With the Omicron Ba2 Variant We in the United States are in for a Bumpy Ride by Dave LIndorff!
(2022-03-23 at 00:13:39 )

With the Omicron Ba2 Variant We in the United States are in for a Bumpy Ride by Dave LIndorff!

Mask up and get shot!

Studies are showing that even mild Covid infection is causing brain shrinkage and loss of cognitive function equivalent to six years of brain aging in many people.

Get ready for Covid Omicron Variant Bs2, America.

Everything is lining up for another wave of infections and deaths.

If you want to know what is coming down the pike, just look at Hong Kong, China and Europe.

In China it is hard to know how many people really have become infected with the new highly contagious Omicron variant Ba2, but according to official reports, the current wave is the highest it has been since the initial outbreak 1 Wuhan more than two years ago. According to Reuters, China has 20 cities in lockdown, including both major economic centers, Shanghai and Shenzhen.

Meanwhile Hong kong, a city now a part of China, and one which had until recently managed to keep its Covid infection fate at among the lowest in the world, is now being overwhelmed with infections, particularly among its elderly, who it turns out were not getting vaccinated at anywhere near the rate of younger residents. in early March, the daily infection in this city of seven million hit 50,000 per day while Covid fatalities hit 3444.

In the United Kingdom Covid cases, mostly the Ba2 variant, are on the rise hitting peak of 180,000 a day in early March when the average daily infection rate has been 87,000 per day - this in a population in which 92% of people over the age of 12 have had at least one dose of vaccine, 86% have had a second shot and 67% have had one booster.

Note that in China and Hong Kong, as in most of Asia, nobody objects to wearing a mask. It has been standard behavior for any kind of disease outbreak from SARS to the flu, and has helped minimize transmission even where there are not vaccines readily available.

Now, things are different in that "exceptional nation," the United (sic) States of America. Here, despite the general availability of free vaccinations, the latest figures show that 77% of the population has had one vaccination, 65% have received two doses and only 29% have received a booster dose.

Little surprise, the United States has among the highest Covid death rates in the world: 1 million. And that is probably way lower than the real number given how deaths get reported on death certificates, which typically offer four causes of death listed by the medical examiner of the persons physician in order of importance or causal relationship.

For example a persons death certificate might list the ultimate cause of death as heart failure, caused by pneumonia, caused by an earlier Covid infection. Because the ultimate cause of death on such a form is "heart failure" the persons death would be listed as heart failure, not the Covid infection that led ultimately to the heart ceasing to beat.

And to make matters worse, the United States has a problem with masks. People consider them an annoyance too much to bear, and in many cases a political affront to their "freedom."

I have a friend, a jazz musician who works between gigs at a local "big box" store. Old enough to be in the vulnerable-to-Covid age bracket, he masks up on the job, including a face shield, especially because these days in Pennsylvania, masking is not mandatory in restaurants and stores. He says many unmasked shoppers at the store will approach him asking for directions to some product area in the store or for information on a product on his aisle. When that happens, he puts up a hand and says, "Please do not come any closer to me unless you put on a mask."

Once, he says, a male shopper in that situation replied to him, "You are interfering with my freedom!" to which he says he replied, "No I am not, I am just exercising my free-smart." He says the guy looked at him quizzically, and said, "What is free-smart?" He responded, "The opposite of your free-dumb."

It would be funny if it were not so sad.

As my old friend Charles Vidich, a Harvard public health graduate and author of the recently published book Germs at Bay: Politics, Public Health and American Quarantine (Praeger, 2022) tells me, the United States is in a uniquely bad position to tackle a pandemic. "Before 1820, decisions about quarantining were made very locally and participatorially," he says, "but now it is all decisions by the federal government, and as a result many people say "to hell with you. We will do what we think is right."

Unfortunately at the same time, he says, "Per capita public spending on public health to deal with communicable disease is less than it was a century ago!" He adds, "As a people, we think we are more intelligent today than people a century ago, but while there has been a lot of progress in medical science, there has been less public education about health."

"Worse yet," he says, "we have lost the consciousness that what we do affects other people. Community trust is gone."

Mr. Vidich is scathing in his appraisal of the Centers for Disease Control under both the Donald Trump and Joe Biden administrations during this pandemic. "The CDCs decisions have been made dictatorially, not on consultations with the public," he says. "They have been making technocratic and political decisions without taking public attitudes into account." He notes that the CDC has also been inconsistent in its decisions.

As he notes, "What can you expect? The United States Public Health Service, predecessor to the CDC, when it was created, was under the direction of the United States Treasury Department, not the Department of Health."

So here we are today with President Biden, whose popularity is in the toilet, declaring at his State of the Union address in February the CDC was announcing that masking would no longer be required outside of hospitals and medical facilities, and saying that through "most of the country people can now go mask free."

Here is the problem with that. The new Ba2 variant is more contagious than the original Omicron variant, and it is also more serious. As well, there are studies now going out showing that the "mild" Covid that people seem to get most of the time in break-through cases where they have already been vaccinated, turn out very often to result, even in younger people, in measurable brain shrinkage and loss of cognitive ability - shrinkage the is equivalent to six years of brain aging.

This suggests that if we have another wave of this latest variant, we will have a population that is significantly less intelligent (if that were possible!) than it was before the pandemic. If that prospect does not get people to put those masks on, and to get a booster shot they had been avoiding, perhaps for fear of being made magnetic one might assume that the already caught the disease and were already having difficulty thinking rationally in their own self interest. (Then again, at least in the case of adults, it is likely that it will be people with already decreased cognitive function who end up suffering such damage, making it all the result that much worse.)

Also, putting aside the risk to ones brainpower, there is the matter of older relatives, including parents, friends or relatives who may be diabetic or suffering from one or another kind of immune deficiency, whether MS or sarcoidosis or thyroid disease, or perhaps undergoing chemotherapy or even just treatment with prednisone, a common therapy for all kinds of ailments which typically temporarily weakens immunity.

There are 60 million Americans who are over 60, and thus are known to be much more vulnerable to serious complications or death from Covid. There are also millions of children under 5 who cannot yet be vaccinated, as well as millions more children aged 5-11 who, even if vaccinated, turn out to be only 24% protected from Covid due to the National Institute of Healths having recommended too low a dose for adequate immune response.

If you as an American adult, insist on putting yourself in jeopardy by not wearing a mask when you go to into a crowded market, restaurant or enclosed public space, it is not just you who is taking a chance. There are perhaps close to 100 million fellow Americans whom you are putting at risk, and not just of getting a little sick, but of getting seriously ill or dying.

Says Mr. Vidich, "We haven’t had a situation like this since the Spanish Flu of 1918-19."

Only this time it is much worse, he says, "Because since then we have built huge apartment buildings and offices that crowd more people together, mass transit that is great for capitalism but not great for avoiding the spread of disease, We have even weakened building codes to allow less space per person in apartments.

So get ready. This next Covid wave of Ba2, which is now the cause of s one quarter of all new cases in the United States, is going to be serious, especially in Red states like Florida, Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and western states like Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, Montana and the Dakotas, where Republican yahoos running state governments are actively working to discourage mask wearing and in some cases denigrating vaccines.

If you are not vaccinated, get vaccinated, and if you are vaccinated but it has been a while, get a booster, and wear a goddam mask whether you like it or not when you go out. If you do not want to do any of this for yourself fine, then at least do it for your parents or grandparents and other older people or immunocompromised friends or relatives.

And look, if you are not going to show any concern about others, I for one am not going to wish you well. I happen to be one of those with an autoimmune condition that weakens my immune response to vaccines making me more vulnerable to Covid even with boosters and to people who cavalierly go around spreading the virus.

Accordingly, I am hoping if you are one of them that you succeed in getting yourself added to a special chapter in the next Darwin Awards book edition honoring people who took one for the gene pool and died after having decided that Covid is "no big deal" or a "fake news conspiracy" and that vaccines and masks are for suckers.

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Reprinted here with the permission of "This Can Not Be Happening" The only news organization in the United States to be labeled a threat by the Department of Homeland Security!!