Any guesses on when they stop publishing numbers entirely? I feel like that's the point where I'm going to be completely screwed.
Any guesses on when they stop publishing numbers entirely? I feel like that's the point where I'm going to be completely screwed.
I’m so fucking sick of hearing this. This is just not true. At any point we could do a hard 1 month lockdown and mass testing and it’d be mostly over. The solution is exactly the same as it always has been even if it’s slightly more difficult than it would’ve been in April 2020.
The solution is obvious and clear, but impossible under capitalism.
There was a window for agitation in the US, and we used it, sometimes successfully. That window existed because liberals could be rallied against Trump to do local politics things against liberals.
Then Biden was elected and everything was fine again and criticizing the government was gauche or naive again.
But at the heart at all of it is real estate and failing businesses. Real estate taxes make up huge amounts of local and state budgets. Lockdowns disrupt rent payments as well as the overall resale profitability of real estate. Failing businesses have a similar situation regarding tax bases and also directly employ people. Local and state governments are the ones that stopped doing lockdowns, they crunched the numbers and listened to their real constituents (capitalists) and halted lockdowns, which were always incredibly weak ones in the US, way back in 2020.
In order to reinstitute a lockdiwn, you'll need one of two things:
A completely different material base for government, i.e. the abolition of capitalism itself (or at least a dotp situation).
A new variant or pandemic that forces a lockdown because it's a greater threat to short term profits.
I was referring to nurses being unable to fix a systemic problem, but honestly I don't see a way to put the cat in the bag at this point.
Looking at the material reality around us, it is unfeasible. There is no infrastructure that would allow a mass lockdown at this point that wouldn't just be another way to brutalize minorities. The population as a whole has since given up on trying, believing the pandemic to be over. Even if we should see a miracle where the US decides to do another lockdown, it's still going wild in other countries and will continue to mutate. On a global scale the only thing that would possibly have a chance is a large global revolution that would simultaneously overthrow all the main seats of power in one fell swoop allowing for a large global collaborative effort to lockdown for a period. As it stands though, there's not any political will globally to make such a sweeping decision. So I stand by what I said that there's nothing we can do that isn't assuming a massive shift in how the world works when there's close to nothing in motion that would see it happen.
No political will != not possible
There's no political will for pretty much anything we advocate for here
Still doesn't change the fact that without a global response, nothing will change. China gave up on zero COVID as a result of nothing else happening globally beyond letting COVID just rip through people. I"m not against doing a month long lockdown either globally, I just don't see it as a feasible reality within my lifetime.
Ngl I still think zero-covid-in-one-country is still a totally feasible strategy and I think China fucked up big time by dropping it and the people in China that advocates for dropping it did not understand what they were asking for.
I’d happy be locked down 1 month out of the year the rest of my life in exchange for not getting sick anymore. I usually spend more than a month out sick anyway.
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There was a post around here that dug deeper into what happened with China dropping zero covid and if I'm remembering right, China didn't intend to drop zero covid, but instead local governments misunderstood something, opened up, and then the cat was out of the bag. This also goes against the narrative that the Chinese government is an oppressive regime, but that doesn't matter to westerners.