π¨π¦ Did you know that more Canadians have died of COVID than died in World War II?
(πΊπΈ Also, did you know that more of our American neighbours have died of COVID than dies in combat in every war they've fought since 1775?)
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π¨π¦ Did you know that the *lowest* number of COVID patients in hospital has been increasing through 5 waves of Omicron and that the troughs have all been higher than the *peak* of the Delta wave?
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π¨π¦ Did you know that summer 2022 had twice as many deaths as summer 2021?
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π¨π¦ Did you know that the main issue with Omicron variants is no longer "tsunamis" caused by individual variants, but rising sea level with high and low tide? This imposes sustained pressure on the healthcare system.
(Image with area under the curve courtesy of @allard)
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π¨π¦ Did you know that 15% of Canadians infected with COVID (1.4 million people) report long-term symptoms?
π¨π¦ Did you know that there are now more than 700 Omicron subvariants, and that many of them can escape prior immunity and are resistant to available treatments?
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π¨π¦ Did you know that mitigation measures like high-quality (N95) masks worn properly, ventilation, air filtration, and avoiding high risk contact are all variant-proof?
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π¨π¦ Did you know that the pandemic is not over?
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Quick note about the not-low lows of hospitalizations since Omicron. Same pattern happening in various places (New York, UK, France, Denmark, etc.).
Here's hospital *admissions for COVID* in England:
It's very important to be clear about what is happening in the Canadian election and how progressives need to approach it. π§΅
The LPC surge toward a majority is due primarily to a collapse of support for the NDP and Bloc, and much less so a drop in support for the CPC.
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This means that the Libs are mostly picking up progressive voters who are planning to vote strategically to stop the Cons. They are not picking up huge numbers of "moderate conservatives".
Cons support is generally committed but Libs support isn't.
Thoughts on pandemics, inclusion, annexation, Indigenous issues, climate, genocide, and more and the connections I see among them. I fully acknowledge that I am writing this from a position of substantial intersectional privilege.
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I really hoped that the (ongoing) SARS-CoV-2 pandemic would inspire us to make meaningful, positive changes in society. Indeed, early on it seemed like privileged people finally understood what it was like to lack access to things we otherwise take for granted.
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Sadly, but perhaps predictably, we instead rushed back to the status quo as quickly as we could. If anything, things are worse now in terms of public health, accessibility and inclusion, and global health equity. Infectious disease has been actively normalized.
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I'm sure infectious disease minimizers are attributing the record-shattering surge of severe flu this year to "immunity debt". Let's think this through, shall we?
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1. Serious mitigations ended more than 4 years ago. Why would immunity debt only kick in now? And why wasn't 4 flu seasons without mitigations enough to repay whatever "debt" there was?
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Just to recap what is happening, since public health has gone AWOL:
* This is the worst flu season in 15 years. Not just number of cases but number of *severe* cases.
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* H5N1 ("avian flu") is getting further out of control in the US. It is getting closer and closer to a human-to-human transmission outbreak.
* Measles is resurgent thanks to low vaccination rates.
* Tuberculosis is making a comeback.
* Many norovirus outbreaks.
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* COVID rates are lower than in past winters, but a) they're still way too high to ignore, and b) that's because there was a surge in summer (it's not seasonal) and the next major lineage of variants has not arrived yet.
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As you read more and more reports of uncommon pathogens infecting a lot of people, or common pathogens surging far more than usual and/or having unusually severe effects, please remember that this is what immunity theft predicts and what we've warned about for years.
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By contrast, "immunity debt" or "post-pandemic normalizing of levels" as an explanation makes less and less sense as more time goes by. In 2025, it is absurd to still be talking of new surges of illness being due to the lack of immunity from mitigations that ended years ago.
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Case in point, we wrote this more than 2 years ago.