A next installment of C-19 ruminations was prepared and left to the wayside. This one is more needful.
I’ve had a sense of discomfort throughout most of the pandemic lockdown, not due to the discomforts of upset to daily life and restriction (even as my circumstances are really quite livable). I’ve felt a gnawing lack of trust in persons who are doing the most to manage the casualties, guiding the lockdown, calculating the effects, and so on. On paper, they’ve done what had to be done. I’ve followed their numbers, their decisions and arrived at or crosschecked against my own conclusions reading a variety of media sources. There isn’t a broad disagreement about the past weeks, and yet I have doubts about where we’re being guided toward in the future.
Estimates of pandemic duration and number of deaths were astronomical a couple weeks ago, now they are more in line. Why were they so far out to begin with? Why has Fauci been so coy and non-committal given that he is keeper of, assumable, the best number crunchers available? Why has medical treatment suddenly become so politicized? Why is China being so steadily pandered to even when it’s widely confirmed that they caused a whole pandemic, mismanaged the original response, they brutally suppressed whistle-blowers and victims, and release reams of false data? Why are our own fine institutions, CDC, Harvard, JHU, all so in bed with that? Why is a conservative administration so openly considering long term measures that only six weeks ago would have been considered a socialist/autocratic dream wish-list for social management?
A long recurring theme of my NER writings are future predictions. A few are simply analytical; some are intuitive but also based on news trends and possible trajectories. Once in a great while, a prediction may be even more mystical than that. With a range like that, many errors will happen but for a lowly layman seeing only public information, I do get certain things right. Combine these two thoughts and it signals even a deeper worry. Well prior to the mass lockdown by several weeks, I saw the pandemic numbers growing in China and elsewhere, even up until it’s arrival in Washington state, and believed it would be contained enough to not disturb life as we knew it until the summer. Part of that was a comparison between our assumed capabilities and the mismanagement in China, not knowing that their information greatly understated their problem. My ‘summer’ prediction was wrong on several key details. Since then, I’ve done better. I knew that 18 months, millions of deaths, and then, even 200k deaths were an overestimate based on what was in progress up to this week. Then the medical experts changed their numbers to roughly what I was seeing with the tallies I’ve kept.
Now we peer into the future. A lot of pieces are in place to manage the United States long term, based on a kind of Marshall-law pandemic footing. There are parties that seem to have a real vesting in a full or partial failure of our pandemic response., political and otherwise. The last two weeks, those interests have not entirely gotten their way. The lowering of casualty estimates was announced with some uncharacteristic flatness. The much broad and deeper control of American lives is; however, still obtainable. I would love to be wrong on that prediction, but I would also be doubly wrong if the parties interested in full social control in the United States were to blitzkrieg that agenda through with the same swiftness that I miscalculated the onset of the pandemic. Having a conservative administration and a lot of conservative state administrations is not a sufficient buffer against a pandemic crisis cabal. Peer pressure and herd mentality are manifested at the federal and state level here. Who is an elected official to risk talking down a doctor in a medical emergency? A perfect leverage point may have been found. If it doesn’t entirely succeed this time, this template will be attempted again.
There are some points for hope though. The techocracy has shown their hand. Millions, including conservative states will not be caught so unaware for a round two if it occurs. China precipitated what I believe was an accidental crisis for what was supposed to be a controlled plan. I predict details will come out to support that that narrative. I hope and pray that in China, Xi will pay the ultimate price for that. Even if that doesn’t occur in a reasonable cause and effect time frame, there will be a mass abandonment of Chinese entanglements by us and others that may very well be the doom of Xi. He’ll have his hands full domestically.
It would be easy to view the predictions herein as responses to the wild conspiracy theories rebounding around the fringes of the pandemic news. The predictions are a construct that explains the deeply troubling unanswered questions that I raise and to be sure, there are many more. As a non-conformist, it’s my nature to question and for that, I should be emulated. Outside of America and particularly in autocratic nations like China, my nature would be worthy of at least suppression if not outright termination. I would like to predict that that would never be possible in America, but at this moment, I cannot say that.