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Notes -
Biden: Pandemic is over
Of course, for all important purposes, pandemic has been over in most of the Western world for most of this year - ie. sure, there's a disease going around, but the "pandemic mentality" is gone, and so have at least the most visible and onerous restrictions - but this sort of a declaration, offhand and qualified as it is, seems like a point in the general development.
It's already evident in social media that COVID doomers - the ones who would still want to mask up, keep up restrictions etc. - are angry and frustrated, as they've been for months, but I also wonder how the sort of "reverse doomers" who declared a year ago that Western world is never going to declare the pandemic over and give up restrictions, either out of stupidity or out of a malignant conspiracy, are interpreting it.
Biden is a bit slow. Pandemic took a lethal hit when George Floyd died, and ended when the war began; if not for war, it could as well be finished off by climate disasters in Asia or something. There can only be one Current Thing, it seems. As a sort of reverse doomer, I think the pandemic has served its purpose as a long-awaited opportunity for certain updates. We now have a strong rhetorical casus belli against «existential risks» and «irresponsible research» in general, that will fuel EA cluster and be used against independent AI. We have all the infrastructure for another round of lockdownism, if needed. We have unprecedented synchronization of policies and propaganda in developed and even many developing nations, that is further refined with sanctions on Russia and China.
But also, and less conspiratorially, pandemic is over only in the sense that we’ve learned there's not much else to do. What has transpired was more or less the best that institutions of the world could manage.
No widespread seriousness and autonomy for voluntary self-isolation for a few weeks to let it fizzle out.
No shutting off underdeveloped countries plus top-down China-style quarantines to achieve the same result artificially.
No fast vaccine rollout to win time for a more substantial response.
No stockpiles, no robustness in logistics, no nothing.
No will to take it on the chin and go on.
So we all had to deal with some fraction of tyranny, for months in some places and years in others, ravage global economy, and with over six hundred million confirmed cases and who knows how many nobody bothered to count – either get sick with high probability, or tolerate vaccine side effects, or get both the vaccine side effects and sickness. Okay. Best we could do.
It's not clear if it's meaningfully over. The economy is still reeling. Most of the important reasons behind this bizarre failure have not gone anywhere (shutting down virology won't make our logistics not shit itself when the next major disruption happens). We're just mentally exhausted with COVID as a newsworthy topic, and that too may be in part because of its lasting effects on cognition. But... to interpret that as lasting effects of infection would be rash. This stubbornly peddled narrative seems to be almost pure bullshit. Maybe the real cause, inasmuch as the effect is real, is exactly the collective long COVID we all had, 2020-2022. I'm happy to see it go, but consequences may linger.
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