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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.
When I was quite young, I adopted the stereotypical pretentious reddit fedora mentality - other people are just dumb sheeple who follow the herd, I'm smarter than them, I'm an independent thinker, etc. As I got a little older I softened on that. I thought, well that's not really fair, people generally do try their best and everyone has a reason for acting the way they do, I shouldn't be so arrogant as to think that I'm all that different from them.
But Covid kinda tanked my assessment of humanity in general and I'm back to thinking that most people really are just dumb sheeple who follow the herd. Covid was empirical proof of that. The media really can just turn mass sentiment on or off, like flipping a switch, and people will go along with it because it's "the right thing to do". Turn the switch on, and people who are ordinarily perfectly reasonable are frothing at the mouth saying you're killing grandma, you're a menace to society, you're a dirty plague rat. Turn the switch off and it's all forgotten. Like it never even happened. They don't even think about it anymore. How can I trust that they have any deeply held convictions or principles at all, if the sentiment comes and goes that easily?
Granted, people have always believed dumb things throughout history. Mass psychosis has existed for as long as we've had mass society. So, taking a broad enough view, Covid didn't really teach us anything new. But I do think it was possibly the first example that showed how spectacularly easy it is to manipulate mass sentiment in the social media age. At least communism required a commitment on your part; it demanded that you have skin in the game for the long haul. Now the political flow of society can be turned on or off like a faucet, they can direct people over here one day and over there the next, running everyone ragged because they're deathly afraid of not getting enough likes on their TikToks from The Right People or whatever the hell it is that kids worry about these days.
With each passing year, reality does more and more to chip away at my faith in the inherent nobility of the human spirit. I'm bitter about it.
I empathize with your sentiment but I think it's a little bit uncharitable, I mean people had a valid right to be afraid of the virus as well. My father was high risk and ended up dying from it, so to paint everyone who freaked out about the virus as a sheeple is slightly insulting, though I realize that for the majority of people they didn't have nearly as much reason to worry. I also wonder if you're living in a blue tribe setting or somewhere outside the US as the response from where I was in a more rural area wasn't nearly as sheeple-y as your post seems to indicate, plenty of people were rolling their eyes the entire time in the small town I was living in
I acknowledge that Covid was an actual disease that actually killed people. But for most of the people who got swept up in Covid safetyism, what they were really responding to was the media campaign, not the underlying empirical facts about the disease itself. That was the core of my complaint.
Covid is still killing people - why aren't we still in lockdown? If reducing deaths from communicable airborne illnesses is a terminal value, why don't we have lockdowns and mask mandates and vaccine mandates every flu season? The major difference between the Covid lockdown era, and the time periods before and after it, is the force of the public propaganda campaign. That was the real operative factor. I didn't think that so many people would be so responsive to that campaign, but they were.
Yes, deep blue. It was inescapable here, impossible not to notice anytime you set foot outside.
Why did we have that strong a media reaction to it? Real question, I honestly have no idea why this became what it was still.
A few reasons:
1: To cover up the fact that our CDC had directly funded the production of the Covid virus, in conjunction with the Chicoms, and it had gotten out. That's bad for China, bad for the US, bad for the CDC, and bad for Fauci.
2: Trump was president yet, and it was an opportunity to tank the economy and change a bunch of election rules to get him out of office. Worked, sort of. Even with all that they barely scraped out a "win".
3: The sheer hatred and contempt the PMC has for normie americans, and their delight in punishing them for the actions and paranoias of the PMC.
But those don't really explain the global strong media reaction.
That's easy. They're all psychological colonies of whatever the US PMC thinks.
Fuck's sake, Finland holds BLM rallies.
You're all living in America.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Rr8ljRgcJNM
https://www.fininst.uk/events/black-lives-matter/
https://finlandtoday.fi/over-3000-people-join-the-black-lives-matter-protest-in-helsinki-i-am-so-very-proud-of-finland-says-organizer/
https://www.euronews.com/2020/07/08/finland-investigates-complaints-of-police-participation-in-black-lives-matter-protest
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For what it's worth I think the Irish PMC has a comparable degree of contempt for the working-class Irish, which they dress up with progressivism in much the same way as their US counterparts.
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Beats me.
It gave people a lot of outward symbols to latch onto, behaviors you could use to signal your allegiance - the mask, the vaccine card, staying at home. Participating in those rituals felt good, and it helped sustain the memeplex. That was definitely part of it.
It also gave people an excuse to stay at home, watch netflix and avoid social interactions.
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There was a "deadly variant" in NYC during that 11 week period in early 2020, but it was not a "deadly covid variant," it was a deadly treatment protocol and behavior by NYC healthcare workers.
And the media fear narrative only amplified the heinous treatment of covid+ patients (or at least those suspected of or finally popped + at those hospitals by healthcare workers.
If you see two places in the entire world which had a magnitude worse outcome at the same time nearby places with the same demographics do not have those outcomes, trying to claim it was caused by a "deadly variant" virus is nonsense because it requires you to believe the virus is incredibly infections, avg death being over 2 weeks post symptoms, but also didn't spread outside of NYC or northern Italy to nearby areas with similar demographics, density (an also debunked correlative variable), etc.
83% of all covid-blamed deaths in NYC in 2020 were in hospitals in an 11 week period. For an "incredibly deadly variant," you would see far more people dying at home instead of what happened which was people with suspected covid would be isolated, dangerously drugged, mechanically ventilated, and then let die with very little care from healthcare workers as they drowned in their own fluids from bacterial pneumonia without antibiotic treatment.
I commuted regularly to NYC for work for weeks-months at a time and had a front-row seat as the city whipped itself up in a panic glued to their computers and tvs and swallowed everything being fed to them. Luckily for me, I was able to avoid getting anywhere near NYC for the duration of the hysteria. The best NYers can say is they were duped and fell for it.
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I’m not sure that is actually true. NY was ventilating people left and right. We learned that was probably counter productive. That is, I’m not sure the virus killed 4x the normal rate but the virus + Iatrogenesis.
It was scary in the first few weeks. I was scared. But pretty quickly realized this wasn’t the Black Death. Shame on the media et al not catching up to that.
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Not to mention the murderous blunder of sending recovered-yet-contagious patients back to old-age homes full of vulnerable targets so as not to "stress the health care system".
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My sister-in-law is a PA and worked in the COVID ward of her hospital. Ventilation isn't and never was something that is done lightly, and it especially wasn't something that was done lightly in the early days of COVID given the fears of a shortage. She said that people didn't go on ventilators until they couldn't breathe on their own and were otherwise going to die. I'll grant you that some of the early COVID treatments were later found to be sub-optimal, but in those early days they were the best that we had, and we can't fault the medical profession for not knowing everything that we know now.
I’m not “blaming” anyone in the sense of saying those doctors should’ve known. But we later found out things like cpap machines were much more efficient
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My hypothesis remains unfalsified: the media reaction and government reaction was a tool for societal changes, not a tool for saving lives.
It was like those SF movies where some monster, disaster, or disease is ravaging the city, and a plucky scientist shows up saying the response has been all wrong. Only, instead of the authorities or the military listening and solving the problem in half an hour of screentime, they lock him out of the building and the media starts calling him an anti-science conspiracy theorist.
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