I sometimes think the defining characteristic of our age is reality denial:
I suppose 1.37% may not seem high, but the point is that Covid just keeps rolling along. Each time you get it, odds are that it’s doing some damage to your organs, including your brain. Most of that is sub-perceptual, it doesn’t qualify as “Long Covid”, but it’s there. Then you get it again, and again, and again.
I’m sure Labour’s program to get the back to work will do nothing but make people miserable. That chart doesn’t suggest “malingering.”
Spain’s numbers are particularly interesting
Now what’s visible here is that the numbers keep increasing. The long Covid continues to circulate, the higher the disability numbers. This is exactly what I’ve been predicting for years: as time goes by, people get Covid again and again. Eventually that causes enough damage to cause long term illness or disability.
I shudder to think what it will mean for kids, since those in school get Covid the most often. Since they’re young they have more resistance, but I’m willing to bet (and will not be wrong) that this will show up in very high illness and early death numbers as they age.
The solution to all this is fairly simple: we need to clean our air up: filtration, UV and so on. This isn’t that expensive, although it has to be done in all buildings. Numbers drop, once they’re fairly low, stop all non-essential travel for three months or so and track and trace. Do this is a group of countries and permanently ban travel from any country that hasn’t done it, until they do.
Yes, there is a cost to this, but it’s a lot less than the cost of having more and more disable and sick people.
Covid is still a big deal, the only thing that’s a bigger deal (unless we have a world war) is climate change/ecological collapse. And we are failing to deal with an issue which is relatively simple because we won’t take a small percentage of our manufacturing and building capacity and refit all buildings to clean the air, then make such air cleaning permanent going forward. This is exactly what we did with water, in the past, to stop disease spread, but our current society is sclerotic and stupid.
This is true everywhere. China’s ZeroCovid policy was the right thing done STUPID. If any country had the capacity to clean air it was China, but they just stuck to shut-downs till the public lost patience.
It’s dismaying to live in societies where we know what’s wrong, we know how to fix what’s wrong and we simply refuse to do what is necessary.