ANYONE WHO BELIEVES they know how Covid-19 is going to mutate into "safer" or more globally deadly forms and with that the future of the pandemic and its effects for People, societies, countries and the entire human population is likely to be inaccurate, at best, deadly wrong at worst.
If there is one thing we know the many trillions of viruses in the human and animal population are quite capable of generating new variants that spread with even more alarming frequency than the "original" did and since it is universal there is no knowing where those variants that are the most deadly will arise but we can be more certain that once they do there will be little that will stop their spread, short of some island nation totally and effectively closing their borders.
Anyone who is expecting an end to the pandemic and the disaster it has been is likely going to have their hopes shattered. I've heard it expressed as an article of faith that viruses always become more contagious and less deadly as time passes. Covid viruses have existed for a long time, the one that caused this pandemic didn't come from nowhere. It's better to face the facts, now, that is is going to be with us and dangerous, probably for as long as there are people and animals on the Earth.
Barring some incredible advance in immunology and epidemiology that could eliminate the virus through some as yet unknown means, we're going to have to live with masks, physical distancing, and a whole range of very unpopular, very inconvenient physical means of slowing the spread of new variants.
I think one thing this has shown in the United States and elsewhere is that the modern medical systems, their infrastructures, etc. are breaking and folding under the strain. The numbers of those working in healthcare have been too few to handle this and the facilities in which they practice are too few, too ill-prepared for something like this and not even minimally structured to deal with a sudden flood of sick people. The for-profit medical system in the United States is one thing I would hope to see go as this terrible pandemic continues. If there is another thing we know, here, it will take a really catastrophic failure for the media-addled American public to even accept a terrible reality.
In every way the problem of managing the pandemic has been increased to another breaking point by the lies of the right-wing, Republican-fascist and Republican-fascist tolerant American media. Canada, Britain and elsewhere have also had that experience, in may ways the American death tole is a product of FOX and Rupert Murdoch and Republican-fascist attempts to harness denial and lies about this for political and economic advantage. That is something that must change, they and the foremost social diseases of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. spreading the venereal disease of lies and stupidity have fueled the epidemic and driven up the death tole, the tole of those injured, permanently, in many cases, the catastrophe this has been for scientifically based health care and, so to We The People.
Yesterday I cited the preamble to the Declaration of Independence and its statement about "When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another," they were really talking about the necessity of changing the political and legal basis for the continued well-being of a country. The bulk of that document lists a long list of arguments variable merit, giving reasons to change the political system radically. None of those reasons had the same level of danger to the entire country as this pandemic has given us a reason to radically change our political and legal system or for the country to break apart. I certainly do not want to see the United States break apart, though I think it would probably be better for some regions if they could get shut of the defects in ours and the ghost of slavery that still manages the politics of many states. Those states have, unsurprisingly, had some of the worst policy driven case loads and death-rates in the pandemic. But it's worse than that, such states aren't confined to the old South, the worst states are presently those which are in the control of Republican-fascism, those states have had an outsized role in making things worse, states such as South Dakota and Florida.
I don't see any reason to expect the United States to permanently remain united under this tyranny of lies and rumors and the era of bad-will that will come with any Republican reign for the rest of the existence of that party. There is no living with it, there is no tolerating the Republican-fascist enabling and owned media. The machinations of the Southern States at the original Constitutional Congress to protect slave owning through anti-democratic features embedded in the Constitution, the electoral college that gave us Trump, the anti-democratically constituted Senate, elections being run by often corrupt state government, etc. have become deadly for all of us even as they used to be deadly mostly for Black People, Native Americans and Latinos.
With another wave of this terrible thing, its political use by Republican-fascists and the media, from the sewer level of FOX to the supposedly better New York Times and NPR, they are all complicit. If the law is not changed to prevent them lying us into permanent Republican rule, I don't think it's going to be possible to live in a united states of America except one as oppressive as any of the more enduring modern dictatorships.
This is dead serious and those may well be the terms we deal with and very soon. There's a new variant being announced, spreading from another country with disastrously low vaccination rates into Europe, who knows if it didn't originate in some affluent country and spread to the third world, though even knowing that as a fact would not stop the racists of he Americas and Europe from trying to use it for political advantage.
No comments:
Post a Comment