“Perceptions,” by Gerry Warner

Op-Ed Commentary

It’s getting worse, not better!

As of today (March 27) world-wide some 2.7 million people have died from COVID-19, according to Johns Hopkins University, the accepted authority on these gruesome matters. This includes 908 new infections in B.C. in the 24 hours preceding Friday. Not good!

More importantly, the world-wide trend is up, not down, at a time when many countries and regional jurisdictions are loosening up their Covid protocols, which is in direct contradiction to the global-wide upward trend.

I don’t know why this is happening. But I do know that health authorities everywhere are under tremendous pressure from anti-vaxxers, COVID-19 deniers and ordinary people who are sick of the Covid restrictions the past year and just want to move around, breathe freely and hug their loved ones again and you can hardly blame them for that.

So, what the hell is the strategy in a situation that cannot be won?

There are people, and I’m not one of them, but I know some who believe the winning strategy is to do nothing and let Covid do its thing until it runs out of steam and we hit the point of herd immunity. This point of view is not as callous as it sounds and is the way plagues have been dealt with in the past all the way back to the times of ancient Greece, Egypt and the very first river civilizations in Mesopotamia.

If I had to be honest and answer my own rhetorical question, I’d certainly say I don’t know what the solution to the Covid tragedy is. But at the risk of offending Saint Bonnie and a few others, I have some opinions on how we made the Covid cataclysm worse than it had to be. Far worse.

We should have done what they did in Wuhan, the alleged source of the plague. How ironic is that?

What Wuhan did as soon as they realized they had a monster on their hands is they doubled down for more than a month, about six weeks in fact, when they basically locked people in their own homes and allowed just enough movement to keep the population alive and no more. And it worked!

According to the John Hopkins stats and other medical sources, Wuhan today is basically Covid-free. This can be seen in the Covid stats for China as a whole, which according to the latest Johns Hopkins statistics, will shock you. And I’m not kidding.

On the basis of the number of Covid infections per 100,000 people since the beginning of the pandemic, the figure for China is only six per 100,000 while the US rate is 9,189 per 100,000. In all, only 4,636 Chinese have died from Covid while almost 550,000 Americans have died from the dread disease.

Meanwhile, the Canadian Covid infection rate is 2,563 per 100,000, much better than the American rate but much poorer than the Australian rate of 115 per 100,000.

In other words, countries that doubled down with draconian Covid restrictions right from the start have essentially ended the pandemic within their borders while countries that have diddled around with ever-changing Covid protocols are facing another rampaging wave of the pandemic.

Pretty dumb, eh.

When it comes to fighting COVID-19, how do you explain the dismally poor performance of affluent and highly educated countries like Canada and the US compared to other countries like China and Australia? Is it bad leadership? Lack of political will? Or are we just downright lazy and unwilling to do what it takes to fight a malevolent pandemic like Covid? If that’s the case, then shame on us!

If you have a better theory, I’d like to hear it.

– Gerry Warner is a retired journalist, who gets his COVID-19 shot April 12.

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