COVID-19 pandemic

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)

The COVID-19 pandemic is a pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The WHO declared the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern on January 30, 2020 and ended its public health emergency of international concern declaration on May 5, 2023.

Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z · See also · External links

A

However you slice it, there was never an instance where COVID-19 was milder than the flu. We've never, ever in the history of the pandemic, in all our studies from the beginning until now, have found that COVID-19 is equally risky to the flu. ~ Ziyad Al-Aly

• "If we did so poorly with something like COVID-19, you can imagine how poorly we would do with something like a 1918-level event," Adalja said, referring to the influenza pandemic of 1918 that killed an estimated 50 million people around the world, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
  • Amesh Adalja as quoted by Simrin Singh in “World leaders are gathering to discuss Disease X. Here's what to know about the hypothetical pandemic”, CBS News, (January 17, 2024)

• Another major lesson from COVID-19 is the importance of transparency, Adalja said.
  "I think what we see now is this distrust between infectious disease physicians, public health practitioners and the general public, because what happened is politicians injected themselves into this," he said. "People may not actually be receptive to the protective actions that are being recommended by public health officials."
  • Amesh Adalja as quoted by Simrin Singh in “World leaders are gathering to discuss Disease X. Here's what to know about the hypothetical pandemic”, CBS News, (January 17, 2024)

• [The COVID-19 pandemic is] most certainly not over. We lower our guard at our peril.

Declining testing and sequencing means we are blinding ourselves to the evolution of the virus.

• Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus The COVID-19 pandemic is 'most certainly not over,' WHO's health chief say (Posted: May 22, 2022 1:02 PM ET)

• "...developed countries are as naïve as developing countries in facing this crisis. One distinct feature of Asia Pacific and South Asia is high population and high population density, which makes them harder to manage..."
  • Dr Shamshad Akhtar, as quoted in " 'Developed, developing countries equally naïve to face COVID-19 crisis' " (30 April 2020) by Rasheed Khalid, The News International

• "However you slice it, there was never an instance where COVID-19 was milder than the flu," says Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly of Washington University in St. Louis, who has done research comparing COVID to the flu.
  "We've never, ever in the history of the pandemic, in all our studies from the beginning until now, have found that COVID-19 is equally risky to the flu," Al-Aly says. "It's always carried a higher risk."
  • Ziyad Al-Aly as quoted by Rob Stein, “Scientists debate how lethal COVID is. Some say it's now less risky than flu”, NPR, (September 16, 2022)

• و وباء #كورونا يجتاح العالم مهددا للبشريةندعو مجلس الأمن والأمين العام للأمم المتحدة انتونيو غوتيرش @antoniojuterres
  لايقاف القوى المعتدية عن عدوانها على الشعب اليمني وفك الحصار عليه
  فالوباء ينتشر بكافة أنحاء العالم ويجب أن تنعم شعوب العالم بالسلام وتتمكن من مكافحة الوباء الخطير
  • As Coronavirus has invaded the world and is threatening humanity, we ask UN security council and also the UN secretary general Antonio Guterres to stop aggressive forces from attacking Yemeni people and end the siege of the country. The virus is spreading all over the world and nations of the world should have peace to fight with this dangerous virus.
    • Mohammed Ali al-Houthi, on a Twitter post (23 March 2020). Translated by The Guardian

B

The hands of the Doomsday Clock remain at 100 seconds to midnight, as close to midnight as ever. The lethal and fear-inspiring COVID-19 pandemic serves as a historic ‘wake-up call,’ a vivid illustration that national governments and international organizations are unprepared to manage the truly civilization-ending threats of nuclear weapons and climate change. ~ Rachel Bronson

• We need to take the news about coronavirus coming out of China very seriously, about which China has released very little information in recent times
  • Annalena Baerbock State of the Union: What were the top stories in the EU this week? (Updated: 06/01/2023 - 20:01) By Isabel da Silva, Euronews 

• Many healthcare workers in our study had no prior illness, but of 172 such participants, 19 were still symptomatic at follow-up and off work at a median of 180 days.

Organ impairment in long COVID has implications for symptoms, quality of life and longer-term health, signalling the need for prevention and integrated care for long COVID patients.

• Amitava Banerjee, professor of clinical data science at the UCL Institute of Health Informatics according to Most long COVID patients have organ damage a year later, study finds (15 February 2023)

• You know, one of the things that continues to bother us in the way in which the moderators don’t even bring up an issue that, before COVID-19, was impacting 43% of this nation. A hundred forty million people, before COVID, were poor and low-wealth, and 62 million people working for less than a living wage. And since COVID, we know that millions have been added to the poverty and low-wealth numbers. We’re well over 50% because of the new poor. We know we had 87 million people before COVID that were either uninsured or underinsured, and now some 20 million people have been added because of people who have lost their insurance because they’ve lost their jobs. Forty percent of the jobs that make $40,000 a year have been lost.
  • Rev. William Barber II quoted in Rev. William Barber: Millions Are Struggling. So Why Do the Debates Ignore Poverty?, DemocracyNow, (8 October 2020)

• We have to stop saying things were well before COVID. It’s almost as though we give that away to the Trump and Pence. The reality is, Wall Street was well. The reality is, those who got his tax cuts were well. The reality is, though, that before COVID, they were trying to overturn healthcare. Before COVID, they were blocking living wages. Before COVID, we were not addressing the issue of poor and low-wealth people.
  • Rev. William Barber II quoted in Rev. William Barber: Millions Are Struggling. So Why Do the Debates Ignore Poverty?, DemocracyNow, (8 October 2020)

• When we look at COVID-19, we know that the fissures of systemic racism and systemic poverty have actually allowed this pandemic to have a greater hold on our American society. We know that when we talk about death, we have to be exact, that it’s not just people are dying, poor people are dying. People who make less than $50,000 a year are dying. People are dying who are among the poor, whether it be white, Black —disproportionately among Black and Brown and Indigenous people, and that COVID has killed more people in the U.S. than Americans were killed in battle in five of our most recent wars — Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, the War in Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf War. I mean, this is what we’re talking about when we’re talking about this devastation that’s happening among poor and low-wealth people.
  • Rev. William Barber II quoted in Rev. William Barber: Millions Are Struggling. So Why Do the Debates Ignore Poverty?, DemocracyNow, (8 October 2020)

• Allow me to break down the facts of hunger as they stand right now. 811 million people are chronically hungry. 283 million are in hunger crises — they are marching toward starvation. And within that, 45 million in 43 countries across the globe are in hunger emergencies — in other words, famine is knocking on their door. Places like Afghanistan. Madagascar. Myanmar. Guatemala. Ethiopia. Sudan. South Sudan. Mozambique. Niger. Syria, Mali, Burkina Faso, Somalia, Haiti and on and on and on. The world has often experienced famine. But when has it ever been so widespread, in so many places, at the same time? Why? Three reasons. First, man-made conflict. Dozens of civil wars and regional conflicts are raging, and hunger has been weaponized to achieve military and political objectives. Second, climate shocks /climate change. Floods, droughts, locusts and rapidly changing weather patterns have created severe crop failures around the world. Third, COVID-19. The viral pandemic has created a secondary hunger pandemic, which is far worse than the first. Shutdowns destroyed livelihoods. Shutdowns stopped the movement of food. Shutdowns inflated prices. The net result is the poor of the world are priced out of survival. The ripple effect of COVID has been devastating on the global economy. During the pandemic, $3.7 trillion in incomes — mostly among the poor — have been wiped out, while food prices are spiking. The cost of shipping food, for example, has increased 3 – 400%. But in places of conflict and low-income countries, it is even worse. For example, in Aleppo, Syria — a war zone, where I just returned from — food is now seven times more expensive than it was 2 years ago. The combined effect of these three — conflict, climate and COVID — has created an unprecedented perfect storm.
  • David Beasley, Nobel Peace Prize lecture of World Food Programme, 10 December 2021
• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been caught on numerous occasions engaging in statistical manipulation in order to drive up a perpetual state of fear among Americans – all with the aim of coaxing people to get the Covid-19 ‘vaccine.’ But one thing the CDC appears entirely unwilling to do is to document the ways that natural immunity has made the vaccines redundant at best, and harmful at worst, for those who were previously infected.
  • Kyle Becker, CDC Unable to Document a Single Case of Covid Transmitted from a Previously Infected Person to Another, Becker News, 14 November 2021

• It is these very conditions that facilitate the emergence of new infectious diseases and that also inflict horrific harms on animals — being kept in confined conditions and then butchered. Simply put, the coronavirus pandemic is a result of our gross maltreatment of animals.
  • David Benatar, "Our Cruel Treatment of Animals Led to the Coronavirus" (13 April 2020), The New York Times

• .. the ban, pending government approval, would last 14 days. Officials hope that within that period there will be more information on how effective COVID-19 vaccines are against Omicron, which was first detected in South Africa and has been dubbed a "variant of concern" by the World Health Organization
  • Statement from Naftali Bennett Israel to ban entry of foreigners from all countries over Omicron (November 28, 2021)

• Like humans, pathogens do not respect species boundaries. Overall, nearly eight billion people, many with advanced technologies and rapacious appetites, are tearing ecosystems apart and within these ecosystems live millions of different kinds of viruses, bacteria, and other pathogens. As Sonia Shah observes in her book Pandemic, society operates with an erroneous paradigm of disease, treating diseases as foreign invaders into our territory (a mentality she describes as “microbial xenophobia”), when in fact we are the invading species encroaching on the habitat and communities of animals and ecosystems. It is wrong to say that these diseases are happening to us, rather they are the unintended results of what we are doing to the natural world. Speculations about accidental laboratory origins of outbreaks and COVID-19 conspiracy plots of bioterrorism draw attention away from actual systemic structures and dynamics of human exploitation of nature, especially as driven by the growth-addicted world system of capitalism. Hardly unexpected or accidental, viral outbreaks are the inevitable consequences of human growth and expansion. All too often, we are the causes, not effects, the culprits, not victims, of pandemic-inducing pathogens.
  • Steven Best, "How To Destroy Civilization: COVID-19 and the Exploitation of Animals and the Earth" (23 June 2020)

• What we shouldn't forget is how little we understood about this disease. There was a moment we were very unclear about whether domestic pets could transmit the disease.
  In fact, there was an idea at one moment that we might have to ask the public to exterminate all the cats in Britain. Can you imagine what would have happened if we had wanted to do that?
  • James Bethell, former UK health minister interviewed on Channel 4 News, as cited in "UK cat cull was considered early in Covid crisis, ex-minister says" The Guardian (1 March 2023)

• From the beginning of my presidency, I’ve been very clear-eyed that we need to attack this virus globally, not just at home, because it’s in America’s self-interest to do so.
  The virus knows no boundaries. You can’t build a wall high enough to keep it out.
  • Joe Biden, “Remarks by President Biden on Fighting the COVID-⁠19 Pandemic”, Whitehouse.gov, (8/3/2021).

• I've been in this (infectious diseases) business for 30 years. I've been through MERS, SARS, Ebola, the first Gulf war and the second, and I don't recall anything like this (Israeli being into unnecessary panic due to COVID-19). There's unnecessary, exaggerated panic. We have to calm people down. People are thinking that there's a kind of virus, it's in the air, it's going to attack every one of us, and whoever is attacked is going to die. That's not the way it is at all. It's not in the air. Not everyone (who is infected) dies. Most of them will get better and won't even know they were sick, or will have a bit of mucus.
  • Jihad Bishara (2020) cited in "Israeli virologist urges world leaders to calm public, slams ‘unnecessary panic’" on The Times of Israel, 15 March 2020.

• The next level of covid escalation is questioning the justified existence of citizens that refuse to be vaccinated. It is with some irony that we are seeing the expert class increasingly sound like dissident political pundit Stefan Molyneux: “The time for arguments has passed.” Any concerns that once existed about the individual rights of those concerned about covid vaccines—including those who have a natural immunity to the virus from prior exposures—are quickly being dismissed by those in power.
  • Tho Bishop, Covid Tyranny Destroys the Myth of "Liberal Democracy", Mises Institute, August 2021

• The people of Norway celebrated the end of coronavirus restrictions on Sunday after an abrupt announcement from the prime minister.
  • Paul Bois, Norway Celebrates End of Coronavirus Restrictions, Breitbart, 27 September 2021

• When the UN security council and the G7 group sought to agree a global response to the coronavirus pandemic, the efforts stumbled on the US insistence on describing the threat as distinctively Chinese... the focus on labelling the virus Chinese and blaming China pursued by the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, helped ensure there would be no meaningful collective response from the world's most powerful nations...
  For some US allies, the fixation on words at a time when the international order was arguably facing its greatest challenge since the second world war encapsulated the glaring absence of US leadership. And that absence was illustrated just as vividly by news coverage of planes full of medical supplies from China arriving in Italy, at a time when the US was quietly flying in half a million Italian-made diagnostic swabs for use in its own under-equipped health system and Donald Trump was on the phone to the South Korean president pressing him to send test kits.
  • Julian Borger, "US awol from world stage as China tries on global leadership for size (29 March 2020), The Guardian

• The hands of the Doomsday Clock remain at 100 seconds to midnight, as close to midnight as ever. The lethal and fear-inspiring COVID-19 pandemic serves as a historic ‘wake-up call,’ a vivid illustration that national governments and international organizations are unprepared to manage the truly civilization-ending threats of nuclear weapons and climate change.
  • Rachel Bronson as quoted by Gayle Spinazze, “Press Release—THIS IS YOUR COVID-19 WAKE-UP CALL: IT IS 100 SECONDS TO MIDNIGHT”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, (January 27, 2021)

C

The pandemic shutdown has shown us the problem. It has revealed what the world looks like without as much pollution, without the chaos and roar of mostly meaningless "work" performed by the exploited, using materials stolen from the abused, for the benefit of the pampered and oblivious. Another world is possible, and we've just gotten a glimpse of it. ~Lee Camp

• This pandemic is not just a crisis, it's also a gift. It allows us the oxygen to notice the things we've been ignoring were the truly essential:
  – Learning and creating
  – Enjoying clean water, clean air, clean food, and making sure every human has that right
  – Forming a world that will last longer than an NFL season
  – Spending a lot of time with your beautiful family (or a little time with an unsightly one)
  Point is — the stuff that truly matters is the stuff we were completely ignoring, blithely pushing it to the back of our minds as our planet is eaten for corporate profit. But now, during "life on hold" the natural world reclaims spaces. Beaches around the globe teem with millions of birds and wildlife, no longer flooded by undulating masses of fleshy apes with our frisbees, and snorkels, and beer coolers and entitlement.
  • Lee Camp, "Lee Camp: Pandemic is Not Just a Crisis, It's Also a Gift" (23 April 2020), Consortium News

• Like cancer, capitalism grows until it murders the host body. During this pandemic shutdown, it's not getting the growth it needs and parts of it are becoming benign... For years...we've been lost in the frenetic pace of lives based on non-events, never pausing to reassess or recess. The spastic motion of avoidance filled the ether — afraid if we stop to truly think about it, we may find our scant few years of consciousness are pissed away as slaves at often meaningless jobs. They, the pustulant corporate owners, suck away our lives... And now, with life on holiday, we see almost none of it was essential... As our planet disintegrates under the weight of consumption and greed, most people are trapped in extreme poverty. And that's how the system of capitalism is designed. Slightly altering capitalism will not change this reality... If we take away the false promises of capitalism and just say to people, "Private luxury is only for a few humans. You will never have it and won't even have the chance at getting it" – if we admit that – then the entire justification for capitalism evaporates... The pandemic shutdown has shown us the problem. It has revealed what the world looks like without as much pollution, without the chaos and roar of mostly meaningless "work" performed by the exploited, using materials stolen from the abused, for the benefit of the pampered and oblivious. Another world is possible, and we've just gotten a glimpse of it.
  • Lee Camp, "Lee Camp: Pandemic is Not Just a Crisis, It's Also a Gift" (23 April 2020), Consortium News

• The Coronavirus is serious enough but it's worth recalling that there is a much greater horror approaching, we are racing to the edge of disaster, far worse than anything that's ever happened in human history... the corona virus is a horrible... can have terrifying consequences but there will be recovery, while the others won't be recovered... If we don't deal with them we're done.
  • Noam Chomsky: Coronavirus - What is at stake? | Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25) 28 Mar 2020

• The scale of the plague is surprising, indeed shocking, but not its appearance. Nor the fact that the U.S. has the worst record in responding to the crisis. Scientists have been warning of a pandemic for years, insistently so since the SARS epidemic of 2003, also caused by a coronavirus, for which vaccines were developed but did not proceed beyond the pre-clinical level. That was the time to begin to put in place rapid-response systems in preparation for an outbreak and to set aside spare capacity that would be needed. Initiatives could also have been undertaken to develop defenses and modes of treatment for a likely recurrence with a related virus. But scientific understanding is not enough. There has to be someone to pick up the ball and run with it. That option was barred by the pathology of the contemporary socioeconomic order. Market signals were clear: There’s no profit in preventing a future catastrophe.
  • Noam Chomsky in an interview with C.J. Polychroniou, Chomsky: Ventilator Shortage Exposes the Cruelty of Neoliberal Capitalism (April 1, 2020), Truthout

• There will be recovery from the COVID-19 crisis, at severe and possibly horrendous cost, particularly for the poor and more vulnerable.
  • Noam Chomsky in an interview with C.J. Polychroniou, Chomsky: Ventilator Shortage Exposes the Cruelty of Neoliberal Capitalism (April 1, 2020), Truthout

• Covid-19 has revealed glaring failures and monstrous brutalities in the current capitalist system. It represents both a crisis and an opportunity. Contests for controlling the narratives around the meaning of this pandemic will be the terrain of struggle for either a new, more humane common sense and society or a return to the status quo ante. The outcome of those contests is uncertain; everything depends on the actions that people take into their hands.
  • Noam Chomsky and Marv Waterstone, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance (2021), p. 344

• Put your hand on that television set. Hallelujah. Thank you, Lord Jesus. He received your healing. Now say it: "I take it. I have it. It's mine. I thank you and praise you for it. [...] I consider not symptoms in my own body, but only that which God has promised. Only that what the Word has said. And by His stripes, I was healed. And by His stripes, I am healed now. I am not the sick trying to get healed. I am the healed, and the Devil is trying to give me the flu!"
  • Kenneth Copeland, 2020-03-12, quoted in Greg Evans, "A controversial televangelist actually attempted to heal people with coronavirus through their televisions", indy100 

D

• You may qualify for up to two weeks of health-related financial assistance IF you have been active on the DoorDash platform for at least 30 days AND have completed at least 30 deliveries in the last 30 days (counting back from the date medical documentation was acquired) AND you fulfill at least one of the following health-related requirements...
  • Doordash COVID-19 Financial Assistance Programs for Dashers

• I believe that we have reached the point where, for an individual, COVID poses less of a risk of hospitalization and death than does influenza.
  • Shira Doron as quoted by Rob Stein, “Scientists debate how lethal COVID is. Some say it's now less risky than flu”, NPR, (September 16, 2022)

• Sweden, a country which never imposed significant lockdown measures, has officially declared that the COVID-19 pandemic is “over” and announced that it will be lifting all remaining restrictions.
  • Tyler Durden, Sweden Declares The Pandemic To Be "Over", ZeroHedge, 9 February 2022

• Children born during the pandemic score markedly lower on standard measures of verbal, motor, and overall cognitive ability, US researchers have found.
  • Owen Dyer, Covid-19: Children born during the pandemic score lower on cognitive tests, study finds, The BMJ, 16 August 2021

F

• "COVID is a much more serious public health issue than is influenza," Fauci says, noting this is especially true for older people, the group at the highest risk dying from the disease.
  • Anthony Fauci as quoted by Rob Stein, “Scientists debate how lethal COVID is. Some say it's now less risky than flu”, NPR, (September 16, 2022)

G

A marathon runner does not stop when the finish line comes into view; she runs harder with all the energy she has left. So must we. We can see the finish line, we are in a winning position, but now is the worst time to stop running. Now is the time to run harder and make sure we cross the line and reap the rewards of all our hard work. ~ Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

• "We have all been questioning, 'When does COVID look like influenza?'" says Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco. "And, I would say, 'Yes, we are there.'"
  Gandhi and other researchers argue that most people today have enough immunity — gained from vaccination, infection or both — to protect them against getting seriously ill from COVID. And this is especially so since the omicron variant doesn't appear to make people as sick as earlier strains, Gandhi says.
  So unless a more virulent variant emerges, COVID's menace has diminished considerably for most people, which means that they can go about their daily lives, says Gandhi, "in a way that you used to live with endemic seasonal flu."
  • Monica Gandhi as quoted by Rob Stein, “Scientists debate how lethal COVID is. Some say it's now less risky than flu”, NPR, (September 16, 2022)

• Humanity continues to suffer as COVID-19 spreads around the world. In 2020 alone, this novel disease killed 1.7 million people and sickened at least 70 million more. The pandemic reveals just how unprepared and unwilling countries and the international system are to handle global emergencies properly. In this time of crisis, governments too often abdicated responsibility, ignored scientific advice, cooperated or communicated ineffectively, and consequently failed to protect the public health and welfare of their citizens.
  • Asha M. George as quoted by Gayle Spinazze, “Press Release—THIS IS YOUR COVID-19 WAKE-UP CALL: IT IS 100 SECONDS TO MIDNIGHT”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, (January 27, 2021)

• A marathon runner does not stop when the finish line comes into view; she runs harder with all the energy she has left. So must we. We can see the finish line, we are in a winning position, but now is the worst time to stop running. Now is the time to run harder and make sure we cross the line and reap the rewards of all our hard work.
  • Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, "The end of the COVID-19 pandemic is in sight: WHO”, News.UN.org, (14 September 2022)

• We missed our previous routines, meetings and parties, living as we are, without being afraid of each other because of the virus and infection.
  • Maguy Bou Ghosn, 3 May 2020 ^[1]

• The most commonly reported mainstream media account of the creation of the Coronavirus suggests that it was derived from an animal borne microorganism... But there appears to be some evidence to dispute that... Because of that and other factors, there has also been considerable speculation that the Coronavirus did not occur naturally through mutation but rather was produced in a laboratory, possibly as a biological warfare agent.
  Several reports suggest that there are components of the virus that are related to HIV that could not have occurred naturally. If it is correct that the virus had either been developed or even produced to be weaponized it would further suggest that its escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology Lab and into the animal and human population could have been accidental. Technicians who work in such environments are aware that "leaks" from laboratories occur frequently.
  • Philip Giraldi, "Who Made Coronavirus? Was It the U.S., Israel or China Itself?" (6 March 2020), Council for the National Interest

• There is, of course and inevitably, another theory. There has been some speculation that as the Trump Administration has been constantly raising the issue of growing Chinese global competitiveness as a direct threat to American national security and economic dominance, it must might be possible that Washington has created and unleashed the virus in a bid to bring Beijing's growing economy and military might down a few notches. It is, to be sure, hard to believe that even the Trump White House would do something so reckless, but there are precedents for that type of behavior.
  • Philip Giraldi, "Who Made Coronavirus? Was It the U.S., Israel or China Itself?" (6 March 2020), Council for the National Interest

• “There was a mental health crisis before the pandemic — it just didn’t catch everyone’s attention the way it does now,” said Dr. Cori Green, the director of behavioral health education and integration in pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City.
  Still, Dr. Green said that she is seeing more of her young patients test positive on screenings for depression. “The pandemic led to more social isolation — a risk factor for depression,” she said.
  • Cori Green as quoted by Azeen Ghorayshi and Roni Caryn Rabin,“Teen Girls Report Record Levels of Sadness, C.D.C. Finds”, The New York Times, (Feb. 13, 2023)

• I've never seen a particular situation during my professional experience anything like this...
  • Alan Greenspan, long-time Chair of the Federal Reserve, talking about the COVID pandemc according to Alan Greenspan: I've never seen anything like this published November 20, 2020

• I'm not convinced at all that we have enough information to know how to deal with this type of problem
  • Alan Greenspan, long-time Chair of the Federal Reserve, talking about the COVID pandemc according to Alan Greenspan: I've never seen anything like this published November 20, 2020

• The coronavirus pandemic and the environmental crisis share the same roots: humans' success as a species in arrogating global resources for themselves and the consequent ecological disturbance. This is increasing viral exchanges – first from animal to human, then from human to human – on a pandemic scale. Our environmental footprint is too large for the planet, leading to accelerated species extinctions and atmospheric chaos. Both the Covid and climate catastrophes are not misfortunes that befell us. They are part of a pattern of decisions that we humans are taking. We need to make different choices.
  • The Guardian, "The Guardian view on climate and Covid: time to make different choices" (22 May 2020)

• [A] pandemic thrives on human inequities and it is inextricable from the society, economy, knowledge, and politics of human existence. During any infection outbreak such as COVID–19, it is the poorer and weaker fractions of a society that remain disproportionately affected and ultimately bear an additional burden of early death.
  • Surya Gupta and Armin Rosencranz, "COVID-19, the Government’s Response, and India’s Sustainable Development Goals" (22 May 2020), edited by Tim Zubizarreta, JURIST

• This is not the flu, like Sajid Javid seems to suggest. Please tell me when flu has led to 400,000 people having chronic disability in a period of 16 months ... why would we want to expose so much of our population to herd immunity through natural infection when we have safe and effective vaccines that could be given to them in the coming weeks.
  • Deepti Gurdasani in “England takes a big Covid-19 gamble as Johnson sets out plan to scrap lockdown rules”, by Lauren Said-Moorhouse, Sarah Dean and Duarte Mendonca, CNN, (Updated 2:14 PM ET, Mon July 5, 2021)

• Sadly, the deadly impact of the pandemic has been made worse by the absence of a global coordinated effort. In the memory of those two million souls, the world must act with far greater solidarity
  • António Guterres in "UN secretary general calls on nations to share vaccines as world surpasses 2 million Covid-19 deaths", (January 15, 2021)

H

• The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, unfolding around the world as I write these words, will likely be remembered as an epochal shift. In this extended winter, as borders close, as lockdowns and quarantines multiply, as people succumb and recover, there is a strong sense that, when the spring finally arrives we will awaken in a drastically changed landscape.
  • Max Haiven, "No return to normal: for a post-pandemic liberation" (23 March 2020), ROAR Magazine

• Those of us now in isolation, in spite of our fear and frustrations, in spite of our grief ⁠— for those who have died or may die, for the life we once lived, for the future we once hoped for ⁠— there is also a sense we are cocooned, transforming, waiting, dreaming. True: Terrors stalk the global landscape, notably the way the virus ⁠— or our countermeasures ⁠— will endanger those among us whom we, as a society, have already abandoned or devalued. So many of us are already disposable. So many of us are only learning it now, too late. Then there is the dangerous blurring of the line between humanitarian and authoritarian measures. There is the geopolitical weaponization of the pandemic. But when the Spring comes, as it must, when we emerge from hibernation, it might be a time of profound global struggle against both the drive to "return to normal" ⁠— the same normal that set the stage for this tragedy ⁠— and the "new normal" which might be even worse. Let us prepare as best we can, for we have a world to win.
  • Max Haiven, "No return to normal: for a post-pandemic liberation" (23 March 2020), ROAR Magazine

• After months of chaos, isolation and fear, the desire to return to normal, even if normal is an abusive system, may be extremely strong. The stage is set for this desire to be accompanied by a frantic revanchism. Will we want someone to blame, especially those of us who lose loved ones? Must there be blood, figurative or literal?: a baptism by fire so that the old order ⁠— which, of course, created the conditions of austerity and inequality that made this plague so devastating⁠ — can be reborn in purified form. Of course, things will never be "normal" again: some of us, the privileged and wealthy, may be afforded the illusion, but this illusion is likely to be carried on the backs of the vast majority who will work harder, longer and for less, suffer greater risks and fewer rewards. The debts of the pandemic, literal and figurative, will have to be repaid. On the other hand ⁠— or maybe at the same time ⁠— we can also expect that, among the powerful and among the rest of us, there will be calls to reject the "return to normal," but in order to embrace something even worse. It is likely that the chaos and deaths of the pandemic will be blamed on too much democracy, liberalism and empathy. Now that states are flexing their muscles and taking full command of society, there will be many who do not want the sleeve to be rolled back down. We may yet see, in this crisis, the use of repressive force on civilians ⁠— as it is already being used on migrants and incarcerated people ⁠— and I fear that it will be seen by many as justified, a human sacrifice to feed the Gods of fear. In the wake of the pandemic we can be sure that fascists and reactionaries will seek to mobilize tropes of ⁠— racial, national, economic ⁠— purity, purification, parasitism, and pollution to impose their long-festering dreams on reality.
  • Max Haiven, "No return to normal: for a post-pandemic liberation" (23 March 2020), ROAR Magazine

• Against all these fateful outcomes there will be those among us who refuse to return to normal, or to embrace the "new normal," those of us who know that "the trouble with normal is it only gets worse." Already, in the state of emergency that the crisis has unleashed, we are seeing extraordinary measures emerge that reveal that much of the neoliberal regime's claims to necessity and austerity were transparent lies. The God-like market has fallen, again. In different places a variety of measures are being introduced that would have been unimaginable even weeks ago. These have included the suspension of rents and mortgages, the free provision of public transit, the deployment of basic incomes, a hiatus in debt payments, the commandeering of privatized hospitals and other once-public infrastructure for the public good, the liberation of incarcerated people, and governments compelling private industries to reorient production to common needs. We hear news of significant numbers of people refusing to work, taking wildcat labor action, and demanding their right to live in radical ways. In some places, the underhoused are seizing vacant homes. We are discovering, against the upside-down capitalist value paradigm which has enriched the few at the expense of the many, whose labor is truly valuable: care, service, and frontline public sector workers. There has been a proliferation of grassroots radical demands for policies of care and solidarity not only as emergency measures, but in perpetuity.
  • Max Haiven, "No return to normal: for a post-pandemic liberation" (23 March 2020), ROAR Magazine

• Meanwhile, the quarantined and semi-isolated are discovering, using digital tools, new ways to mobilize to provide care and mutual aid to those in our communities in need. We are slowly recovering our lost powers of life in common, hidden in plain sight, our secret inheritance. We are learning again to become a cooperative species, shedding the claustrophobic skin of homo oeconomicus. In the suspension of a capitalist order of competition, distrust and endless, pointless hustle, our ingenuity and compassion are resurfacing like the birds to the smog-free sky. When the Spring arrives, the struggle will be to preserve, enhance, network and organize this ingenuity and compassion to demand no return to normal and no new normal. [...] We have learned how to bring a capitalist economy to its knees through non-violent protest in the face of overwhelming, technologically augmented oppression. We are learning how to become ungovernable by either states or markets. Equally important, we have learned new ways to care for one another without waiting for the state or for authorities. We are rediscovering the power of mutual aid and solidarity. We are learning how to communicate and cooperate anew. We have learned how to organize and to respond quickly, how to make collective decisions and to take responsibility for our fate. Like the heroes of all good epics, we are not ready, our training was not completed, yet fate will not wait. Like all true heroes, we must make do with what we have: one another and nothing else. As the world closes its eyes for this strange, dreamlike quarantine ⁠— save of course for those frontline health, service and care workers who, in the service of humanity, cannot rest, or those who have no safe place to dream ⁠— we must make ready for the waking. We are on the cusp of a great refusal of a return to normal and of a new normal, a vengeful normalcy that brought us this catastrophe and that will only lead to more catastrophe. In the weeks to come, it will be time to mourn and to dream, to prepare, to learn, and to connect as best we can. When the isolation is over, we will awaken to a world where competing regimes of vindictive normalization will be at war with one another, a time of profound danger and opportunity. It will be a time to rise and to look one another in the eye.
  • Max Haiven, "No return to normal: for a post-pandemic liberation" (23 March 2020), ROAR Magazine

• The best way to describe COVID right now is as endemic but with these periodic epidemics. And those epidemics can vary in terms of their timing and magnitude. And that’s exactly why ongoing vigilance and surveillance is critical.
  • Aron Hall as quoted by Rob Stein, “Is COVID endemic yet? Yep, says the CDC. Here's what that means”, NPR, (August 9, 2024)

• In the face of the COVID-19 tsunami, our lives are changing in ways that were inconceivable just a few short weeks ago. Not since the 2008–9 economic collapse has the world collectively shared an experience of this kind: a single, rapidly mutating global crisis, structuring the rhythm of our daily lives within a complex calculus of risk and competing probabilities. In response, numerous social movements have put forward demands that take seriously the potentially disastrous consequences of the virus, while also tackling the incapacity of capitalist governments to adequately address the crisis itself. These demands include questions of worker safety, the necessity of neighborhood-level organizing, income and social security, the rights of those on zero-hour contracts or in precarious employment, and the need to protect renters and those living in poverty.
  • Adam Hanieh, "This is a Global Pandemic – Let's Treat it as Such" (27 March 2020), Verso Books

• In this sense, the COVID-19 crisis has sharply underscored the irrational nature of health care systems structured around corporate profit — the almost universal cutbacks to public hospital staffing and infrastructure (including critical care beds and ventilators), the lack of public health provision and the prohibitive cost of access to medical services in many countries, and the ways in which the property rights of pharmaceutical companies serve to restrict widespread access to potential therapeutic treatments and the development of vaccines. However, the global dimensions of COVID-19 have figured less prominently in much of the left discussion. [...] Even inside Europe there is extreme unevenness in the capacity of states to deal with this crisis — as the juxtaposition of Germany and Greece illustrates — but a much greater disaster is about to envelop the rest of the world. In response, our perspective on this pandemic must become truly global, based on an understanding of how the public health aspects of this virus intersect with larger questions of political economy (including the likelihood of a prolonged and severe global economic downturn). This is not the time to pull up the (national) hatches and speak simply of the fight against the virus inside our own borders.
  • Adam Hanieh, "This is a Global Pandemic – Let's Treat it as Such" (27 March 2020), Verso Books

• As with all so-called humanitarian crises, it is essential to remember that the social conditions found across most of the countries of the South are the direct product of how these states are inserted into the hierarchies of the world market. Historically, this included a long encounter with Western colonialism, which has continued, into contemporary times, with the subordination of poorer countries to the interests of the world's wealthiest states and largest transnational corporations. [...] Foregrounding these historical and global dimensions helps make clear that the enormous scale of the current crisis is not simply a question of viral epidemiology and a lack of biological resistance to a novel pathogen. The ways that most people across Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia will experience the coming pandemic is a direct consequence of a global economy systemically structured around the exploitation of the resources and peoples of the South. In this sense, the pandemic is very much a social and human-made disaster — not simply a calamity arising from natural or biological causes. One clear example of how this disaster is human-made is the poor state of public health systems across most countries in the South, which tend to be underfunded and lacking in adequate medicines, equipment, and staff. This is particularly significant for understanding the threat presented by COVID-19 due to the rapid and very large surge in serious and critical cases that typically require hospital admission as a result of the virus (currently estimated at around 15–20 percent of confirmed cases). This fact is now widely discussed in the context of Europe and the United States, and lies behind the strategy of "flattening the curve" in order to alleviate the pressure on hospital critical care capacity.
  • Adam Hanieh, "This is a Global Pandemic – Let's Treat it as Such" (27 March 2020), Verso Books

• Yet, while we rightly point to the lack of ICU beds, ventilators, and trained medical staff across many Western states, we must recognize that the situation in most of the rest of the world is immeasurably worse. Malawi, for example, has about 25 ICU beds for a population of 17 million people. There are less than 2.8 critical care beds per 100,000 people on average across South Asia, with Bangladesh possessing around 1,100 such beds for a population of over 157 million (0.7 critical care beds per 100,000 people). In comparison, the shocking pictures coming out of Italy are occurring in an advanced health care system with an average 12.5 ICU beds per 100,000 (and the ability to bring more online). The situation is so serious that many poorer countries do not even have information on ICU availability. [...] Of course, the question of ICU and hospital capacity is one part of a much larger set of issues including a widespread lack of basic resources (e.g., clean water, food, and electricity), adequate access to primary medical care, and the presence of other comorbidities (such as high rates of HIV and tuberculosis). Taken as a whole, all of these factors will undoubtedly mean a vastly higher prevalence of critically ill patients (and hence overall fatalities) across poorer countries as a result of COVID-19.
  • Adam Hanieh, "This is a Global Pandemic – Let's Treat it as Such" (27 March 2020), Verso Books

• Debates around how best to respond to COVID-19 in Europe and the United States have illustrated the mutually reinforcing relationship between effective public health measures and conditions of labor, precarity, and poverty. Calls for people to self-isolate when sick — or the enforcement of longer periods of mandatory lockdowns — are economically impossible for the many people who cannot easily shift their work online, or those in the service sector who work in zero-hour contracts or other kinds of temporary employment. Recognizing the fundamental consequences of these work patterns for public health, many European governments have announced sweeping promises around compensation for those made unemployed or forced to stay at home during this crisis. It remains to be seen how effective these schemes will be, and to what degree they will actually meet the needs of the very large numbers of people who will lose their jobs as a result of the crisis. Nonetheless, we must recognize that such schemes will simply not exist for most of the world's population. In countries where the majority of the labor force is engaged in informal work or depends upon unpredictable daily wages — much of the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Asia — there is no feasible way that people can choose to stay home or self-isolate. This must be viewed alongside the fact that there will almost certainly be very large increases in the "working poor" as a direct result of the crisis.
  • Adam Hanieh, "This is a Global Pandemic – Let's Treat it as Such" (27 March 2020), Verso Books

• Without the mitigation effects offered through quarantine and isolation, the actual progress of the disease in the rest of the world will certainly be much more devastating than the harrowing scenes witnessed to date in China, Europe, and the United States. Moreover, workers involved in informal and precarious labor often live in slums and overcrowded housing — ideal conditions for the explosive spread of the virus. [...] Similarly disastrous scenarios face the many millions of people currently displaced through war and conflict. The Middle East, for example, is the site of the largest forced displacement since the Second World War, with massive numbers of refugees and internally displaced people as a result of the ongoing wars in countries such as Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Iraq. Most of these people live in refugee camps or overcrowded urban spaces, and often lack the rudimentary rights to health care typically associated with citizenship. The widespread prevalence of malnutrition and other diseases (such as the reappearance of cholera in Yemen) make these displaced communities particularly susceptible to the virus itself.
  • Adam Hanieh, "This is a Global Pandemic – Let's Treat it as Such" (27 March 2020), Verso Books

• One microcosm of this can be seen in the Gaza Strip, where over 70 percent of the population are refugees living in one of the most densely packed areas in the world. The first two cases of COVID-19 were identified in Gaza on March 20 (a lack of testing equipment, however, has meant that only 92 people out of the 2-million-strong population have been tested for the virus). Reeling from thirteen years of Israeli siege and the systematic destruction of essential infrastructure, living conditions in the Strip are marked by extreme poverty, poor sanitation, and a chronic lack of drugs and medical equipment (there are, for example, only sixty-two ventilators in Gaza, and just fifteen of these are currently available for use). Under blockade and closure for most of the past decade, Gaza has been shut to the world long before the current pandemic. The region could be the proverbial canary in the COVID-19 coalmine — foreshadowing the future path of the infection among refugee communities across the Middle East and elsewhere.
  • Adam Hanieh, "This is a Global Pandemic – Let's Treat it as Such" (27 March 2020), Verso Books

• It is not enough to speak of solidarity and mutual self-help in our own neighborhoods, communities, and within our national borders — without raising the much greater threat that this virus presents to the rest of the world. Of course, high levels of poverty, precarious conditions of labor and housing, and a lack of adequate health infrastructure also threaten the ability of populations across Europe and the United States to mitigate this infection. But grassroots campaigns in the South are building coalitions that tackle these issues in interesting and internationalist ways. Without a global orientation, we risk reinforcing the ways that the virus has seamlessly fed into the discursive political rhetoric of nativist and xenophobic movements — a politics deeply seeped in authoritarianism, an obsession with border controls, and a "my country first" national patriotism.
  • Adam Hanieh, "This is a Global Pandemic – Let's Treat it as Such" (27 March 2020), Verso Books

• As the coronavirus epidemic stretches on, working people are facing an economic collapse, the likes of which have not been seen since the Great Depression. Organizing to fight for an immediate ban on all layoffs has to be an essential part of any program to protect the working class and to make the capitalist's pay for their crisis.
  • James Dennis Hoff, "Freeze Layoffs: Make the Capitalists Pay" (23 March 2020), Left Voice

• as I’m sure you’ve noticed, the official Covid narrative is finally falling apart, or is being hastily disassembled, or historically revised, right before our eyes. The “experts” and “authorities” are finally acknowledging that the “Covid deaths” and “hospitalization” statistics are artificially inflated and totally unreliable
  • Christopher Hopkins, The Last Days of the Covidian Cult, Consent Factory, 18 January 2022

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• There’s still a lot of unpredictability with this virus. And a lot of scientists including myself think it’s going to take at least a decade for SARS-CoV2 to really find this really predictable pattern. I hope that over time that it will fade into the background. But we’re just not there yet.
  • Karelyn Jetelina as quoted by Rob Stein, “Is COVID endemic yet? Yep, says the CDC. Here's what that means”, NPR, (August 9, 2024)

• “We’re not trying to go for zero Covid,” Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told me. “The question becomes: When do, in most communities, people feel comfortable going about their daily business and not worrying, excessively, about doing things that are important and meaningful to them?”
  • Ashish Jha as quoted by German Lopez in “America needs to decide how much Covid-19 risk it will tolerate”, Vox, (Sep 7, 2021)

• If you are up-to-date on your vaccines today, and you avail yourself of the treatments, your chances of dying of COVID are vanishingly rare and certainly much lower than your risk of getting into trouble with the flu.
  • Ashish Jha as quoted by Rob Stein, “Scientists debate how lethal COVID is. Some say it's now less risky than flu”, NPR, (September 16, 2022)

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• Vladimir Putin's government has also been accused of downplaying the severity of the outbreak. Officially, there have been 2,337 cases in Russia—very low by international standards—but low testing rates make it hard to know for sure. Critics suggest that a suspiciously nationwide uptick in pneumonia cases in recent weeks actually consists of undiagnosed COVID-19 cases. Aggressive measures put in place to punish the spread of "false" information on the outbreak online may also be preventing media outlets from publishing accurate information. After moving much more slowly than other governments to order lockdowns and social distancing measures, Russia is finally implementing new rules as the number of cases has grown rapidly in recent days. Putin, who was highly visible while touting the government's efforts to contain the disease's spread early on, was conspicuously absent when it was time to deliver the bad news. The impending crisis has not stopped Russia's government from scoring a propaganda coup by shipping medical supplies to other countries—including the U.S.
  • Joshua Keating, "Strongman Medicine: Suspicious Numbers and Brutal Quarantines" (2 April 2020), Slate

• It may not just be dictatorships that are playing this game. Given its proximity to China, high elderly population, and high smoking rate, Japan would seem to be highly vulnerable to the coronavirus. Yet the number of cases and deaths in the country has been conspicuously low until recent days—perhaps suspiciously low. Japan, which has not adopted widespread testing or the kinds of strict social distancing measures seen elsewhere, saw the number of cases spike dramatically since it was announced last week that the 2020 Olympics would be postponed.
  • Joshua Keating, "Strongman Medicine: Suspicious Numbers and Brutal Quarantines" (2 April 2020), Slate

• Hungary's parliament on Monday passed the emergency law, [...] allowing President Viktor Orbán to rule by decree for an indefinite period. This arguably makes Hungary the first dictatorship within the EU and the first democracy to fall victim to the coronavirus.
  • Joshua Keating, "Strongman Medicine: Suspicious Numbers and Brutal Quarantines" (2 April 2020), Slate

• Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s technical lead on COVID-19, highlighted that the virus is still “ intensely circulating” around the world and that the agency believes that case numbers being reported are an underestimate.
  “We expect that there are going to be future waves of infection, potentially at different time points throughout the world caused by different subvariants of Omicron or even different variants of concern”, she said, reiterating her previous warning that the more the virus circulates, the more opportunities it has to mutate.
  However, she said, these future waves do not need to translate into “waves or death” because there are now effective tools such as vaccines and antivirals specifically for COVID-19.
  • Maria Van Kerkhove as quoted in, "The end of the COVID-19 pandemic is in sight: WHO”, News.UN.org, (14 September 2022)

• While Malaysians are concerned about the spread of the (COVID-19) virus to our shores, we are equally sympathetic towards China, especially given that the two countries share deep cultural and business ties which have been built over decades.
  • Teresa Kok (2020) cited in "Coronavirus: Malaysia to donate 18 million medical gloves to China" on The Star Online, 31 January 2020.

• Whether it will be contained or not, this outbreak is rapidly becoming the first true pandemic challenge that fits the disease X category.
  • Marion Koopmans, as quoted in "Coronavirus May Be ‘Disease X' Health Experts Warned About" (21 February 2020) by Jason Gale, Bloomberg News

• [A major wave of infections and an exponential rise in daily cases is] almost like a rite of passage
  • Singapore's Health Minister w:Ong Ye Kung "Singapore’s daily Covid cases breach 1,000 over the weekend — first time since April 2020" (September 20, 2021)

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• ... [ Omicron variant to unleash a] massive fifth wave
• ... we have never seen in this form before
  • German health minister Karl Lauterbach Covid: Germany tightens restrictions on UK travellers (December 18)

Is the current death toll — of more than 1,500 a day, or equivalent to more than 500,000 deaths a year — too much? Many people would say, of course, it is. But in the middle of a delta variant surge, Americans may be revealing their preferences as restaurant reservations are now around the pre-pandemic normal — a sign the country is moving on. ~ German Lopez

• The pandemic has demonstrated the bankruptcy of national sovereignty. The major threats to humanity are global in character, so mutual aid, cooperation and solidarity must be too.
  • Christian Laval and Pierre Dardot, The pandemic as political trial: the case for a global commons (March 28, 2020), ROAR Magazine

• The COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented global health, social and economic crisis. Historical comparisons are few, particularly in recent decades. This tragedy constitutes nothing less than a trial for all humanity. The two meanings of the French word "épreuve" captures the dual significance of what we now confront: épreuve in the sense of an ordeal, an immense and painful undertaking, but also a test, an evaluation, or a judgment. The pandemic, in other words, is now testing the capacity of our political and economic systems to cope with a global problem situated at the level of our individual interdependence, which is to say at the very foundation of our social life. Like a dystopia made real, the current situation provides us with a glimpse of what soon awaits humanity if global economic and political structures are unable to radically and rapidly transform in order to confront the climate change crisis.
  • Christian Laval and Pierre Dardot, The pandemic as political trial: the case for a global commons (March 28, 2020), ROAR Magazine

• First observation: around the world, we are all willing to rely on the sovereign power of the nation state to respond to this global epidemic in two more or less complimentary ways: on the one hand, we count on the state to enact authoritarian measures to limit personal contact, largely by establishing "states of emergency" (whether officially declared or not) as in Italy, Spain, France and elsewhere. On the other hand, we expect the state to protect citizens by preventing the virus being "imported" from abroad. Social discipline and national protectionism are thus the two primary weapons deployed in our fight against the pandemic. Here, we see the two faces of state sovereignty: internal domination and external independence.
  • Christian Laval and Pierre Dardot, The pandemic as political trial: the case for a global commons (March 28, 2020), ROAR Magazine

• What we have witnessed so far is cause for alarm. The institutional xenophobia of the state form is becoming especially manifest just as we are gaining increasing awareness of the lethal danger the virus poses for all humanity. The European states responded to the initial spread of the coronavirus in a totally uncoordinated fashion. Very quickly, most European states — Central Europe in particular — locked themselves behind the administrative walls of their national territory in order to protect their population from the "foreign virus," and the first countries in Europe to cloister themselves in were also the most xenophobic. This set the tone throughout Europe and the rest of the world: every state must look after their own — to the delight of the extreme right in Europe and elsewhere. And nothing has been more abject than the lack of solidarity with the most affected countries. Italy's abandonment by France and Germany — who pushed selfishness to new heights by refusing to send Italy medical equipment and protective masks — sounded the death knell for a Europe built on a foundation of generalized competition between states.
  • Christian Laval and Pierre Dardot, The pandemic as political trial: the case for a global commons (March 28, 2020), ROAR Magazine

• The WHO has been financially weakened for the past several decades, and is now largely dependent on private donors, with 80 percent of its funding coming from private businesses or foundations. But despite its weakened condition, the WHO could have still provided an initial framework for global cooperation in the fight against the pandemic, not only because of the reliable information it had gathered since the beginning of January, but also because its recommendations for radical and early control of the epidemic were ultimately correct. According to the Director-General of the WHO, the choice to abandon systematic testing and contract tracing, which were effective in Korea and Taiwan, was a major mistake that contributed to the spread of the virus in virtually every country. The ultimate cause of this alarming delay were strategic choices. Italy was quickly forced to adopt a strategy of absolute confinement in order to halt the epidemic, as China had previously done. Other countries waited far too long to react, largely on the basis of the fatalist and crypto-Darwinian strategy of "herd immunity." Boris Johnson's United Kingdom was entirely passive in its initial approach, and other countries equivocated and delayed their restrictive measures, such as France and Germany, not to mention the United States.
  • Christian Laval and Pierre Dardot, The pandemic as political trial: the case for a global commons (March 28, 2020), ROAR Magazine

• By adopting a strategy of "mitigation," or epidemic delay by "flattening the curve," these countries have de facto renounced any serious attempt to keep the virus under control from the start through the use of systematic screening and general confinement of the population, as was done in Wuhan and Hubei province. According to the forecasts of the German and French governments, the strategy of collective immunity necessitates 50 to 80 percent contamination across the entire population. This amounts to accepting the deaths of hundreds of thousands — even millions — of people who are supposedly the "most fragile." All the while, the WHO's recommendations were very clear: states must not abandon systematic screening and contact tracing of anyone who tests positive for the virus.
  • Christian Laval and Pierre Dardot, The pandemic as political trial: the case for a global commons (March 28, 2020), ROAR Magazine

• What has since become abundantly apparent is the destructive influence of behavioral economics and the so-called "nudge theory" of political decision-making, which relies on incentives and stimuli to steer individual behavior, rather than coercion or restraint. We now know that the "nudge unit," or the "Behavioural Insights Team," that advises the British Government successfully convinced the state of their theory that individuals who are too quickly constrained by severe measures will tire and relax their discipline when the epidemic reaches its peak, which is precisely when discipline is needed most. Since 2010, Richard Thaler's economic theory — which he outlines in the book Nudge (2009) — is widely thought to be the best means for producing "efficient state governance." This approach tells us to encourage people, without coercing them, to make the best decisions through the use of "nudges": by using gentle, indirect, comfortable and optional influences upon individuals who are still ultimately free to make their own choices. The application of this "libertarian paternalism" in the fight against the epidemic has been two-fold: (a) the rejection of any coercive measures to regulate individual behavior and (b) a preference for "barrier gestures": keep your distance, wash your hands, cough into your elbow, self-isolate if you have a fever and all for your own benefit. This wager to rely on soft, voluntary measures was risky: there is no scientific or empirical evidence demonstrating the effectiveness of this approach in the context of an epidemic. And it is now all too clear that this approach entirely failed.
  • Christian Laval and Pierre Dardot, The pandemic as political trial: the case for a global commons (March 28, 2020), ROAR Magazine

• The public service is a mechanism by which the governors become the servants of the governed. These obligations, which are imposed on those who govern as well as the agents of government, form the basis of what Duguit calls "public responsibility." This is why the public service is a principle of social solidarity, one which is imposed on all, and not a principle of sovereignty, inasmuch as the latter is incompatible with the very idea of public responsibility. This conception of the public service has largely been suppressed by the fiction of state sovereignty. But the public service nonetheless continues to make itself felt by virtue of the strong connection citizens feel toward what they still consider to be a fundamental right. For the citizen's right to public services is the strict corollary of the duty or obligation of state representatives to provide public services. This why the citizens of various European countries affected by the current crisis have demonstrated, in diverse ways, their attachment to public services in their daily fight against the coronavirus: for instance, the citizens of numerous Spanish cities have applauded their healthcare workers from their balconies, regardless of their political attitude toward the centralized unitary state. [...] Two relations must therefore be carefully separated here: the citizenry’s attachment to the public service, and healthcare in particular, in no way suggests adherence to public authority or public power in its various forms, but rather suggests an attachment to services whose essential function is to meet the public's need. Far from disclosing an underlying identification with the nation, this attachment gestures toward a sense of a universal that crosses borders, and accordingly renders us sensitive to the trials our "pandemic co-citizens" are enduring, whether they are Italian, Spanish, or live beyond European borders. We are extremely skeptical of Macron's promise to be the first leader to question "our developmental model" after the crisis is over, and there are plenty of reasons to think that the drastic economic measures currently in place will eventually share the same fate as those enacted during the 2008 economic crisis: we will likely see a concerted effort to "return to normal" — i.e., return to our otherwise uninterrupted destruction of the planet amidst increasingly conditions of social inequality. And we fear the enormous stimulus packages designed to "save the economy" will once again be borne on the backs of the lowest-paid workers and taxpayers.
  • Christian Laval and Pierre Dardot, The pandemic as political trial: the case for a global commons (March 28, 2020), ROAR Magazine

• What I found disgusting and really distressing ... was not just the travel ban being implemented by the UK and Europe but that that was the only reaction, or the strongest reaction.
• There was no word of support that they're going to offer to African countries to help us control the pandemic and particularly no mention of addressing this vaccine inequity that we have been warning about all year and [of which] we are now seeing the consequences play out
  • Dr. Richard Lessells, infectious diseases specialist at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa Vaccine inequity and hesitancy made the Omicron variant more likely, scientists say (November 28, 2021)

• This coronavirus, they're just — all of this panic is just not warranted. This, I'm telling you, when I tell you — when I've told you that this virus is the common cold. When I said that, it was based on the number of cases. It's also based on the kind of virus this is.
  • Rush Limbaugh, The Rush Limbaugh Show, 2020-03-11

• Three years ago, experts were saying that bat coronaviruses could become a new pandemic. Almost two months ago, experts were saying that the new virus in Wuhan was potentially a global threat. One month ago, experts were saying that it was likely to be pandemic, and the White House's response was that this was under control, despite the fact that the US's testing was demonstrably giving a false picture of the extent of infection. This was foreseeable, and foreseen, weeks and months ago, and only now is the White House coming out of denial and heading straight into saying it could not have been foreseen.
  • Marc Lipsitch, as quoted in "Contrary to Trump's Claim, A Pandemic Was Widely Expected at Some Point" (20 March 2020) by Rem Rieder, FactCheck.org

• Are 30,000 to 40,000 deaths a year too many? That’s generally what the country sees with gun violence and car crashes — and American policymakers, at least, haven’t been driven to major actions on these fronts.
  Are as many as 60,000 deaths a year too many? That’s what Americans have tolerated for the flu.
  Are 90,000 deaths a year too many? That’s the death toll of the ongoing drug overdose crisis — and while policymakers have taken some steps to combat that, experts argue the actions so far have fallen short, and the issue doesn’t draw that much national attention.
  Is the current death toll — of more than 1,500 a day, or equivalent to more than 500,000 deaths a year — too much? Many people would say, of course, it is. But in the middle of a delta variant surge, Americans may be revealing their preferences as restaurant reservations are now around the pre-pandemic normal — a sign the country is moving on.
  • German Lopez, “America needs to decide how much Covid-19 risk it will tolerate”, Vox, (Sep 7, 2021)

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Sweden is now down to 50th in the ranking of total Covid deaths per capita since the pandemic began. Almost every other country ranked above Sweden had lockdowns, mask mandates and draconian restrictions. Sweden meanwhile, largely kept its society open and freedoms intact. ~ James Melville

• The Covid-19 pandemic has jolted everyone into a renewed interest in environmentalism, sustainability, and conservation. In fact, nature is celebrating in the wake of the pandemic. Animals have been found roaming the streets of numerous cities around the world because humans have temporarily retreated. Fish are being seen in rivers previously too polluted to support life, and the skies have cleared up of pollution. It is unfortunate that humanity needed this hard knock to give back nature its share, at least in the short term. But this wakeup call could also be an opportunity to bring spirituality back into people’s lives in a big way.
  • Malhotra, R. (2021). Artificial intelligence and the future of power: 5 battlegrounds. New Delhi : Rupa, 2021.

• The pandemic appears to have given a boost to the China-like command societies and economies in times of disaster when the pragmatics of rapid decision-making and implementation take priority over aesthetic values like individualism and freedom.
  • Malhotra, R. (2021). Artificial intelligence and the future of power: 5 battlegrounds. New Delhi : Rupa, 2021.

• [Kiribati’s industry is taking the time to get even better prepared for reopening. On Friday, some staff will set sail for remote areas of Kiribati’s Line Islands to deliver the training to operators there.]“ nstead, of sulking we are taking this as an opportunity to really restart better.
  • Petero Manufolau, the CEO of the Tourism Authority of Kiribati A COVID-Free Pacific Nation Opened Its Border a Crack. The Virus Came Rushing In (UPDATED: FEBRUARY 2, 2022 )

• And the people stayed home. And read books, and listened, and rested, and exercised, and made art, and played games, and learned new ways of being, and were still. And listened more deeply. Some meditated, some prayed, some danced. Some met their shadows. And the people began to think differently.
  And the people healed. And, in the absence of people living in ignorant, dangerous, mindless, and heartless ways, the earth began to heal.
  And when the danger passed, and the people joined together again, they grieved their losses, and made new choices, and dreamed new images, and created new ways to live and heal the earth fully, as they had been healed.
  • Kitty O'Meara, "In the Time of Pandemic" (16 March 2020), The Daily Round'

• Sweden is now down to 50th in the ranking of total Covid deaths per capita since the pandemic began. Almost every other country ranked above Sweden had lockdowns, mask mandates and draconian restrictions. Sweden meanwhile, largely kept its society open and freedoms intact.
  • James Melville, Twitter, 3:31 AM · Oct 10, 2021

• Governments around the world say they’re engaged in a war against the coronavirus. [...] This kill-or-die idiom is more than casual rhetorical overkill. Many governments are symbolically but very deliberately calling, in this time of fear and uncertainty, for general conscription along military lines. This is so they can, while pointing to an insidious foreign enemy, aim their firepower against some of the most valuable institutions of domestic public life. They have been very successful so far. [...] In addition to economic and military mobilization, wartime measures typically encourage a high degree of political, social and intellectual conformity. The general idea is that, in the face of an existential challenge from a vicious enemy, criticism of the government ought to cease. The media tends to become more patriotic, as do former political partisans. Such was the case in the United States during the early stages of its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, when most journalists and even Democratic politicians rallied around the Republican George W. Bush administration. The trouble is that the "war" against Covid-19 is actually not a war at all. And no one should feel obliged to sign up for it. The loss of, and separation from, loved ones, and the fear and anxiety that is devastating many lives is not an opportunity to fantasize about heroism in battle. The pandemic is, primarily, a global public health emergency; it is made potentially lethal as much by long neglected and underfunded social welfare systems as by a highly contagious virus. A plain description like this is not as stirring as a call to arms — and doesn’t justify the more extreme actions governments have taken against critics during the crisis. It does, however, open up a line of inquiry that journalists ought to pursue, now as well as in the future.
  • Pankaj Mishra, From Modi to Johnson, leaders are using the pandemic to suppress their critics (9 May, 2020), ThePrint

• Awakening late to the pandemic, authoritarian or authoritarian-minded leaders have turned it into an opportunity both to shore up their power and to conceal their stunning ineptitude. To fail to see through their manufactured fog of war, as many in the media are doing, can only further endanger the long-term moral and political health of their societies.
  • Pankaj Mishra, From Modi to Johnson, leaders are using the pandemic to suppress their critics (9 May, 2020), ThePrint

• During the pandemic, many of us have begun to discover how much of our travel is unnecessary. Governments can build on this to create plans for reducing the need to move, while investing in walking, cycling and – when physical distancing is less necessary – public transport. This means wider pavements, better cycle lanes, buses run for service not profit. They should invest heavily in green energy, and even more heavily in reducing energy demand – through, for example, home insulation and better heating and lighting. The pandemic exposes the need for better neighbourhood design, with less public space given to cars and more to people. It also shows how badly we need the kind of security that a lightly taxed, deregulated economy cannot deliver.
  • George Monbiot, "Airlines and oil giants are on the brink. No government should offer them a lifeline" (29 April 2020), The Guardian

• Let's have what many people were calling for long before this disaster hit: a green new deal. But please let's stop describing it as a stimulus package. We have stimulated consumption too much over the past century, which is why we face environmental disaster. Let us call it a survival package, whose purpose is to provide incomes, distribute wealth and avoid catastrophe, without stoking perpetual economic growth. Bail out the people, not the corporations. Bail out the living world, not its destroyers.
  • George Monbiot, "Airlines and oil giants are on the brink. No government should offer them a lifeline" (29 April 2020), The Guardian

• There are two ways this could go. We could, as some people have done, double down on denial. Some of those who have dismissed other threats, such as climate breakdown, also seek to downplay the threat of Covid-19... Or this could be the moment when we begin to see ourselves, once more, as governed by biology and physics, and dependent on a habitable planet. Never again should we listen to the liars and the deniers. Never again should we allow a comforting falsehood to trounce a painful truth. No longer can we afford to be dominated by those who put money ahead of life.
  • George Monbiot, "Covid-19 is nature's wake-up call to complacent civilisation" (25 March 2020), The Guardian

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• To counteract all this, we are told that big government must now return, to regain control, redistribute resources and, with enlightened industrial policy, steer resources to particular national industries and green technology. This is what the debate looked like even before the pandemic. When the new coronavirus ravaged the planet, suspicion of the outside world and free trade exploded. Governments began to close their borders and demand that supply chains be repatriated. ‘I don’t want to talk about a victory lap,’ Trump’s rather enthusiastic business secretary said about the ravages of the virus, but ‘I think it will help to accelerate the return of jobs to North America.’ Financial Times’ global business columnist Rana Foroohar declared that ‘Globalisation as we’ve known it for the last forty years, has failed.’ Governments, meanwhile, decided that the way to protect the economy was bailouts for everyone – first for the financial sector, then for everybody else. People got used to the idea that gains are to be privatized but a growing share of losses are to be covered by taxpayers or central banks. When they run out of money, they just print more and when this creates inflation, people need another round of bailouts to compensate for higher prices. And so on.
  • Johan Norberg, The Capitalist Manifesto: Why the Global Free Market Will Save the World (2023)

• The pandemic, explained the Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson, was the definitive ‘end of the neoliberal era inaugurated by Thatcher and Reagan’. We don’t just hear that from Social Democrats these days. Now right-wing populists, journalists and economists also claim that ‘the Reagan/Thatcher era is over’. These two leaders are often used as symbols of the era of economic liberalization in the early 1980s, and I agree that it feels an awful lot like that era has come to an end. Donald Trump’s advisor Stephen Moore declared that the Republicans are no longer Reagan’s party but Trump’s, and that’s exactly how the party comes across in their recent agitation against free trade, immigration and tech companies, not to mention lies about election fraud. (Reagan once called the peaceful transfer of power the ‘magic’ of the free world.) Thatcher’s Tories have abandoned the European single market she was once instrumental in developing, and have simultaneously abandoned many other economic orthodoxies, toying with more active industrial policies and ‘Buy British’ slogans – a new attitude that Boris Johnson in an unguarded moment happened to summarize as ‘fuck business’. His short-lived successor, Liz Truss, who famously declared that large-scale imports of cheese were ‘a disgrace’, tried to invoke the Iron Lady, albeit through her boldness rather than her policies. Instead, Truss railed against the ‘consensus of the Treasury, of economists, with the Financial Times’ that budgets should be balanced and went on to doom her premiership with a massive, unfunded package of energy subsidies and tax cuts, which markets refused to finance.
  • Johan Norberg, The Capitalist Manifesto: Why the Global Free Market Will Save the World (2023)

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Why not take advantage of the knowledge of the Global South? If we work together this way, then we can protect the whole globe. ~ Tulio de Oliveira

• You might remember Covid! It's the Stephen Miller of diseases, in that we were all very worried about it a few years ago and have since moved on even though it's still extremely dangerous.
  • John Oliver, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver -- "Pig Butchering Scams" (March 3, 2024)

• In fact, de Oliveira says that compared to the wealthy nations of the Global North, countries of the Global South actually have a leg up: "We have more experience dealing with epidemics in the Global South," he says. He gives a rueful chuckle. "It's one of our only scientific advantages."
  It's why Brazil has some of the foremost experts on mosquito-borne outbreaks like Zika and Chikungunya. Why Uganda is so good on viral hemorrhagic fevers like Ebola.
  In South Africa the scourge has been HIV. To deal with it de Oliveira didn't just study up on genomic surveillance, he helped pioneer its use. "Yeah, very early on," he says. "Probably in 1995. When the field was just starting."
  In other words, it wasn't a fluke that South Africa stood up their COVID genomic surveillance so fast. They were building on years of prior work.
  • Tulio de Oliveira as quoted by Nurith Aizenman, “Who's most likely to save us from the next pandemic? The answer may surprise you”, NPR, "Goats and Soda", (February 2, 2023)

• De Oliveira says those early efforts included developing methods to minimize the number of samples that clinics would need to send in so that South Africa's already strapped health workers could contribute.
  And yet, de Oliveira says, the burden those health workers face is something many of his Global North colleagues overlook.
  "They come with these great ideas of setting up these really advanced computer systems in the clinic."
  De Oliveira's response: First try spending a day at one of our rural clinics.
  "Most of them just burst into tears during the process," he says. "And they're like, 'Oh! I didn't realize that that clinic would have like, 500 people in the queue. And like, people almost dying and the doctors didn't have the tools. And that if I put in an advanced computer system that tries to get [hundreds of samples], not only is it going to have no effect, but it will disturb the clinicians who are overworked.' "
  • Tulio de Oliveira as quoted by Nurith Aizenman, “Who's most likely to save us from the next pandemic? The answer may surprise you”, NPR, "Goats and Soda", (February 2, 2023)

• And so as the world mobilizes to catch future pandemics, de Oliveira has a request: Let the Global South take the lead.
  "Why not take advantage of the knowledge of the Global South?" he says. "If we work together this way, then we can protect the whole globe."
  • Tulio de Oliveira as quoted by Nurith Aizenman , “Who's most likely to save us from the next pandemic? The answer may surprise you”, NPR, "Goats and Soda", (February 2, 2023)

• The situation with the coronavirus is different from the Charlie Hebdo incident, because this is neither a religious nor a political conflict. In 2015, the political opposition was looking for a way of stirring up an uprising in order to be able to overthrow the government of the day, and the Church was a handy scapegoat. But I believe that with the coronavirus they will not venture to attack the Christians in the same way.
  • Bishop Ambroise Ouédraogo of Maradi In Niger, in time of the virus, fears of anti-Christian violence (May 1, 2020)

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The whole messaging of this pandemic is you're stuck at home teleworking, that must be really tough so here are some recipes for sourdough starter, and here's what you should catch up on Netflix. ~ Nick Papageorge

• "The whole messaging of this pandemic is you're stuck at home teleworking, that must be really tough so here are some recipes for sourdough starter, and here's what you should catch up on Netflix," Papageorge said. "But what about the people who aren't teleworking? What are they going to do?"
  People with access to the outdoors at home were 20% more likely to maintain social distance.
  "It's not shocking that if you don't live in a comfortable house you're going to be leaving your house more often," Papageorge said. "But the point we want to push is that if I'm a policymaker maybe I really need to think about opening city parks in a dense neighborhood during a pandemic. Maybe that's something that's worth the risk. This is why we want to understand these details -- they can eventually suggest policies."
  • Nick Papageorge as quoted in “Do You Socially Distance? Your Income Might Matter”, by Cara Murez, U.S. News & World Report, (Jan. 19, 2021)

• A pandemic has been declared, but not for the 24,600 who die every day from unnecessary starvation, and not for 3,000 children who die every day from preventable malaria, and not for the 10,000 people who die every day because they are denied publicly-funded healthcare, and not for the hundreds of Venezuelans and Iranians who die every day because America's blockade denies them life-saving medicines, and not for the hundreds of mostly children bombed or starved to death every day in Yemen, in a war supplied and kept going, profitably, by America and Britain. Before you panic, consider them.
  • John Pilger, quoted in Here is what legendary journalist John Pilger said about coronavirus outbreak Pilger decries inattention to hunger, malaria and American wars and blockades, The Week, 12 March 2020

• Even among the experts I’ve spoken to over the past few weeks, there’s wide disagreement on how much risk is tolerable, when milder precautions like masking are warranted, and at what point harsher measures, like lockdowns and school closures, are needed. There’s not even agreement on what the endgame is; some say that, from a policy standpoint, the goal should be to keep caseloads manageable for hospitals, while others call for doing much more to drive down Covid-19.
  One big problem identified by experts: “I don’t think we’re having those conversations enough,” Saskia Popescu, an infectious disease epidemiologist at George Mason University, told me. Instead of the public and officials openly discussing how much risk is acceptable, the public dialogue often feels like two extremes — the very risk-averse and those downplaying any risk of the coronavirus whatsoever — talking past each other.
  • Saskia Popescu as quoted by German Lopez in “America needs to decide how much Covid-19 risk it will tolerate”, Vox, (Sep 7, 2021)

• If I had to sum it up, I would say sheer madness. It's obscene. It's strictly political, really, an attempt to divert from what we all know has been a gross mismanagement of the prevention phase of this in the United States and the response phase, and it's tragic because the World Health Organization now is moving into a phase where it is going to try to help avert a catastrophe in the developing world. If we think about how difficult it has been for us in the United States with our sophisticated healthcare system to manage this crisis, imagine living in a slum in a developing country or in a refugee camp. And in places like that, the only place you really have to turn for expertise and for financial support is the World Health Organization when governments themselves can't provide the resources. So the timing of this is particularly catastrophic because it is just about to wallop parts of the world in vulnerable communities that really can't handle it. I mean, Trump has a point about aspects of the World Health Organization's response that have been problematic. The problem is his very criticisms are ones that you could levy just as easily at him, overreliance on China, flattery of China, sucking up to China, to put it in an undiplomatic way. I mean, that's something that we saw it characterize the early phase of the U.S. response led by President Trump, and downplaying the crisis until it was too late, missing the month of February, as he did, to get the testing apparatuses in place and put in place the kinds of guidelines that we have now but at the time when it's already spread across the country.
  • Samantha Power, former United States Ambassador to the United Nations, on President Trump's plan to halt the half a billion dollars to the WHO, interview in CNN's New Day on 15 April 2020. Transcript online at CNN.

• The moment that the Chinese scientists and doctors announced that the coronavirus could be transmitted between human beings on Jan. 20, 2020, the socialist governments went into action to monitor ports of entry and to test and trace key parts of the population. They set up task forces and procedures to immediately make sure that the infection would not go out of control amongst their people. They did not wait till the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a global pandemic on March 11.
  This is in stark contrast to governments in the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, India, and other capitalist states, where there has been a hallucinatory attitude towards the Chinese government and the WHO. There is no comparison between the stance of Vietnam’s Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc and U.S. President Donald Trump: the former had a sober, science-based attitude, while the latter has consistently laughed off the coronavirus as a simple flu as recently as June 24.
  • Vijay Prashad in COVID-19: Why Laos, Vietnam & China Have Beaten the Virus and India, Brazil and the US Have Not, Consortium News (16 July 2020)

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• If the government continues with its ‘zero-COVID’ policy, Foxconn would only be the beginning. There is Foxconn today, but other factories will face similar situations
  • Li Qiang In a challenge to Beijing, unrest over COVID lockdowns spreads (BY AMY CHANG CHIEN, CHANG CHE, JOHN LIU AND PAUL MOZUR THE NEW YORK TIMES. Nov 25, 2022)

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• People inoculated against Covid-19 are just as likely to spread the delta variant of the virus to contacts in their household as those who haven’t had shots, according to new research.
  • Suzi Ring, Vaccinated People Also Spread the Delta Variant, Yearlong Study Shows, Bloomberg, 29 October 2021

• It is not yet clear whether the people concerned [in the earlier cases] have also been to southern Africa
  • RIVM health institute Omicron COVID variant was in Europe before South African scientists detected and flagged it to the world (NOVEMBER 30, 2021)

• Vaccines against the coronavirus may impair the body’s ability to produce a key type of antibody, thus potentially limiting the immune system’s defenses against mutated strains of the virus, a new study suggests.
  • David Rosenberg, COVID vaccines may impair long-term immunity to the virus, Israel National News, 24 May 2022

• Successful vaccine rollouts have failed to stop Covid transmission, with new data showing the prevalence of the virus increasing in fully jabbed individuals, according to a medical study in The Lancet. Examining new infections in Germany, researchers found that the rate of cases among fully vaccinated individuals aged 60 and older has risen from 16.9% in July to 58.9% in October.
  • RT, Mass vaccination fails to halt Covid transmission rates – study, 1 December 2021

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• It is only a matter of weeks before Omicron is dominant here (in Germany).
  • Olaf Scholz cited in: "Germany agrees new contact limits to curb COVID-19" in The Star, 22 December 2021.

• I think it's really important people have an accurate sense of the reality in order to go about their lives. If their risk assessments are being driven by or influenced by these overestimated hospitalization and death rates, I think that's problematic.
  • Jake Scott as quoted by Rob Stein , “Scientists debate how lethal COVID is. Some say it's now less risky than flu”, NPR, (September 16, 2022)

• It may take four to five years before we finally see the end of the pandemic and the start of a post-COVID normal,”
  • Singapore’s education minister according to Chilling trend: A longer, deadlier pandemic February 1, 2021

• The fight is far from over
  • J Small EU Parliament Special Committee on COVID19 pandemic - Pfizer admits vaccines were untested (FULL) (via Youtube ~7:30) (Oct 13, 2022)

• COVID-19 is a terrible warning against complacency in the face of global threats to all human life. The past twelve months have served to reinforce the messages that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been saying for decades: that it is only through collective action and responsible leadership that we can secure a peaceful and habitable planet for future generations. The new Presidency of Joe Biden has a chance to reassert US commitments to the values and institutions of multilateralism; there is no other way for humanity to overcome the dangers posed by pandemics, climate change and the risk of nuclear war.
  • Ellen Johnson Sirleaf as quoted by Gayle Spinazze, “Press Release—THIS IS YOUR COVID-19 WAKE-UP CALL: IT IS 100 SECONDS TO MIDNIGHT”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, (January 27, 2021)

• The pandemic-related economic slowdown temporarily reduced the carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming. But over the coming decade fossil fuel use needs to decline precipitously if the worst effects of climate change are to be avoided. Instead, fossil fuel development and production are projected to increase. Atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations hit a record high in 2020, one of the two warmest years on record. The massive wildfires and tropical cyclones of 2020 are illustrations of the major devastation that will only increase if governments do not significantly and quickly amplify their efforts to bring greenhouse gas emissions essentially to zero.
  • Susan Solomon as quoted by Gayle Spinazze, “Press Release—THIS IS YOUR COVID-19 WAKE-UP CALL: IT IS 100 SECONDS TO MIDNIGHT”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, (January 27, 2021)

• A lot has been written about how this pandemic is exacerbating social inequalities. But what if it's because our societies are so unequal that this pandemic happened? There is a school of thought that, historically, {pandemics have been more likely to occur at times of social inequality and discord. As the poor get poorer, the thinking goes, their baseline health suffers, making them more prone to infection. At the same time they are forced to move more, in search of work, and to gravitate to cities. The rich, meanwhile, have more to spend on luxuries, including products that hail from far-flung places. The world becomes more tightly connected through trade, and germs, people and luxury goods travel together along trade routes that connect cities. On paper, it looks like a perfect storm.
  • Laura Spinney, "Inequality doesn't just make pandemics worse – it could cause them" (12 April 2020), The Guardian

• Pandemics don't always trigger social unrest, but they can do, by throwing into relief the very inequalities that caused them. That's because they hit the poor hardest – those in low-paid or unstable employment, who live in crowded accommodation, have underlying health issues, and for whom healthcare is less affordable or less accessible. This was true in the past and remains so today. During the 2009 flu pandemic the death rate was three times higher in the poorest fifth of England's population than in the richest. Covid-19 is showing no signs of departing from the pattern, which, because of the way the socioeconomic dice fall, also has a racial dimension. But there is something brand new about this pandemic, which has never been seen before in the history of humanity – and that is our unprecedented global experiment in lockdown. These lockdown measures are designed to slow the spread of the disease, relieve the burden on health systems and ultimately save lives – and it looks as if they may be doing that. But they may also be exacerbating social inequalities themselves.
  • Laura Spinney, "Inequality doesn't just make pandemics worse – it could cause them" (12 April 2020), The Guardian

• In India there have been reports of deaths among unemployed migrant workers returning home in search of food; many countries, including the US, have seen workers taking industrial action, and anger has been expressed in rural communities over wealthy city-dwellers retreating to their second homes for the duration. Governments should keep an eye on these developments, in weighing up when and how to lift the lockdown, because even if it's difficult to argue today that the cure is worse than the disease, the cure might provoke an entirely different malaise – and history teaches us that no society is immune to that. That's the symptomatic treatment. In the long term, of course, they – and we – should address the dreadful inequality in our societies, which this pandemic is picking apart with a lethal scalpel.
  • Laura Spinney, "Inequality doesn't just make pandemics worse – it could cause them" (12 April 2020), The Guardian

• We believe that Spain will not have, at most, beyond a diagnosed case. Hopefully there will be no local transmission. If there is, it will be very limited and very controlled
  • Fernando Simon Soria, (31 January 2020)

• Humans wield more power over the planet than ever before. In the wake of COVID-19, record-breaking temperatures and spiraling inequality, it is time to use that power to redefine what we mean by progress, where our carbon and consumption footprints are no longer hidden.
  • Achim Steiner, "Broken societies put people and planet on collision course, says UNDP". undp.org, December 15, 2020.

• During lockdown... and hedgehog walkabouts were a lot safer
  • David Suzuki Nature of things (November 12, 2021) a video with this explanation: When humanity hits pause, nature reboots. Scientists discover the surprising ways pandemic lockdowns affected our planet (youtube video not available yet)

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• People in quarantine should not think they won't be fined for leaving their hotel room.
  • Taiwan department of health Man fined $5000 for breaking Taiwan Covid-19 quarantine for 8 seconds December 7, 2020

• The Corona crisis will shrink the inflow of dollars. Hopefully, this is temporary, no more than a few months. CBN can allow some downward pressure on the naira without energetically intervening to defend the exchange rate. Only if and when the rate seems that it might dip precipitously should the CBN intervene.
  • Chief Bola Ahmed Adekunle Tinubu Adresses Federal Government on COVID-19:(April 2020)

• If one word could sum up the experience of 2020, it would be disbelief. Between Xi Jinping’s public acknowledgment of the coronavirus outbreak on January 20, 2020, and Joseph Biden’s inauguration as the 46th president of the United States precisely a year later on January 20, 2021, the world was shaken by a disease that in the space of twelve months killed more than 2.2 million people and rendered tens of millions severely ill. As of the end of April 2021, when this book went to press, the global death toll exceeded 3.2 million. The danger it posed disrupted the daily routine of virtually everyone on the planet, stopped much of public life, closed schools, separated families, interrupted travel both within and between countries, and upended the world economy. To contain the fallout, government support for households, businesses, and markets took on dimensions not seen outside wartime. It was not just by far the sharpest economic recession experienced since World War II, it was qualitatively unique. Never before had there been a collective decision, however haphazard and uneven, to shut large parts of the world’s economy down. It was, as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) put it, “a crisis like no other.”
  • Adam Tooze Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy (2021)

• And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning? So it'd be interesting to check that.
  • Donald Trump, as reported in "Coronavirus: Outcry after Trump suggests injecting disinfectant as treatment" BBC News (24 April 2020)

• His Majesty the (Bhutan) King's leadership and guidance have been key to the vaccination program's success. Earlier this year (2021), Bhutan was able to inoculate more than 80% of the total population (12 years old and above), with timely and generous support from countries in the region, Europe and the United States. And currently, Bhutan is preparing for a nationwide third, booster, dose. Despite being a resource-constrained economy, Bhutan did not compromise on the quality and standards of COVID-19 measures. With strict containment measures and successful vaccination programs, Bhutan did not have any positive cases from the community as of mid-December 2021 and was also able to open the economy for business. The good news is that the economy is estimated to achieve 3% GDP (Gross Domestic Product) growth in 2021 from –10.8% in 2020.
  • Namgay Tshering (2021) cited in: "Containing COVID-19 in the Land of the Thunder Dragon" in International Monetary Fund, December 2021.

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• In an interview with The Economist last month, Bill Gates stated that millions of people in developing countries would die before the COVID-19 pandemic was over. He noted, importantly, that 90 percent of the deaths would not result from the virus itself, but from “indirect” effects. These include most prominently the economic impact of the pandemic, as well as other causes such as the overwhelming of medical and public health resources, which increases fatalities from other diseases. Gates was not exaggerating at all. It’s easy to see how this horror will materialize, if we project forward from the current situation.
  • Mark Weisbrot, If you could save a million lives, would you do it?, The Hill, (1 October 2020)

• The World Food Program projects that the number of people facing acute hunger will nearly double this year, from 135 to 260 million. This is mainly a result of the economic impact of the pandemic: as the World Bank has noted, this is the worst global recession since the end of World War II, and the worst ever (since 1870) in terms of the number of countries pushed into recession. It creates poverty, extreme poverty and food shortages for hundreds of millions of people in developing countries.
  • Mark Weisbrot, If you could save a million lives, would you do it?, The Hill, (1 October 2020)

• Pregnant women do not seem to be at higher risk of getting SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. However, studies have shown an increased risk of developing severe COVID-19 if they are infected, compared with non-pregnant women of a similar age. COVID-19 during pregnancy has also been associated with an increased likelihood of preterm birth. 
  • World Health Organization Coronavirus disease (COVID-19): Pregnancy and childbirth (30 August 2021 | Q&A) (video)

• ​In the light of the coronavirus pandemic, I focus criticism on capitalism and the vulnerabilities it has accumulated for several reasons. Viruses are part of nature. They have attacked human beings—sometimes dangerously—in both distant and recent history. [...] Alternative systems—those not driven by a profit-first logic—could manage viruses better. While not profitable to produce and stockpile everything needed for a viral pandemic, it is efficient. The wealth already lost in this pandemic far exceeds the cost to have produced and stockpiled the tests and ventilators, the lack of which is contributing so much to today's disaster. Capitalism often pursues profit at the expense of more urgent social needs and values. In this, capitalism is grossly inefficient. This pandemic is now bringing that truth home to people.
  • Richard D. Wolff, "COVID-19 and the Failures of Capitalism" (6 April 2020), CounterPunch

• "...Who do you know that has ever said, “I’m going to get really drunk and then drive around on public roads?”; Who do you know that has ever said, “I’m going to go out in public, but I refuse to wear a face mask?”

Both these questions can end in the same result to any of us in Gadsden.....If you choose to drive a vehicle when you’re drunk,..., you are putting everyone on our highways in danger of possible injury — or even death....It’s the same as choosing not to wear a face mask in public. You’re putting everyone around you in danger by possibly exposing them to COVID-19, ultimately leading to severe illness and even death for some....You’ll never even know that you injured someone or gave them the virus that caused their death.....I’ve heard some say, “It’s My body, my choice.” It’s your choice for your body, but not my body, or all the general public’s bodies around you that you are exposing to the virus...."

• • Diane Davis in Not wearing mask is like driving drunk, The Gadsden Times, (July 20, 2020).

X

• The pandemic must be tackled together, united, and following science. Any attempt to politicize or stigmatize the pandemic must be rejected.
  • Xi Jinping (September 22, 2020)

• In dealing with the Covid-19 epidemic that suddenly exploded, we have given expression to the great love that unites human beings by adhering to the principle according to which people and human life must be put first, and we have written an epic of the struggle to the epidemic with intrepidity, aware of the fact that unity is strength.
  • Xi Jinping (December 31, 2020)

See also

• COVID-19 pandemic in mainland China
• COVID-19 pandemic in France
• COVID-19 pandemic in India
• COVID-19 pandemic in Pakistan
• COVID-19 pandemic in the United States
• COVID-19 testing
• COVID-19 Vaccine
• Coronavirus disease 2019
• Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on religion
• SARS-CoV-2
• Shortages related to the COVID-19 pandemic

External links

Wikinews

Wikinews has news related to this article:

COVID-19

• Encyclopedic article on COVID-19 pandemic on Wikipedia
• Media related to COVID-19 pandemic on Wikimedia Commons
• COVID-19 pandemic travel guide from Wikivoyage

Authority control: WorldCat search

1. ↑ https://www.hiamag.com/مشاهير/حوارات/1358016-ماغي-بو-غصن-للموت-لا-يشبه-أي-عمل-آخر-وسحر-قدمتني-في-قالب-جديد-ومختلف