As TDB has been pointing out since the beginning of this pandemic, Covid is far larger and more problematic than many of us seem to comprehend right now.
Bloomberg are in no way shape or form card carrying members of the left, they are raw data crunchers for the elites and their research on current vaccine roll outs warn that we won’t get back to ‘normal’ for 7 more years!!!
Covid 19 coronavirus: Calculation shows when pandemic is expected to end
Bloomberg has built the biggest database of Covid-19 vaccines given around the world and, by their calculations, it will take seven years.
Number-crunchers at the publication say it will take that long to reach leading US doctor Anthony Fauci’s estimate for the herd immunity threshold of 75 per cent of people inoculated globally.
7 years and that is best case scenario to get to 75% global herd immunity.
There is much that go wrong.
Poor vaccine roll outs, insufficient supply of the vaccine and the new mutations out of the UK and South Africa are so contagious that the UKs current lock down regime, which creates a 30% reduction in transmission, will actually see a 30% increase in infections from the new mutation!
The rest of the planet is faring just as poorly and most health systems are now close to capacity and exhaustion.
The euphoria of the vaccination announcement in late 2020 utterly underplayed the lack of public health infrastructure in America, the new mutation’s contagiousness and the fact that a global 75% herd immunity will need to be an annual immunisation event if it is to mean anything.
The economic whiplash hasn’t hit us yet and the full death count hasn’t even begun.
The difference between this pandemic and previous pandemics is that 24 hour air travel can re-infect a country or geographic area over and over again, rather than allow it to slowly die out as previous pandemics have.
What does that mean for us in NZ?
The naked truth is that we don’t have capacity to widen the border safely and if the virus gets through, Labour will be blamed if the track-trace can’t stop us going back into another lockdown.
All that political gratitude to Jacinda for keeping us safe would immediately evaporate if public service incompetence is seen as a conflating factor in any new outbreak.
That all adds up to one thing, the border has little chance of opening before 2024.
That means exploited migrant workers, exploited international students and hyper tourism will be banned from returning which is problematic to NZ because much of our economy is based on those flawed economic models.
This in turn demands a vision from the Government that goes well beyond simply keeping the virus out.
Does Labour have that vision?
No. no they do not.
All the Government’s energy is being spent keeping us safe, there is no plan to rebuild, there is no plan to adapt. This would be a problem if any other political party had a vision, but none of them do, so Jacinda’s position is only threatened by another outbreak combined with an incompetent response.
If you think Covid will be dealt with this year, I don’t think you are paying attention.
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To be fair to Labour, based on the last 3 years, I don’t think they had a plan full stop, except getting reelected.
And National are so far off the target, (Chris Bishop is embarrassingly awful), despite a gift like the housing crisis worsened by Labour’s ineptitude, that they certainly are not the answer.
But what will Grant do without his stock Neo Lib play book of immigration, trash tourism and cheap exploitable labour to refer to?
There are a lot of very silly notions deeply ingrained in the psyches of people living in industrial nations:
1. Politicians know what they are doing and have the welfare of the people as their prime concern..
2. Bureaucrats are intelligent, well-educated, effective and efficient.
3. Debts and deficits don’t matter.
4. Energy and resources are infinite.
5. The Earth has an infinite capacity to absorb/process pollution.
6. Positive thinking can overcome all problems.
7. Human ingenuity and resourcefulness got us to where we are, and therefore we can overcome all setbacks on the path to a ‘better future’.
8. Humans have control of nature.
‘The Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine offers as little as 10% protection against the Covid variant first seen in South Africa, researchers have suggested…..’
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/08/oxford-covid-vaccine-10-effective-south-african-variant-study
Turn the tap off immigration for a number of years. As people die allow for energy and resource to replenish. As long as our population is allowed to grow at an alarming rate, our energy and resource can’t cope, as is paying out in home ownership and entitlement right now.
I still pine for the N.Z. of the 70s and 80s.
Yes that fact on the South African variant is scary.
‘Vaccines Or Not, Scientists Now Believe COVID Is Here To Stay’
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/vaccines-or-not-scientists-now-believe-covid-here-stay
Hmm, it is “normal” that sees us in all of this shit, from climate science and degradation of the natural world and the poisoning of the seas to pandemics and our own overpopulation of this fragile planet. Maybe “normal” is not what we should be aiming for.
Perhaps this pandemic, and any subsequent ones, is a cloud with a silver lining, giving us the opportunity to reset so we and this planet can survive.
climate science denial of course, duh
All depends on when the great Asian immigration ponzi scheme gets up and running again. Rapid and unsustainable immigration is the only way Western countries can ‘grow’ their economies. It’s a natural mask for income inequality and all other social ills creates by this fusing of the poor parts of capitalism and socialism. The real risk for western societies over the next 24 months is rapid inflation as supply continues to be constrained coupled with central bank debt monetization policy that is driving asset prices far past rational and economic value judgements.
You want a real world example of this – the median house price in both Dunedin and Whangarei is now > $600k.
Something has to give and soon
After the last Capitalist crash, ten years recovery i said.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/02/08/cubas-covid-19-vaccines-serve-the-people-not-profits/
If Cuba can do it, why can’t NZ?
Because we have the WRONG KIND OF GOVERNMENT.
So are we, yet again, going to settle for going back to ‘normal’ tho….especially as after each and every crisis ‘normal’ seems to involve a massive transferal of wealth..
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