Neverendemic: Summary

When exactly does this clown show end? I’m tired of it and I want to go home.

Pandemic policies are damaging our civil liberties and destroying the economy.

Politicians have discredited themselves with these failing policies.

It is up to us as citizens to decide when and how we want the social crisis to end.

We have clocked four full months now since the fateful days of mid-March, when panicked policy makers forced a quarantine on not only the sick, as had been done in prior pandemics, but also on almost every other healthy person on the planet.

That decision, unprecedented in human history, has had a long tail effect beyond anyone’s initial expectation.

It collapsed the economy, led to hundreds of millions of unemployed, massively expanded the welfare state, suspended our freedoms of movement and association, disrupted normal political processes, and turned all against all by creating a culture of shame and fear of others.

Our political masters have actually benefited in the short term from these adverse developments, as an anxious populace has sought out active leadership in a time of quasi-anarchy and rewarded any diminution of the pandemic growth curve.

This is probably a fleeting political gain, though, since their efforts are visibly failing.

Instead of the pandemic fading from view, we are being treated to a rolling resurgence.

Every policy under the sun has been tried, from lockdowns and contact restrictions to masks and social distancing and there is no correlation between such actions and contagion results around the world.

The overall effect is to paint most of our leaders as weak, ill-informed, confused, inconsistent, foolish, and hypocritical partisans — everything that we in fact feared they were prior to the pandemic.

Such people will definitely be punished politically when the time comes, in spite of their recent high standing in the polls. And the first installment is fast approaching with the national elections in the US in November.

So, apart from eventually chastising our purported betters, where is the exit ramp from this madness?

If this were purely an analytical or data matter, we would end the restrictive policies in most places right now.

The evidence for that is three-fold.

First, national excess deaths, those beyond what we expect for this time of year, are pretty much back to normal levels.

Second, for places with exploding Covid positive cases, like certain US states, there are few signs of increasing hospitalization rates or deaths.

Third, the pandemic is increasingly revealing itself not to be a world-class mass disease.

Yes, it is a severe pathogen and worth taking targeted public health precautions against uncontrolled contagion, but no, it is not even close to the danger that requires us to suspend civil liberties and destroy our economic livelihood.

So, if it was up to the data, we would probably end the crisis today.

Sadly, data don’t vote, and those who might make the case for this evidence are the same ones who are compromised by their continuing policies: our beloved politicians.

Unfortunately, the blame game where politicians are tied to bad social outcomes, even if they are out of their control and perfectly within traditional norms and bounds, means that we will see only the slowest and most painful return to our former lives.

Ultimately, there are only three outcomes to the pandemic: it mysteriously disappears, we create an effective vaccine and it downgrades to a less dangerous pathogen, or we reach population immunity and it peters out for lack of additional victims.

The first solution is basically wishful thinking and the second is hopeful, but takes time.

The third solution is the likeliest to occur and it is more a matter of how long it takes, than whether it happens.

This solution requires a massive mental shift for most people, from doing everything to avoid contagion to accepting that each new infection in safe populations is a positive step forward to ending the overall social crisis.

So long as vulnerable people are protected, we actually want people to engage with each other in a normal and natural way, and thus speed the end of this wholly unnatural time.

The end of the pandemic can be now or never, according to how we choose our future.

All we have to do is decide who is in charge of our free society: us, or those who report to us.

What will it be?

The full article can be found here.