It’s been clear since our petty dictators started imposing COVID lockdowns that these are actions that disproportionately target the poor. I’d been thinking of that in terms of people in the city, waiters, cooks, theater and gym staff, …, who have lost their jobs, will lose their homes, and will rack up debt. However, this is much more than a first world problem. There is real cost to blind fear.
Initially we saw many virtue signalling rich celebrities blindly parrot “stay at home” while their personal shoppers and cooks procured their needs. Later the peons got into the act and made themselves feel good by spouting meaningless catch phrases like “flatten the curve”, “exponential growth”, “stay safe”, “stay apart”, and “follow the science” (the irony of this last one is amazing!). Somehow, this was all exploited by media and power hungry politicians to mobilize enough fear that people clamored to have their freedoms taken away, creating illusions of safety. I don’t really understand how the COVID fear porn has reached these comprehension defying levels. The media and politicians who have been pumping the mindless fear really need to step back and take ownership for the chaos, death and misery that will result from their actions.
For months, there have been WHO projections of millions who will die of starvation in developing countries as side effects of lockdown policies. I had naively envisioned that this would be economic fallout, believing that developing countries would not be foolhardy enough to attempt to replicate the rich country lockdown strategies. As it turns out, stupidity is more contagious than I imagined it would be, and there are poor countries that have imposed lockdowns on their people, despite the fact that their people have much bigger dangers to battle in their day to day lives.
For a taste of this chaos, check out this Tom Woods episode with Gret Glyer, the founder of DonorSee. The episode talks about lockdowns in Africa that are killing more kids than COVID, and lockdowns in Sierra-Leone that are so severe that kids are not being allowed to get food available across the street. Crossing the street was prohibited since it would have required them to cross an imaginary line drawn by an idiot bureaucrat. Seeing the images of the skeletal Sierra-Leone kids is heartbreaking. Gret predicts that despite continual decreases in child mortality over the last 30 years, there will be a massive spike in excess child mortality in 2020. This spike isn’t going to be due to COVID, but because of fear based political responses that are starving kids to death!
Future generations will look back at the pathetic people of 2020, and shake their heads at how uninformed fear and group-think lead to so much death worldwide. The death that are being focused on are the deaths of those over 80 years old, labelled “covid deaths”. These are people that generally have multiple pre-existing conditions that were the root cause of the death, with coronaviruses possibly pushing them over the top (and getting the blame.) Some of those deaths may have been accelerated by COVID, but were likely not preventable. What could be prevented are all the surplus deaths due to the evil lockdown policies themselves (these deaths in developing countries, deaths by suicide and drug and alcohol abuse in response to financial ruin and demoralization, …). Children, statistically speaking, are not dying of COVID, but they are being killed by the lockdowns.
It is, incidentally, confusing and heart breaking to be glad that my mother and my mother in law passed away in 2019, and did not live long enough to die this year. In order to “save grandma” we are consigning family members that are at the end of their lives to die in misery isolated from their families.
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