Andrew Nikiforuk is furious. Our political leaders continue to live in a state of denial. He writes:
A biological transformative event, which may have killed nearly 20 million people by revised estimates and has burdened millions more with chronic illness, continues to burn through the world’s population.
Yet, although the authorities know that masking, ventilation, air filtration and isolating when sick can dampen this fire and protect the public health, they have inexplicably abandoned these tools.
Ontario’s chief medical officer of health, for instance, even banished an inadequate five-day protocol for isolating while sick and infectious. How’s that for “laissez-faire epidemiology”?
The chief medical officer made this bad decision at a time when, as the epidemiologist Larry Brilliant recently explained in Wired magazine, the BA.5 variant has vastly increased its viral reach “by being able to infect people who’ve had three doses of the vaccine or people who had COVID a month ago.”
Having surrendered all other public health options, the authorities now count on vaccines, whose effectiveness in the face of immune busting variants is steadily waning, to serve as our absolute defense against the disease. Expecting vaccines, already one step behind an evolving virus, to end the pandemic makes about as much sense as expecting bitcoin to end poverty in El Salvador.
Consider the numbers:
COVID has killed more than 14,317 Canadians since December 2021, a month dominated by the first Omicron wave. Or 24,230 if you include estimates of underreporting of COVID deaths — a chronic problem.
By the end of the year the number of dead will likely surpass the totals of the two previous years. Total Canadian COVID deaths calculated solely by year look like this: 13,791 in 2022 up till Sept. 5; 14,711 in 2021 and 15,606 in 2020.
Daily deaths from COVID (500 in the last two weeks) remain five times higher than average Canadian flu mortality.
Tara Moriarty, an infectious disease researcher at the University of Toronto, with associates, publishes an important COVID hazard index as a public health service. In August, Moriarty told us that more than half of Canada’s 190,585 COVID hospitalizations during the pandemic to date have occurred since last December.
Incredibly, one in every 402 people living in Canada has been hospitalized with a variant of Omicron since December 2021.
And we have decided to abandon COVID protocols? This is pure folly.
Image: follytheatre.org
7 comments:
Seems the FluTruxKlan won after all.
Cap
They claim that they are standing up for freedom, Cap. Something has gone terribly wrong.
Rest easy folks ...
Humans' wildly successful, collective efforts have defeated covid!
This bodes well for our battle with climate change.
Oh, were that it was true, PoV!
I disagree profoundly with you, Anon. But if you have the courage to inital what you wrote, I'll publish it.
Adults Aged 35–44 Died At Twice The Expected Rate Last Summer, Life Insurance Data Suggests
"In that three-month period, the change was such that, there was something that occurred..."
Death claims for working-age adults under group life insurance policies spiked well beyond expected levels last summer and fall, according to data from 20 of the top 21 life insurance companies in the United States.
Now do you have the courage to admit what it was that changed during that time
Are you suggesting that death rates have influenced public policy, Ogi? What are you driving at?
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