by Kaatje van der Gaarden
Albuquerque Mayor Keller, like most politicians, is mistaken. In emails to his denizens, he declares “We’re in this together, because… we are One Albuquerque.” Uh, no. Those with mental or physical disabilities too young to benefit from Senior Resources will find no help at the city’s website. When my caregivers stopped showing up I lied to the non-profit Mutual Aid that I was a senior citizen, just so they’d pity me and drop off a roll of toilet paper and two packages of ramen noodles. Which is more than migrant and day labourers in India have, so I’m grateful.
Yet at this point, no-one can deny the long-term effects of lockdown: domestic violence, suicide, child abuse, poverty and despair. Hundreds of thousands of special needs children require in-person education and socialization: online learning is not an option, neither is it for those in an unstable family without laptops, tablets or a reliable internet connection. As a (disabled) Dutch-American Physician Assistant I was already alarmed at the state of US mental health – in the last twenty years, our suicide rate has increased by 35% to an exceptional annual total of 48,000 deaths.
We must acknowledge the poor in Level 3 and 4 countries are experiencing a massive decline in maternal health care, TB, pneumonia, malaria medications and children’s vaccinations, while facing increased police brutality and hunger. Even a Level 1 country like the United States sees the secondary effects of the lockdown via untreated cardiovascular emergencies such as strokes and heart attacks. US preventive health care has always been problematic, but lack of cancer treatment and diagnoses? Not acceptable, even in a greatly exaggerated pandemic.
The lockdown causes unprecedented brain drain: medical clinics with providers nearing retirement will choose to close, other clinics will simply shut down. And we are losing experienced mechanics, welders, electricians, event organizers, suppliers and small business owners – the backbone of US society and GDP. Annually, 35–40 million Americans are infected with the flu, requiring up to 800,000 hospitalizations. The case fatality rate (CFR) of 0.1% leads to tens of thousands of deaths, mostly the elderly and the very young. Yet only 45% of adults obtain a yearly flu shot. What ought to really scare politicians is that a yearly flu vaccine is not mandatory for US health care providers – not even for home carers and nursing aides, who provide extensive personal care such as bathing and dressing.
How is it that my friend’s mom isn’t allowed to visit her dying husband in a nursing home due to COVID-19 orders, while many of his nursing aides and carers don’t even have a flu shot? And why did my boyfriend’s grandmother die alone on the Navajo Reservation (of non-COVID-19 causes) without his mum – a nurse – being able to say goodbye, despite wearing PPE? Meanwhile, research showed a CFR of 0.03% for 14,000 COVID-19-positive health care workers in the Netherlands. Six of the nine who died were between 45 and 69 and had existing health conditions, and they are still investigating the remaining three. Incidentally, thanks to a targeted Dutch public health campaign, healthcare workers now have a 70–80% annual flu and H1N1 vaccination rate.
My own lockdown saga has a mixed happy ending: I did receive that “One Albuquerque” kindness our Mayor brags about, albeit through personal connections, not my city’s website. But not everyone with severe disabilities or pre-COVID-19 isolation is that lucky. Because of the extra help and caregiving by neighbors and friends I ended up with a little excess energy. So despite a neuroinflammatory disease I volunteered at a COVID-19 test site where pharmacists, volunteers and nurses sat around picnic tables chatting amicably, without masks, during breakfast and lunch. As someone who has been mostly bed-bound the last few years I know how cruel and demoralizing isolation, despair and poverty are, so I urge our politicians to do the right thing: end the lockdown now, without nonsensical measures such as plastic shields in stores, face masks and mandatory six-feet distancing.
Studies show that prolonged stay-at-home orders aggravate mental health disorders, decrease our immune systems, and may prevent herd immunity. Most worryingly, the lockdown is destroying our societal and global fabric. Segregate and protect the elderly and those at risk, maintain voluntary distancing and use masks and gloves as needed, and let people decide whether or not they want to risk going to a store. Being alive comes with all sorts of risks that we normally accept, yet COVID-19 scared politicians and the media into a panic which they turned into propaganda. According to Professor Hans Rosling, M.D. – instrumental in the Ebola epidemic – panic and hysteria never lead to good decision making. Mentally, I’ve only been able to make it through by following Reddit/lockdownskepticism and subscribing to Lockdown Sceptics.
The lockdown did end up affecting me badly: I haven’t been able to use my hydrotherapy pool for weeks, which worsens my severe spinal cord inflammation, and I’m now denied access to pain medication. My father passed away on March 9th and my mother isn’t allowed to fly in from overseas – a cruel and bad decision, since air travel and commerce ought to resume immediately. I’m not an expert, but I graduated from a technical college and am blessed with an abundance of common sense and compassion. By the end of March, I’d tweeted that Dr John Ioannides’ views ought to be considered, and I correctly predicted this inhumane global tragedy. So why didn’t our politicians and journalists see the truth, and, why is this security theatre still going on? Could it be that our leaders know, but refuse to admit they were wrong?
Sadly, history will prove that politicians, experts, social media companies and journalists were directly responsible for the deaths, suffering and censorships caused by the lockdown. I have nightmares from waking up in a world where no one understands the difference between linear expansion and the natural Bell curve, or Farr’s Law, or percentages. To me, this year and this coming decade will always be known as “COVID-1984” and the destruction of our world.
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Good article, although I still think the author finds it hard to cut himself loose from the past. The fact he always felt good to be part of the ‘centre left’ is also strange. What good has any left wing Government done anywhere?
Glad he made it to Texas and found sanity. Hopefully he will never vote Dumb again.
Finally did the author mix up log and splinter in 3rd para?
It is a start. You (we) can’t expect everything in one step. Nobody can cast off long-held views overnight.
Peter Hitchens would agree!
Come on you smug Rightists.. Whilst it is true that relatively less on the Right have fallen for the Virtuous Covid Hoax than the naive Leftists, that still doesn’t include most of the Conservative Party!
This is far more than shallow point scoring between Left and Right, this is about seeing through a scam/hoax, as promoted by the Establishment. Some of us can see it, but sadly most not.
Like the author, I would have regarded myself as Centrist or possibly slightly Leftist in terms of economy, but we can likewise see horse faeces for what it is!
Orwell observed that the real divide is not between Left and Right, but between authoritarians and libertarians.
Yes but most of today’s conservative party are not right of centre. It was Tories that gave us Net Zero after all in 2019. It is Tories who speak of things like “Social Justice”. It is Tories that have allowed people to roam about with knives and gangs of people with rucksacks to walk into stores and fill up. It is Tories who have allowed 750,000 people to enter the country with 100,000 of them just arriving uninvited. All these people will have to live somewhere and presumably that will be in a house, but where are all these houses? So no we don’t have a conservative party now, we have Labour and we have Labour Lite.
Which just shows the absurdity of the whole left-right paradigm when not discussing France circa 1790.
The laughably misnamed ‘Conservative’ Party is dominated by Blue Blairites (if you don;t believe me, look at the tax rates & observe what happened to Truss when she dared suggest a meaningful change of approach). People will be shocked when the soon-to-be-in-power Red Blairites just dial all the idiocy of the last 14 years up to 11, resulting in more of the same but faster.
I found solace with Left Lockdown Sceptics that now call themselves Real Left.
https://real-left.com/
Off topic but the DS boffins have fixed notifications
I’ve encouraged them to give those features a plug as I feel they enhance the experience, but if they don’t I’ll post about it tomorrow
Good article by Dr Bell. I hadn’t been a “lefty” since my youth but I realised my London “liberal” tribe abandoned me over Trump and Brexit so by the time “Covid” came I was not surprised.
Both David & Bell arose from The America™ and their total cluelessness of European history of the first half of the 20th century is only shadowed by their apparently indomitable desire to keep making stupid remarks about it both David & Bell from The America™ certainly believe to be profound.
As I’m not in the mute of trying to explain this history to boneheads again, what about a question instead: Is the reason that you always write fascism when you mean totalitarianism that the idea that Stalin really wasn’t a nice guy offends your communist sympathies?
David, you should ask these “superior” specimens whether they believe that epidemics grow exponentially. If they say yes you can tell them that are bad at both “Math” and basic literature reviews.
It certainly has been very interesting – if not very pleasant – seeing ill-liberalism take centre stage in the attitudes of quite intelligent friends and acquaintances. It suddenly became a real clear dividing line, though no doubt it was always there under the surface, in less ‘clarifying’ times.
Excellent article.
Comparing far-left and far-right (the actual far-right, not someone who thinks Bearded Bill perhaps shouldn’t be donning a frock, slapping on the makeup, and reading stories to schoolchildren) is like comparing a red apple to a green apple – peel away the skin and what you’ll find beneath is always an apple. Communism is bold, brash totalitarianism, fascism is quiet, shy totalitarianism. The green and red skins of your totalitarian apple. The reason why so many more on the left succumbed is, quite simply, because so many more on the left – particularly the modern left, which is now the party of the middle-class ‘educated’ – consider themselves superior. And if you ‘know’ you’re superior then you have a duty to control the inferior – for their own good of course. Superior opinion isn’t opinion, it’s fact. Fact, because all superior people hold the same opinion, and all superior people can’t be wrong. And, because it’s fact, any inferior people holding a contradictory opinion must be forced in line. Because, fact.
The last few years has laid bare how many people enjoy the idea of total authority; either enforcing it or being subjected to it. The biggest social experiment in history and the results are not only bloody depressing, but a clear window into what comes next. We, on this site, are in a minority. Buckle down the hatches.
Thank you for this article.
Overnight, the British Establishment turned into Tyrants and the vast majority of the population demonstrated that they are gullible idiots who have no common-sense, ability or willingness to think or take responsibility for themselves.
It was the most depressing revelation of my life.
Yes, but I believe even Texas is covering the place in thousands of turbines. I suppose no one is perfect.