Covid's Only Options
Nobody likes lockdowns but you can't say they don't work. In Alberta we lived through the proof of it. The failure lies in what sectors we choose to reopen & when & in not adopting a #ZeroCovid strategy like some much smarter places have adopted, saving lives & economies.
If it feels like our leaders don't know what they're doing it's because they don't but you can't blame that on lockdowns. There's no avoiding lockdowns when our hospitalization numbers rapidly approach a rate our hospitals can't manage. Other jurisdictions aren't failing.
I tried to share the article below with a "Conservative" friend who assured me we had to do things the way we did or our economy would fail. When I told him that just wasn't factually accurate he refused to read it & the chat ended in acrimony. Okay then.
The alternative to an ineffective series of costly re-openings and lockdowns is the #ZeroCovid or #GoForZero solution employed by a number of countries worldwide, most famously by New Zealand, whom never even had a Second Wave. Sounds pretty good to me.
The opposite sides of the pandemic response spectrum are Elimination vs Mitigation, with #ZeroCovid at one end & an ever-shifting Laissez-Faire/Lockdown approach at the other. With more pain up front, the former's more work but makes for better pandemic economies overall.
[Sound like the 2006 ~ 2018-ish Climate debate points to anybody else or is it just me? Like maybe we should have been listening to scientists over economists, Big Business and other right wing blowhards this whole time or what? You feel me? Hello? Is this thing on?]
"In order to win the fight you have to fight to win." In much of Canada we opted for the path of least economic resistance on the front end, utterly oblivious or denying entirely the overall cost. Penny wise and pound foolish. It's a strategy we're intimately familiar with here in Alberta.
Think #ZeroCovid can only work in small countries or islands? There's an awful lot of smart people that think we could certainly have done it here in Canada (and still could) like the Covid Strategic Choices Group.
Think it some kind of structural impossibility that Alberta could successfully employ a #ZeroCovid strategy either now or in the past? Not according to Calgary emergency room physician and early mandatory mask advocate Dr Joe Vipond who's been calling this pandemic pretty much flawlessly for well more than a year now:
Many of us've been saying from the get-go that jurisdictions with solid, science-based covid policies will have optimal pandemic economies. Now we have the data to prove it but it only matters to people that care about things like data, facts & truth:
Another thing the data irrefutably reveals (that many of us also predicted) was that jurisdictions under "Conservative" leadership'd generally suffer much higher per capita Covid cases, which we now know inevitably leads to poorer performing economies.
In fact it was with America's "Conservatives" under President Trump (and today in places like Brazil) that we see the only existing alternative to #ZeroCovid vs our rollercoaster Liassez-Fair/Lockdown strategy: to do nothing at all. It didn't end well.
In the early days many were touting the Swedes as next level geniuses for pursuing the Do Nothing approach and banking on Herd Immunity but ultimately resulting in a death-rate and shrinking GDP worse than all its neighbours.
In far right President Bolsonaro's Brazil we see the latest results of the Do Nothing strategy as out of control viral variants circulate freely. It's become the most likely birthplace yet of even deadlier new variants, a threat to every human on earth.
So you don't like lockdowns. I get it. You're not supposed to. But absent a bold #ZeroCovid strategy, serial lockdowns are an inextricable, entirely predictable result of the Laissez-Faire approach wrong-headed jurisdictions like ours believe protect economies 1st & foremost.
If you're not talking #ZeroCovid & you're espousing anti-lockdown positions, the onus is on you to provide a solution that doesn't devastate our hospitals capacity to manage Covid & non-Covid emergencies during this time. The whole world awaits your brilliance. Tick tock.
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Post Thread:
Grateful for my vaccine shot but should I have gotten it before every healthcare worker, teacher, grocery store worker & other essential vocations? Or servers & bartenders in jobs that keep getting opened up & shut down again? Just because I was born before 1980 & they weren't?
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