit with more powerful variants of the covid virus. The idea that vaccines and antiviral drugs are going to end the pandemic have been proved to be just as dumb as the idea that we would eliminate bacterial diseases just with antibiotics.
We are now going into the most dangerous stage of the pandemic. Government is giving up and throwing everything open. Vital infrastructures quickly thrown into place to manage past waves has been dismantled. Critical information is being suppressed.
Much has been written about the special danger to the vulnerable. That includes me because I am fairly old and have health problems which could make a trip to covid land especially rough and dangerous. Lockdown will not end for people like me until covid ends.
It remains very grim for people in care homes. The mismanagement of these places is just as bad as it was when the pandemic started. We have not yet finished off enough of these money drainers who should just die at age 70. Another wave or two will be needed.
If the past two years were a bad time to have to go into a hospital, the next two years will be a really frightening time to need emergency care or essential surgery. It will be the worst of times for the poor and vulnerable; for anyone who cannot self protect, who cannot refuse.
These conditions will be even further exacerbated by the economic turmoil created by the pandemic, financial speculation, and the ridiculous confrontation the NATO countries have gotten themselves into versus the Eurasian bloc.
The covid wrecking ball is being swung at the structures we depend on; on our means to a safe and decent life. The next years will be a very bad time.