Infection Rebellion

Seeing the Situation Globally From Canada

In Canada, public discussion about the covid pandemic is starting to get intense. It is like a breaking point is being reached. It parallels but does not quite match public rumble in other English speaking countries. The situation is different in each.

In Canada, we have not had public figures talking openly about “herd immunity”. That is not acceptable in Canadian society. However, plenty of them do have these eugenic type ideas in their heads and are working to effect that kind of policy by stealth.

Our social and public health systems have not been wrecked to the same extent they have been in the US and UK, so that has been a bulwark against the ravages of covid here. Our numbers had been much less dire than these countries and we seemed to be beating the virus last autumn. Then omicron arrived.

Our numbers are now going up to compare with the worse hit countries. The Atlantic bubble has collapsed. The two causes of this are obvious; the emergence of the Omicron, and the Great Barrington conspiracy finally cracking resistance in the larger provinces.

These two factors work well together. The success of the relatively modest mitigations and vaccinations had greatly reduced the Delta variant of covid. The “force it open” bunch used this as the excuse to dismantle these limited infrastructures and begin a “return to normal”.

Then Omicron arrived. All attempts to reestablish measures in order to control it have been resisted. It helped the Barringtons to push the line that the pandemic is permanent, will become ‘milder’ and can be ‘lived with’.

The public is becoming frustrated and demoralized by the pandemic. Forces pushing for proper measures against it are also getting demoralized. The best must become a lot more militant and that does seem to be happening but not fast enough.

Analysis

From Canada it looks like the pandemic and the pandemic pushers are winning all over. In Canada itself they are winning. However, my theme in a previous post, which I will continue to develop, is that they are failing on a global basis.

A month ago, before the effects of Omicron were so clear, I divided the world into the western nations where the pandemicists were succeeding, and the rest of the world where they were receding. I find it is more complex than that. It is hard to get a clear idea of how the human versus covid virus war is going due to many factors; misinformation from several perspectives, unreliable and inconsistent statistics, the shifting politics of many countries.

I can divide the nations of earth into three categories; where the pandemicists are winning, where they are losing, and where it is in contention. While there are countries in all areas of the world in all three of these categories, I can make generalizations about the geographic areas.

The pandemicists are generally winning in Europe, North America, and Australia. They are generally losing in the Far East, the Middle East, and Africa. Latin America and South Asia are in contention. Call them zones A, B, and C, in the above order.

The caveat must be made that these are generalizations. A, B, and C countries exist in all parts of the world. Many countries pursued a type B policy for some time and then fell to some sorts of coups. They were ‘opened up to the world’, meaning to infection, with predictable results.

Sometimes the reverse has occurred. Countries which had been ravaged came under tough, responsible government and the pandemic was effectively suppressed, even with minimal resources.

Zone A is the core territory of the old imperial empires and their base populations, sometimes called the Atlantic peoples or the Atlanticists. They have the most pretence to being democracies but are where capitalism and oligarchy are most embedded. Since these people are the most dominated by oligarchy and have the most dug in ‘individualist’ attitudes, they will have the most difficulty in doing what has to be done to eliminate the pandemic.

Zone B are the countries where a cultural understanding of interdependence is strongest. People in these places will comply with their government or local leaders and will not tolerate trouble makers. This is not about “trusting government”, but recognizing that civilization requires a government able to govern.

Zone C are areas where these two cultural tendencies are in collision. They tend to have histories of both violent suppression and strong, often armed, resistance. In several of these countries, local governments are neutralizing the ‘herd immunity’ policies of national governments.

Several lessons can be drawn from the experiences of non industrialized countries. Vaccines are not critical to controlling the disease. In many of these countries, the people are justifiably suspicious of vaccines.

It is seen that often the best method of contagion control is plain old quarantine; the ‘forty days’. The people of African and Middle Eastern countries in particular retain folk memories of what to do in such situations. If you have been exposed to the contagion, you and your family stay home while your neighbours organize delivery of necessities, until the forty days have passed.

One misinformation meme which is being accepted in zone A is that all the zone B countries are giving up on suppressing the pandemic. They are adopting ‘live with it’ policies. China is now the only holdout.

What these countries are in fact doing is changing their policies due to the fact that better tools are now in place to control the pandemic, for those countries which really want to control it. Lockdowns are generally no longer necessary. Vaccination is now almost universal, treatment of breakthrough cases has improved, reliable and quick testing is available, people understand how masks and ventilation work in controlling airborne diseases.

It cannot be emphasized too strongly that the reason the zone A countries are failing at pandemic control is because their rulers want them to fail. Behind the herd immunity mentality is the view of humanity as a herd to be controlled and exploited. The Barringtons want the useless eaters culled. They want the health care and education systems broken up.

Going Forward

From these observations of the pandemic from an international perspective, it is possible to make some conclusions about how it will end. It will go on for several years. It will not become ‘milder’ and more capable of being ‘lived with’ but rather, keep evolving more powerful variants.

Covid’s effects on the global economy have barely begun. It is not well understood that the countries of the far east which have generally suppressed the virus and where much of the world’s manufacturing is now done, have been keeping the world’s economy going in the crisis. They have been able to do so simply because they have been able to suppress the virus.

There is no way to bring an end to the pandemic in the zone A countries. This is solely for political reasons. The economies of these countries are deteriorating and will collapse.

Meanwhile, these countries will continue act as reservoirs of the disease and breeder of new mutations. The Delta and Omicron variants both in countries which were operating on the ‘let it rip’ principle and so will the next variation. This creates hardship for the world’s other countries.

As the economic and financial power of the zone A countries collapses so will their military and political power. This development has been under way for awhile. Covid has put the process on fast forward.

Finally, these nations will undergo political revolutions of some kind and rejoin the world, not as hegemons, but as equals. They will have to comply with a new international consensus about how public health is to be managed.

Until then, the next few years will be very nasty ones for people living in zone A countries, such as Canada.