Pandemic Ranting
Jan. 11th, 2022 10:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mousmeA lot of people had the forethought to start journaling the minute the first lockdown started, so they would have a record of their time during the pandemic, although I'm sure most of them never thought it would last this long (most of us didn't). Obviously I was not one of those people, and while I mostly don't regret not recording every stupid stray thought I had, part of me kind of wishes I'd been a little more diligent about it.
We're nearly two years in, now, and there's no real end in sight that I can see. I'm living in a state of constant cognitive dissonance because there are so many contradictory attitudes out there about the pandemic these days. I'm not even talking about the rabid anti-vaxxers and anti-vaxxers who are going around spitting in people's faces to prove it's all a hoax or because "freedom" or whatever. I'm talking about the friends and acquaintances who've been blithely going out to bars and restaurants, who've taken beach vacations and booked hotels and who are basically acting as if the pandemic is over because they've all had both their vaccinations (and now their booster shots).
In the meantime, the Omicron variant is running rampant through the population. Public health authorities are issuing conflicting guidelines and disagreeing with each other, and while that's to be expected in the face of an ever-evolving situation, it seems as though every time new guidelines come out, they are increasingly lax, whereas the data I'm seeing doesn't support it at all. Omicron is the most contagious variant we've seen so far, and even though everyone has been calling it "mild," I think it would be more accurate to qualify it as "milder," which is not at all the same thing. It's also looking very much like it's actually a lot more serious in children, and no child under five has been vaccinated at all as yet.
People have decided they're "tired" of the pandemic, and I guess that means we're pretending that things need to go back to "normal" (whatever that is). Governments are suddenly scrambling to save the economy, which means that even though we have skyrocketing case numbers, no one is calling for a lockdown anymore. Curfews, sure. Restrictions in public places, sure. Smaller gatherings, sure. But definitely no lockdown, no keeping children home anymore (even though they are the ones most at risk of death or Long Covid based on the currently available data), and far shorter isolation/quarantine times in spite of mounting evidence that Omicron's period of contagion is just as long as other variants. We appear to have gotten rid of the "better safe than sorry" mentality of before, and now we're being told we can carry on as usual if we've been exposed and aren't symptomatic (even thought Omicron appears to be transmissible for several days before symptoms appear).
Health care workers are being ordered to come into work if their symptoms are "mild," which is WILD to me. By definition they are working with vulnerable people, so even if they have a mild case, their patients are a lot more likely to develop a serious case and even die. I understand it's because of staffing levels, I do. All the anti-vaxxers are *crowing* about this, because a bunch of health care workers were let go or fired if they refused to get vaccinated (for reasons other than pre-existing health conditions that put them at risk for adverse reactions), and now they are using that as... I don't know, proof? That the authorities are full of shit. And, as much as I hate to concede anything at all to anti-vaxxers, they do have a point on this. If you fire people who aren't vaccinated because they might transmit Covid to patients, then you can't turn around and order Covid-positive people to work and expect to maintain the high ground. (To be clear, I am NOT suggesting they shouldn't have fired workers who refused to get vaccinated.)
The thing is, the short-staffing problem ISN'T actually a pandemic problem. We've been running essential and emergency services at minimum staffing for literal decades now. I'm going to speak mainly from my personal experience in Canada, but I think it applies pretty much all over North America. Somewhere in the mid to late nineties, we started pivoting away from having fully staffed services. We moved to "lean staffing," instituted hiring freezes, and governments everywhere started slashing spending on both staff and infrastructure. Hospitals, schools, paramedics, police, you name it, all of these services issued warning after warning after warning that cutting costs like that simply wasn't sustainable. In the early aughts there was constant talk of a nurse and doctor shortage in Quebec, and schools were struggling with poor ventilation and overcrowded classrooms. In my fourteen years as a police dispatcher, I have never once worked a single year in which my unit wasn't short-staffed (anywhere between a high of 75% staffing levels to a low of 40% staffing levels where I am now), and we only kept going because people agreed to work overtime basically year-round.
The private sector isn't any better. It moved to "just-in-time" models, to not stocking things in warehouses in order to save on costs, to underpaying all its employees, to investing only the bare minimum in its infrastructure because Heaven forfend we affect the bottom line for such piddly considerations as safety, or redundancy, or care for the employees.
And now, we're reaping what the decision-makers of the past have sown. Not only that, but current decision-makers appear quite happy to double down on it all, rather than try anything new. The status quo is what brought them their power (and their wealth and influence), and it doesn't serve their immediate interests to try to think of the long-term interests of the human race or even the population of their own country, for fuck's sake. Millions of people have died already, and they appear to be quite content to sacrifice millions more of us on the altar of the economy.
Ugh.
Anyway, this has been a rant brought to you by a person who thinks we've probably got another couple of years of this ahead of us and who is wildly unimpressed with how the government is handling things. I am probably a little crankier about this than usual today because I'm having to work night shifts, and lack of sleep is no one's friend. I promise to try to make my next post a happier one.
We're nearly two years in, now, and there's no real end in sight that I can see. I'm living in a state of constant cognitive dissonance because there are so many contradictory attitudes out there about the pandemic these days. I'm not even talking about the rabid anti-vaxxers and anti-vaxxers who are going around spitting in people's faces to prove it's all a hoax or because "freedom" or whatever. I'm talking about the friends and acquaintances who've been blithely going out to bars and restaurants, who've taken beach vacations and booked hotels and who are basically acting as if the pandemic is over because they've all had both their vaccinations (and now their booster shots).
In the meantime, the Omicron variant is running rampant through the population. Public health authorities are issuing conflicting guidelines and disagreeing with each other, and while that's to be expected in the face of an ever-evolving situation, it seems as though every time new guidelines come out, they are increasingly lax, whereas the data I'm seeing doesn't support it at all. Omicron is the most contagious variant we've seen so far, and even though everyone has been calling it "mild," I think it would be more accurate to qualify it as "milder," which is not at all the same thing. It's also looking very much like it's actually a lot more serious in children, and no child under five has been vaccinated at all as yet.
People have decided they're "tired" of the pandemic, and I guess that means we're pretending that things need to go back to "normal" (whatever that is). Governments are suddenly scrambling to save the economy, which means that even though we have skyrocketing case numbers, no one is calling for a lockdown anymore. Curfews, sure. Restrictions in public places, sure. Smaller gatherings, sure. But definitely no lockdown, no keeping children home anymore (even though they are the ones most at risk of death or Long Covid based on the currently available data), and far shorter isolation/quarantine times in spite of mounting evidence that Omicron's period of contagion is just as long as other variants. We appear to have gotten rid of the "better safe than sorry" mentality of before, and now we're being told we can carry on as usual if we've been exposed and aren't symptomatic (even thought Omicron appears to be transmissible for several days before symptoms appear).
Health care workers are being ordered to come into work if their symptoms are "mild," which is WILD to me. By definition they are working with vulnerable people, so even if they have a mild case, their patients are a lot more likely to develop a serious case and even die. I understand it's because of staffing levels, I do. All the anti-vaxxers are *crowing* about this, because a bunch of health care workers were let go or fired if they refused to get vaccinated (for reasons other than pre-existing health conditions that put them at risk for adverse reactions), and now they are using that as... I don't know, proof? That the authorities are full of shit. And, as much as I hate to concede anything at all to anti-vaxxers, they do have a point on this. If you fire people who aren't vaccinated because they might transmit Covid to patients, then you can't turn around and order Covid-positive people to work and expect to maintain the high ground. (To be clear, I am NOT suggesting they shouldn't have fired workers who refused to get vaccinated.)
The thing is, the short-staffing problem ISN'T actually a pandemic problem. We've been running essential and emergency services at minimum staffing for literal decades now. I'm going to speak mainly from my personal experience in Canada, but I think it applies pretty much all over North America. Somewhere in the mid to late nineties, we started pivoting away from having fully staffed services. We moved to "lean staffing," instituted hiring freezes, and governments everywhere started slashing spending on both staff and infrastructure. Hospitals, schools, paramedics, police, you name it, all of these services issued warning after warning after warning that cutting costs like that simply wasn't sustainable. In the early aughts there was constant talk of a nurse and doctor shortage in Quebec, and schools were struggling with poor ventilation and overcrowded classrooms. In my fourteen years as a police dispatcher, I have never once worked a single year in which my unit wasn't short-staffed (anywhere between a high of 75% staffing levels to a low of 40% staffing levels where I am now), and we only kept going because people agreed to work overtime basically year-round.
The private sector isn't any better. It moved to "just-in-time" models, to not stocking things in warehouses in order to save on costs, to underpaying all its employees, to investing only the bare minimum in its infrastructure because Heaven forfend we affect the bottom line for such piddly considerations as safety, or redundancy, or care for the employees.
And now, we're reaping what the decision-makers of the past have sown. Not only that, but current decision-makers appear quite happy to double down on it all, rather than try anything new. The status quo is what brought them their power (and their wealth and influence), and it doesn't serve their immediate interests to try to think of the long-term interests of the human race or even the population of their own country, for fuck's sake. Millions of people have died already, and they appear to be quite content to sacrifice millions more of us on the altar of the economy.
Ugh.
Anyway, this has been a rant brought to you by a person who thinks we've probably got another couple of years of this ahead of us and who is wildly unimpressed with how the government is handling things. I am probably a little crankier about this than usual today because I'm having to work night shifts, and lack of sleep is no one's friend. I promise to try to make my next post a happier one.
