Four Years Later, Two Million Infections A Day

Disastrous covid failure

The US is on course to post around two million cases of Sars2 infection next week, maybe three million.

It will be the second largest, or even the largest wave, of the entire pandemic.

The UK is in a similar boat, with researchers forecasting the largest wave of infections yet.

Much of Europe will see a massive wave too.

We don’t know this from any testing regime, but from waste water monitoring.

Potentially the largest wave of the pandemic and there remains only informal testing. Governments are happy to spend billions supporting genocide but they won’t spend that money giving us free covid tests.

In September 2021, when asked when the pandemic would be under control, Anthony Fauci said 'you've got to be under 10,000 infections a day to feel comfortable.'

Now we’re at two million. Per day. And he didn’t say this in the context of no vaccines. By September 2021, a majority in the US had been vaccinated.

Deaths of course will not hit the peaks of earlier waves, the most vulnerable already dead and the rest of us having some protection against the worst virus outcomes as a result of vaccination, infection, and in too many cases, both.

Despite this, weekly deaths in the US, which are at nearly 1,800, are almost certain to go above 2,000. The UK is probably looking at upwards of 500 deaths per week. Hospitals in the US, UK and Europe are being stretched to breaking point, with talk of care being rationed depending on how bad this wave is.

Kids are now bearing a greater risk than ever before, with infectious disease deaths among 5-17 year olds now 32% higher than they were pre-pandemic. Cumulative covid infections are weakening immune systems in the young, leaving them open to opportunistic infections. Remember, deliberate infection of the young was - and is - the plan.

Currently those who aren’t vulnerable will be made vulnerable in this wave, as covid does what it does to bodies.

It’s been four years. Four years. This is total, utter and astonishing failure.

On December 31st, 2019 a message from a doctor in Wuhan reported a mystery pneumonia whose origin was an unknown virus. That doctor, Li Wenliang, later died of covid at just 34 years of age.

Covid quickly became the world’s leading cause of death. The Economist estimates a total pandemic death toll so far of 27 million. It has dropped down the overall rankings now, but it remains the leading cause of infectious disease death, overtaking tuberculosis, a position that disease had held for decades. Do you ever remember anyone calling tuberculosis mild? Or TB outbreaks on hospital wards and in schools being ignored? Parents casually shrugging off a dose of TB in their child?

Yesterday a doctor in Portugal posted on Twitter how infection controls in hospitals have collapsed.

He followed this up by saying those controls were ‘strict, thorough and accepted no excuses.’ This just doesn’t happen any more, viral spread of infectious diseases in hospitals is now assumed and expected, with no mitigation attempted.

There are similar stories from organ transplant wards.

From cystic fibrosis clinics.

It’s so shocking.

Especially because millions of vulnerable people mount a weak or even no immune response through vaccination or infection. These people have been sacrificed, fully sacrificed, for good vibes.

I talk a lot about how mass infection has been encouraged by capital and power, but this snapback to a worse safety baseline in healthcare settings than pre-covid, despite far greater risk, is how we know there is something else going on at a social-psychological level. Something strange and deeply worrying. A collective denial about how the world has changed.

I’m sure many have felt this trying to talk to friends and family about the risks covid still presents. People mostly just don’t want to know. People who, on all the other topics, would consider themselves guided by ideas of science and logic.

This hasn’t been an organic process.

A liberal political, media and corporate class mainstreamed ideas that were once confined to the far-right: herd immunity, the mocking of masks, the labelling of covid as a cold or flu. All these formerly heretical ideas were necessary for the great return to profits as usual. Ongoing infection control was a cost that capitalism could not bear. And society largely absorbed these ideas as the route back to recreational liberty.

For so long, we have been told that modern, technological capitalist society is a society of forever progress. People have made careers writing books and creating fancy infographics showing how everything is getting better. While there might be bumps in the road, our journey to the stars, literally and metaphorically, remains unimpeded. Destiny calls.

Into this cultural landscape a new virus appeared and caused a pandemic. In the imaginary, our modern, advanced, technological society quickly made a vaccine and everything went back to normal. Except it didn’t.

A virus unlike any other in global, endemic circulation is infecting millions every day. We’re told in research paper after research paper how bad this thing is for us. The damage it can do to our brains, hearts, lungs, kidneys, livers, blood vessels, nervous system. Even if we’re young. Even if we’re vaccinated. Even if we’ve been infected before.

Researchers tell us Sars2 infects the body very differently to a common cold virus or flu.

But an almost unspoken cultural pact suppresses the truth of physical reality.

There is a fear in internalising the idea that everything had changed. That it isn't 2019. If it wasn't over with vaccines, then maybe it will never be over. And so maybe that means I have to change forever. That fear has been overcome with normalisation and denial, psychological modes abetted by dark money groups (like the Koch network) and mainstream corporations (like Delta Airlines and the infamous letter to the CDC demanding shorter isolation periods) who strategized about how to get people to no longer fear the virus.

A very similar dynamic is at play with the climate and ecological crisis. We’re progressing to the stars drowning in plastic on an overheating, burning and flooding planet. Cognitive dissonance reigns, once again aided by corporations and oil bosses who say there is no science behind the call to stop burning fossil fuels, everything will be fine.

Blocking out the bad reconciles the two sides of the mind. The happy future can remain the full brain idea.

Is this inability to reckon with regression enabled by the consumption of apocalyptic imaginaries?

The most popular film on Netflix over the holidays was Leave The World Behind and one of the most popular series was Carol & The End Of The World. Both are about, well, the end of the world. I liked them a lot. But they did make me wonder about how the culture, sensing, feeling and seeing this breakdown, is responding by feeding us visions that help us displace rather than reckon with realities.

Perhaps under capitalism it is only inevitable that our fears are commoditised and turned into objects for passive consumption.

Frighteningly, this mode of passive consumption has been overlaid onto physical reality itself, a virus being casually and passively consumed, just another object in the culture.

And as it once again pushes forward like a tsunami, leaving bodies in its wake, as difficult as it might be in moments like this, we must never accept the devastation it causes as normal or inevitable.