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Notes -
Covid global health emergency is over, WHO says
Yes, I know, Covid "has been over" for well over a year, pretty much no-one cares about this topic anyway, but I wonder if we'll now start more getting full appraisals of the entire Covid period. It is bewildering to consider how little people (apart from the two formed and ongoing "Covid tribes" - lockdown/vaccine skeptics on one hand, zero-covidists still wearing masks on the other hand) care about Covid now, considering how large it loomed for two years. For instance, I watched some Finnish election debates a few months ago, and the dire financial/general status of the health care system was frequently discussed with almost no mentions and indications that the Covid crisis and the decisions done during this period might have had anything to do with it.
What are all the ways people here would say the pandemic era changed the world? I don't think that all the effects will be visible or evident for years to come - there will yet be a lot of stuff where people in ten years might say "of course the Covid era changed that" but isn't properly yet considered to be a Covid effect.
Even though I think the disease was real and needed at least some level of intervention, I fear that we’ve learned all the wrong lessons and are creating the basis for severe oppression in the name of safety, especially things that should never have been seriously considered. And the reason is that I think most white-collar people are so safetyist that it skewed the entire thing to maximal government intervention and control without any thought to the wider implications.
The inflation and supply chain issues should have been obvious to anyone giving thought to how our supply chain actually works. We don’t keep warehouses full of goods “in the back” as the Karen would say. Everything is manufactured and shipped in a very short timeframe. Our system is set up to deliver just in time. Which, obviously means that you can’t just “shut down” manufacturing or cut shifts back or whatever else without breaking the thing. It doesn’t work that way. You can’t have food processing plants shut down and still have food on the shelves or turn on a dime from restaurant ready food to grocery food. It doesn’t work.
And the level of authoritarianism that we enabled without thinking about it is insane. In Australia, you needed permission to go more than a couple of miles from home. You needed and easily revocable pass in some parts of Europe and China. Even in America, health departments were empowered to simply order things closed without so much as a hearing. And without any regulation requiring that they make businesses forced to curtail operations by the government to be able to sue or demand payment for their loses. Also the “emergency” had no legally enforceable end date or even a requirement for re-authorization. The emergency will last *until the people empowered to run your life decide that it’s over and they’ll simply hand it back.” Which, as you point out, only ended in May 2023, after being declared in March of 2020. Three years and two months of fiat control unanswerable to anyone is not something I find compatible with the idea of human rights. In fact, had you told people of the “before times”, even if you’re talking about the 2000s, they’d have assumed a coup had taken place in these countries. You need a pass to enter a business? Permission to open? Permission to leave your home?
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