I was thinking today about China giving up on Zero Covid. They were responding to significant public protests. The CCP isn’t democratic by our standards, but they actually care a great deal about public opinion, especially “expressed” public opinion.
What’s embarrassing, however, is the failure to spend the two years Zero-Covid bought fixing infrastructure. We know, at this point, that ventilation, HEPA filtering and UV radiation work. (This is what the rich gave themselves at Davos, so don’t waste anyone’s time arguing.)
There was a time, basically in the Victorian era, where we rebuilt all of the water infrastructure because we had finally got it thru our thick skulls that disease spread thru water. We did it, and it made a huge difference.
I think particularly of China because no other major country even really tried. China had the time, and they have the industrial resources to do what is necessary (also, refit buildings with water traps, those little u-bends you see under your sink or by your toilet.) They’re the largest manufacturing nation in the world, and they had spare housing workers hanging around.
Clean the air flow in buildings. Even just putting a HEPA filter in a classroom, without any other changes, drops Covid massively.
Now, this is a symptom of a larger problem. We have known about climate change for decades. The science was clear and known to the educated public by the late 70s, before there was a huge push for climate denialism backed by big money. There were some obvious easy solutions that amounted to “change infrastructure to use less energy.” Every building in developed country could have been made to use vastly less energy, and since we had an unemployment crisis combined with an energy crisis, it would have been the obvious right thing to do. Instead we did demand restriction through wage suppression, which had the side-benefit of making the rich a lot richer.
It has remained the right thing to do for decades. AOC’s New Green Deal is just a version of what everyone with sense has known needed to be done. I put out a similar plan first in the early 2000s at BOPNews, but I was nowhere near the first.
This is just embarrassing. We know what’s wrong, we know how to do some of the major steps required to fix it and we don’t do anything. Zero Covid was, on top of that run incompetently (but China gets points for at least trying till they gave up.)
Embarrassing. I’m just embarrassed for our leadership, who are psychopathic morons, even the ones who sometimes try to do the right thing, and I’m embarrassed or humanity, given how human social dynamics lead to such terrible leadership, over and over. Periods with competent leadership are rare, those where the leadership is both competent and non-psychopathic rarer still (in the US, this period in the 20th century arguably only exists for the period where FDR was in charge, and was marred even then by the sad fact that he was racist, particularly against Japanese (ironically because he liked the Chinese.) Truman, despite his good reputation, was a disaster.)
But this is a human problem which has gone on for about eight thousand years, and maybe longer.
The entire shit-show is just embarrassing and pathetic.
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