Covid notes 10; As the Pandemic turns Endemic.
“In epidemiology, an infection is said to be endemic (from Greek ἐν en "in, within" and δῆμος demos "people") in a population when that infection is constantly maintained at a baseline level in a geographic area without external inputs.”-Wikipedia
I am now up to covid notes number ten. These covid notes are not the most read of the stuff I put out. I cannot understand why; they are full of my brilliant insights into the cause and effects of the pandemic.
However, I have taken a fairly casual approach to discussing the pandemic. With the pandemic in Canada seemingly approaching its end, or at least the end of the beginning, I will start take a more edgy tone about it. I am going to broaden my scope. This is the last of my ‘covid notes’.
I will continue to blog on three things. One is the sociopolitical problems in Canada brought into sharp focus by the pandemic. Second is the grim message Covid19 has sent Canada and most other countries about the lack of readiness for any kind of real emergency, pandemic or otherwise.
Third is to look at the global implications of the pandemic which is just getting started in parts of the world. Covid is the entree into a turbulent decade in which the old order will collapse. I wonder if Escobar will sue me for plagiarism if I call my future posts “the raging twenties notes?”
Personally
While all this goes on I will still be living my life in Toronto the Good. I have gotten over my second dose of Moderna, almost two weeks now. The vaccine is at full power now, so covid bugs beware.
The word is that the second shot usually has stronger “side effects” than the first one. I confirm this from experience. The first shot, two months ago, I hardly felt. I wondered if he had actually given me anything.
With this one the side effects were almost special effects. I really needed some extra bed time. But it was very easy to book and there was no line up at all; I just walked over to a local pharmacy. This was unlike the first one where I had to go across town and stand in line for an hour.
I do not, however, think I am now completely safe from covid. I will be wearing a mask for awhile. I have grown pretty comfortable with them anyway and will likely keep on wearing them when I go to certain places.
Neighbourly
I do not think the great plague is over just yet. Too many people seem to think it is. Take a look at places like the U.K., where in spite of a high immunization rate, higher than Canada, cases are now climbing again.
My reading of the data is that the bug is gradually becoming more resistant to the vaccines. In the developed countries which have failed to suppress it, it is becoming concentrated in those sectors of the population who cannot or will not get vaccinated. The saddest are those in the type of workplaces which are big breeding grounds for the virus, yet whose employers refuse to give time off to go get stuck.
There are still plenty of covidiots who refuse to get vaccinated. There is one less in my neighbourhood. He was the rotund main local organizer of the “covid is a hoax, break out of the lockdown” movement. He was recently found dead in his apartment. It is believed that he probably did not die from anorexia nervosa.
I think it will be difficult to get up to the +80% vaccination rate that will be required to get something like real herd immunity (Moo!) We will still get a smaller fourth wave, likely in the fall. But I think the worst is now over in Canada.
Worldly
The frightening thing is that the vaccination of most of the world has not even begun. Covid will have plenty of time to mutate. At best it will not be under control worldwide until 2023.
Meanwhile, all the nonsense from corrupt and incompetent governments continues to impede cleaning up the virus. The most disgusting thing is the attacks by the mRNA drug companies, Pfizer and Moderna, highly invested in by everyone’s friend Bill Gates, on their competition. This slows down world vaccination. It also puts people in Canada who have already got the AstraZenica vax in a bad situation.
It looks like a fightback is slowly developing against this “intellectual property rights” nonsense. But the best way to fight it is to use vaccines which are being offered with reduced or waived patent royalties, such as Astra Zenica and the Russian Sputnik V. World Health Organization has now bestowed its blessing upon a Chinese poke which is already being widely used.
All over the word, people are totally enraged at the incompetence and contempt for life shown by their governments. The mismanagement is so similar as to suggest an underlying cause. I will suggest what that cause is.
The global wave of rage has even got cowardly and complacent Canada highly perturbed about its elected leaders. It is interesting here that some provinces and territories did the job right. It was mostly the bigger and wealthier ones which made a mess out of it.
It is also notable that these prosperous polities messed things up in fairly similar ways. They did so no matter what political party, with whatever nominal political ideology, was in office. Again, some sort of underlying cause seemed to be at work.
The forces of darkness
There is now plenty of reason to believe that powerful global interests wanted the pandemic response to be ineffective. These not so mysterious forces wanted the pandemic to become endemic in order to insure a profit centre for themselves. The idea is being planted in our minds that covid will become endemic, with new variants always emerging, like the flu but more dangerous.
This brings us to the question of whether these forces actually created the virus. This has been the domain of the serious conspiracy freaks. We must remember that a lot of what the conspiracy people claim turns out to have a core of truth.
The behaviour of some corporations in the drug and chemical business is such that nothing should be ruled out about them. They would have no need to create anything new; lots of viruses could be taken off mother nature’s shelf and used for this purpose. But it is likely they merely waited for a suitable virus to come along, as happens regularly, and then gave it a little push.
Some writers have found that the covid virus in its early spread seemed to pop up in many places at once, even before the Wuhan outbreak, as though it were being seeded. It may well have been, but less direct methods would have been sufficient to get it around. For example, the World Health Organization, partly funded by our friend Bill Gates, infamously advised against the use of masks.
The object, of course, is to make the disease endemic in poor countries. This creates a reservoir for the disease and a breeder of new strains. Also, competition must be forced out so that a very profitable monopoly of the vaccine is created.
Patterns
The pattern in so many different countries was for the local health authorities to read the writing on the wall and take the appropriate measures. The political authorities would then intervene and shove them aside. They then made complete messes out of the pandemic response.
The appropriate measures against an imminent pandemic are well studied in schools of public health. Where these measures were applied, the impact of covid has been minimal. This has been true even in countries where public health infrastructure have been eroded by austerian nonsense, or in simply poor countries. Nowhere was there any reason for covid to get so far out of control.
The different responses in even wealthy English speaking countries is interesting. In New Zealand the Aderne government locked down at once and made a determined effort to eliminate the virus and keep it out. New Zealand suffered among the least economic damage of any country.
In Australia the government started out with the common mentality that the economy has to keep rolling no matter what. Then it abruptly changed course and forced a serious lockdown. It succeeded in spite of having a federal system similar to Canada’s.
South of the border, America has been one of the worst hit countries due to the idiotic libertarian mentality that prevails there. It seems they will be unable to convince enough people to get vaccinated to achieve herd immunity. This will hasten the decline of the USA and complicate recovery in Canada.
It is interesting that Ireland started out well. They stopped covid at their shores. Then they quit quarantine measures for no apparent reason and quickly developed a severe wave of covid.
The Future
The message which needs to be pounded hard and constantly is that the covid outbreak is a warning. It is not all that bad as viral infections go and should not have been hard to suppress. Yet most governments were unable to cope with it.
Most countries seem to have no emergency planning at all. That includes Canada. There were not even stockpiles of personal protective equipment.
A really serious pandemic would have killed hundreds of millions of people and brought about a global economic collapse with widespread starvation. There will be more serious pandemic viruses. They are coming more frequently and a multitude of factors are enabling their rapid global spread.
So far we have been lucky. Various foolish human behaviours, from consuming exotic animals to factory Farming to research into bioweapons is creating vectors for the next pandemic to find its way into homo sapiens. Our habit of jet setting all over the place is the big spreader.
A number of other writers on this topic have made observations on the lines of; the real pandemic is bad government, or capitalism, or selfish attitudes. I think this problems are going to solve themselves in the near future. They are topics for lots of future blogs.
I will leave my readers with some further reading on the subjects covered here. Test next week.
A piece on how bad things could get in the ‘third world’.
https://eand.co/this-is-why-the-world-is-facing-a-covid-apocalypse-b7e9d6935b7d
About Bill Gates
https://newrepublic.com/article/162000/bill-gates-impeded-global-access-covid-vaccines
About the motives of ‘Big Pharma’ in this pandemic.
https://eand.co/this-is-why-big-pharma-doesnt-want-covid-to-end-e3a44280015f
More on the dire consequences just beginning in the ’thirdies’.
A die Hard Communist view of it all.