The Long-Term Implications of COVID

Here's Julia Doubleday at The Gauntlet: Germany entered a recession last year because the average worker needed 20 sick days. Pitting public health against economic health is fundamentally wrong and will lead to the utter destruction of both

Here are some excerpts, but make sure you read the whole thing and subscribe to The Gauntlet yourself.

"While the average person- subject as they have been to years of COVID-minimizing propaganda- may not understand that unmitigated disease spread carries a cascade of economic impacts, they can certainly observe those impacts in day-to-day life. People are complaining of being ill, more frequently and for longer periods of time, losing work hours and pay. People are wondering at the pace of reinfections occurring in young children, which also contributes to lost labor hours as parents stay home with sick kids. Teachers are noting that children are falling behind grade level, unable to read, and data confirms that test scores are dropping. People are complaining about bad service, staff shortages, flight delays, tour cancelations. And people are mourning as unusually young friends and family suddenly drop dead.

"What people aren’t doing is wearing masks, demanding clean air, or otherwise mitigating. The relationship between continual, forcible COVID reinfection and long-term social and economic consequences- from the annoying to the tragic to the catastrophic- has been purposely obscured. 

"Since 2020, including during the Trump era when press outlets still challenged policies of abandonment to the virus, media players and politicians have framed public health and economic health as opposing goals. Mitigations and protections were labeled “restrictions” and portrayed as punishments, rather than collective care empowering us to protect and save one another. Republicans, from day one, were on TV encouraging the vulnerable to die for the economy.

"Among them was Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, who famously stated that grandparents would happily lay down their lives for the health of the American economy. The problem here isn’t just that it’s morally reprehensible for a society to throw elders in the garbage because money; it’s also that sickening, disabling and killing people at scale will never help the economy. 

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"All of the sociopathic calculation behind the idea that “letting it rip” would be “good for the economy” was based on this now obviously false presumption: that herd immunity was achievable. And perhaps if COVID wasn’t an illness people can catch over and over, every few months, the long-term economic outcome might not look so disastrous. But recurrent infections being the reality- and herd immunity being impossible- the mass, unending infection approach carries obvious and compounding economic consequences.

"The anti-science herd immunity strategy began with Republicans under Trump, but it has thrived and been mainstreamed by Democrats under Biden. Optimistic interpretation of initial data led then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky to claim that vaccines would provide sterilizing immunity; that a vaccinated person would have long-term immunity and could not spread COVID. (Sidenote: this announcement is often memory-holed by the administration as it is starkly inconvenient to their current claims that sterilizing immunity was never a goal of vaccination.)

"Thus, the vaccination campaign kicked off the Democrats’ pursuit of herd immunity, which bore no more fruit than the Republicans’. Vaccine mandates were not an authoritarian punishment intended to poison anti-vaxxers or turn them into 5G conductors. Vaccination mandates are an integral part of a successful herd immunity strategy. It’s also why you’ll see those mandates begin to relax and unwind; with herd immunity unachievable, the individual vaccination status of others is far less critical to collective health.

"In other words, Democrats are now well aware that the herd immunity strategy via vaccination, like herd immunity via infection, and then the subsequent, short-lived “rich hybrid immunity” strategy- have all failed.

"So now I come to the implications of failed herd immunity, ongoing reinfection, and serious, common, long-term health impacts of COVID, which should strike fear into the heart of every investor, every boss, every landlord, every pundit, and every politician: economic impacts of COVID are only just beginning and will continue to spiral downward. The damage will be cumulative, irreversible, and it will destroy the workforce. 

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"The libertarians behind our failed COVID approach- the ones that successfully laundered their “let it rip” strategy through media outlets hellbent on supporting Biden’s premature declaration of the end of the pandemic- bet the house on a false hypothesis that can’t but produce recession in the long-term. They went all-in on the gamble that mass infection would lead to mass protection. They lost. The rest of us will be paying the compounding interest on this bet until we finally reject their failed approach and implement mitigations."

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Boy, I wish SHE were the head of the CDC!  If we had more like her, maybe we wouldn't be in this fix!