Social distancing, class, and hypocrisy

JKR wrote:

Scientific consensus on the COVID-19 pandemic: we need to act now; The Lancet; 31 October 2020

Quote:

Effective measures that suppress and control transmission need to be implemented widely, and they must be supported by financial and social programmes that encourage community responses and address the inequities that have been amplified by the pandemic.

...

Japan, Vietnam, and New Zealand, to name a few countries, have shown that robust public health responses can control transmission, allowing life to return to near-normal, and there are many such success stories. The evidence is very clear: controlling community spread of COVID-19 is the best way to protect our societies and economies until safe and effective vaccines and therapeutics arrive within the coming months. We cannot afford distractions that undermine an effective response; it is essential that we act urgently based on the evidence.

You mean how the fact that Japan is currently experiencing its third wave of covid makes the country a success? I guess by that metric Canada must be more successful because nationally we are near the top of our second wave.

What's going on in India?

Quote:

Following some news articles announcing India had reached near herd immunity and widespread reports on the ground of services and businesses opening up [1], most of the country has once again locked down this month following a reported ‘surge’ in cases and ‘spikes’ in deaths and the herd immunity hypothesis being withdrawn [2/3]. The figures circulated on mainstream media sound huge but are small in the context of India’s total population. By my calculations using the government’s own cumulative data since March 2020, only 0.95% of the population (13.7 million) have tested positive for SARS COV2 and 171,000 of those cases had COVID 19 entered on their death certificates, which amounts to 0.0124% of the entire population; just over one every ten thousand [4/5]. To protect those vulnerable to fatal infection the remaining 99.9% have suffered lockdown and all the attendant hardships. 80% of India’s population work in the informal sector on a day to day, hand to mouth basis and many have again suffered a loss of income [6].

India has much greater public health problems than that posed by SARS COV2 which comes nowhere near the top ten causes of death, trumped by the following highly communicable diseases: diarrhoea at 720,000 deaths per annum, lower respiratory tract infections at 520,000 deaths per annum and tuberculosis at 450,000 deaths per annum  [7]. India has never locked down to prevent these fatalities which are a regular annual occurrence. So, why does the spread of SARS COV2 warrant locking down the population once more? In the light of the data presented above, the public health rationale doesn’t appear to make sense given a far greater burden is presented by other communicable diseases that proliferate unchecked.

This shows why we must question the motivations of anyone claiming that an urgent priority for global health right now should be to vaccinate everyone in the world with the covid vaccine, or the idea that we have to keep massive restrictions (including travel restrictions with developing nations, which in particular hurts the newcomer families that the left claims to care so much about) or public health measure in place (possibly for years) until this happens.

This is why social distancing mandates should have been rejected by the left:

Quote:

Manitoba's Opposition New Democrats have received a warning, but no fine, for holding an outdoor news conference that attracted a large crowd during the COVID-19 pandemic.

NDP Leader Wab Kinew says two enforcement officials visited his legislature office recently and left after issuing a warning about the event.

The provincial Justice Department did not comment other than to say its investigation has concluded and no fines will be issued.

Kinew held a news conference outside Manitoba Hydro headquarters in downtown Winnipeg in mid-March and was joined by striking workers at the utility.

Outdoor public gatherings at the time were capped at 10 people under COVID-19 health orders, and several dozen people attended the news conference.

Kinew says he offered to pay any fines when he received the warning.

With social distancing top of mind, any time there is a protest people are going to watch for social distancing violations. The group's critics will watch for it in order to distract from the protest, and the media will watch for it because it gives them easy clickbait to get attention while being able to ignore the issue that sparked the protest in the first place. Even the most thoughtful, carefully organized protest is easily derailed by one person not wearing a mask or doing social distancing. Suddenly, it becomes all about a group disobeying the social distancing rules, the issue that sparked the protest is forgotten in the public mind, and instead of advancing its cause, the group is forced to play defense.

Unfortunately this is not the last time something like this is going to happen.

laine lowe wrote:

The master mind behind many of these anti-masking groups (i.e. Hugs not Masks, Mothers Against Distancing, etc) are being funded and coordinated by a far right asshole who goes by the name Chris Sky and is actually the son of a wealthy real estate developer. His real name is Chris Saccoccia and he is connected with such admirable politicians as Maxime Bernier. There's a reason that Jagmeet Singh made the claims he made and he is correct, this is a toxic and dangerous movement.

https://www.antihate.ca/chris_saccoccia_appears_antisemitic_show

The fact that people who support mask mandates and lockdowns are digging up this kind of dirt on people who call these measures into question proves their desparation, because they know they cannot win arguments based on the substance and the merit. It's the same tactics and techniques the Republicans used to smear anyone who questioned the Iraq war when the issue was current. There are many people who have issues with masks and lockdowns, and some groups have even distanced themselves from Chris Sky. For Singh to talk about anti-white extremism is simply an attempt to use race as a divisive tactic to demonize anyone who disagrees with his position, and it reeks of priviledge. It ignores the videos of First Nations drummers at the events making their way on Twitter right now. It ignores that some Muslims have decided to have Eid celebrations without social distancing. It ignores that many of the businesses that have gone under are owned by people of colour. It ignores the fact that police enforcement of lockdowns and curfews will fall heavily on people of colour. It ignores the fact that lockdowns actually accelerated the spread of the virus among poor people of colour. It ignores the fact that non-white children have been disproportionately harmed by school closures, and these children will be left further behind when the public education system is dismantled, which is what online learning is going to lead to. It ignores the fact that extended family support networks are important for many newcomer Canadians, and that restrictions on family gatherings are an inderect attack on this group. It ignores the fact that Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gil, a doctor, founder of a physicial lobby group, and a woman of colour herself, essentially agrees that lockdowns and mask mandates are bad for public health. Wear masks and stay home if that's what makes you feel better, but it smacks of arrogant privilege to demand everyone else do the same and to demonize and vilify anyone questioning these motivations.

Maxime Bernier may be a reprehensible human being, but right now every other politician in the country, and especially the left, is a clear and present danger to civil liberties and human rights. I think the fact that politicians and health officials were telling people to not visit loved ones over Christmas and Easter and still assume power to restrict how many people can visit in private resdences, and the fact that large segments of the population are comfortable with that, is far more toxic and dangerous than all the worst elements of the anti-mask/anti-lockdown movement combined.

Speaking of racist anti-lockdowners, does this guy sound like a racist to you? This sounds exactly like the kind of talk I would hear people speak when I started becoming involved with left-wing politics, back when I was on the left.

And of course the doctors are only trying to help and have the purest of motivations:

Quote:

The top public health officials in Southwestern Ontario pulled in hundreds of thousands in overtime pay last year for their work during the COVID-19 pandemic.

At least two of the region’s medical officers of health received more than $100,000 each in overtime, including Middlesex-London’s top public health doctor, Chris Mackie, and Haldimand-Norfolk’s Shanker Nesathurai. 

The overtime pay is part of a provincial program to compensate local health units for extraordinary expenses incurred relating to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It was one of the initiatives set up by the province to recognize some of the frontline healthcare workers,” said London city councillor Maureen Cassidy, who chairs the Middlesex-London board of health.

“They’ve asked us to keep a tally of all the overtime hours and the dollars for every one of our employees who have worked overtime directly related to the COVID-19 response,” she said.

You mean high-level government medical officers of health might actually have a financial incentive to keep the pandemic measures going? I know Dr. Henry found the time to write a book, but has there been any investigation of the terms of pay for any of the other medical officials in this country?

Pondering wrote:

Flu overload was annoying, Covid overload leads to deaths by cancer and diabetes and heart attacks and car accidents and everything else people die of.

The vast majority of such deaths have happened because the hospitals actually shut down surgeries in anticipation of waves of patients that never materialized. It was all based on exaggerated models that never came anyhwere close to true.

Pondering wrote:

See India for what happens when it is out of control. That isn't comparable to flu overload with people waiting too long in emergency.

Over one billion people live in India, and the current wave is turning down after cresting at just over 300 000 new daily cases. Not a major problem in the grand scheme of things, in particular with other health and poverty challenges in that country. The global media is far more concerned with covid in India than people who actually live in the country.

kropotkin1951 wrote:

I think this is a racist statement. Its a good thing that this COVID only affects old people because they are even less valuable especially if they are brown in a poor country.

I suspect that the people dying in India and their families do not subscribe to your who the fuck cares they are only poor people philosophy. They likely see all those individuals as important. Of course tens of thousands of dead people is the price to pay for egalitarianism. They should all be proud to sacrifice for you.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/43-of-covid-19-deaths-in-india...

Sunetra Gupta has raised concerns about literally hundreds of millions of people starving to death from lockdowns, most of whom will be in the developing world. I guess she must be a racist white supremacist.

That's the problem with the covid cult. They claim that only deaths from coronavirus matter, and that if you try and put things into perspective, you are somehow a bad person and these people automatically assume you don't care about covid deaths.

This is going to go over very well:

Quote:

The federal government has approved a travel exemption for the final two rounds of the Stanley Cup playoffs that would allow NHL teams to cross the Canada-US border with a modified quarantine.

Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino issued a "national interest" exemption to the league that would allow cross-border travel under specific conditions amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

NHL players and team personnel will enter and leave the country using private planes. Players and club personnel from the United States to Canada will be subject to pre- and post-arrival testing in addition to daily COVID-19 tests.

The players will have to live in a modified quarantine bubble that includes the team hotel and the arena. They will have to abide by rules that either severely limit or strictly forbid interaction with the public in both places. There will be no use of shared facilities and no contact with the general public