Balloux - "I believe it is time to give in soon"
Let me describe some of the ways that this is slippery bullshit.
The idea that he gets to announce that covid will become endemic, at this stage, is a joke. Because since quite early on it was basically inevitable. Only a handful of countries went for zero covid, and only for a certain length of time. Thats not what an attempt to eradicate the virus looks like, and most zero covid stuff was not really about zero, it was about minimising the number of infections until vaccination uptake reached a certain level.
And the UK never attempted to push cases down to nothing. After nasty waves forced it to take action, it kept measures in place for long enough to push numbers down enough that it would take time for the virus to bounce back. And it didnt even bother doing that with the Delta wave, so its a mystery to me as to why Balloux thinks that the Omicron wave is now the right moment to declare some kind of surrender, could have done that 6 months ago!
I dont know what people who like that shit think it actually has to offer them. Are declarations of this sort going to magically mean that we can rely on fighting the pandemic on the medical front only in future? Thats always been the end game and the preference of the establishment, but they cannot make it so with words. And they've been trying to make it so for ages already, there is nothing new to see here. Its a gradual process with accumulated gains made on the immunity front (via vaccines and prior infections) and more treatments becoming available, and via a chunk of the most susceptible already having fallen victim to the virus. And when the virus finds ways to spread more effectively, or bypass some immunity, we end up with situations like this Omicron wave where it takes time to find out just how much of a setback this is.
So I ask again, what difference does this surrender mean to learning to live with covid as a country? On an individual basis there are obvious potential differences for those who have already caught the virus at least once, attitudes towards trying to avoid the virus are bound to change under such circumstances. But in terms of the country living with the virus without heavy restrictions on our lives, thats always going to be a numbers game because a certain level of pressure on healthcare will make any regime blink. Throwing your hands in the air and giving up does nothing to eliminate that possibility, and if everyone does that then it makes further interventions far more likely, so be careful what you wish for. Part of the core numbers game still involves the sheer number of people infected at any one time, and we arent quite at a stage where attention to that can be safely lost in the way Balloux is perhaps hinting at.
So for now if we want to live in relatively normality with the virus then we have to pay attention to all the factors that affect that fundamental health care equation, including the number of people catching it. One of the problems with this country is that the establishment doesnt seem interested in doing some things properly, so more ends up having to be done on other fronts under emergency conditions. Hospital infections amplify the waves and make them a heavier burden in many ways. But we still fail to do some of the basics on this front, such as upgrading mask standards for health care workers. The effort put into improving the situation with schools, in terms of both levels of infection and disruption has been pathetic. Failures on these fronts make it more likely that non-pharmaceutical interventions end up still being required. By getting vaccinated people are helping with the medical side of the equation, but this other stuff is important too.
The 'way out' of this pandemic still seems reasonably clear. An evolving picture of immunity and hospitalisation risk, and the authorities fiddling with health capacity and trying to find all sorts of ways to treat a chunk of people that would previously have ended up in hospital at home instead. Once they are more confident on that front, they will want to reduce other sorts of disruption to our lives by scaling back testing and isolation, trying to reach a point where being infected doesnt have quite so many consequences, including consequences for the workforce. Timescales are unclear to me, how this Omicron wave in winter turns out will contain some big clues, building on the messy picture of 'learning to live with Delta in summer'. So I expect I'll have more to say on this throughout January.
His 'pretending we are in control' stuff is weird framing too. There are human tendencies towards such things but this country never really pretended to be in control, rather it just found itself in periods where there was no choice but to exert some crude control over certain things, whilst leaving other fronts in a mess. We've never even attempted to have much control over the virus mutation picture either, preferring to allow conditions at home and abroad to come about which make the pace of change of this virus even faster, via large numbers of ongoing infections. And when it comes to civilisations pretending to be in the driving seat when they are not, he seems to have managed to allude to this whilst at the same time issuing a declaration and a statement of intent that is in itself a demonstration of the very same phenomenon. We lost control and/or certain agendas didnt like the control methods, so lets pretend it was unavoidable and for the best, why fight the inevitable, hey hey do you like the sound of my arse trumpet?
