If society organized and chose even a month to focus on preventing sick people from wandering around and flying everywhere, we’d wipe out more influenza like we did 6 years ago while trying to stop SARS-2. Suffering would go down.
Society completely shut down for almost 2 years and it didn’t work. Do you have any evidence an extra month of shut down would help?
Depends on your definition of it not working. We made a variety of influenza extinct and eliminated flu deaths in Canada for months, which never happened before or since. Atlantic Canada, the territories, and New Zealand, and Australia all went extended periods with no new COVID cases too. Elsewhere, morgues needed freezer trucks to keep up with the dead. If the government organized a period where travelers who are sick get quarantined, and locals all wore respirators in public spaces, while air was cleaned too, we have plenty of evidence suffering would go down, unless someone’s definition of suffering is wearing PPE sometimes, for a few weeks to try and make the world better.
Now, 6 years later, Emergency Departments have completely shut down, or are in daily crisis mode in both Alberta and Saskatchewan, which is not unrelated to health authorities failing to keep their guard up after 2020/2021. Aside from vaccination, healthcare workers were gaslit into thinking low quality surgical masks on everyone would keep them safe, when they needed high quality respirators to avoid infection. Today it’s rare to see someone in a doctor’s office wearing one, despite measles and COVID-19 circulating in our provinces. My doctor’s office has poor air quality, but the government only thinks metal detectors in ERs is how to improve safety there.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10927280/
“Annual seasonal influenza vaccination is a key public health intervention available to protect Canadians.”
Strange how the summary mentions vaccination, but doesn’t reconcile how no increase in vaccination during 2020 coincided with elimination of influenza deaths in that period.
Reading on, they correctly credit NPIs, but don’t explicitly say that includes sick people wearing masks, and that we’ve also learned N95 or better respirators are very effective.
“Globally, comprehensive nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) implemented in March 2020 aimed at reducing the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), suppressed seasonal influenza epidemic activity into the period of the usual 2021–2022 Northern Hemisphere season ((1–8)). Canada saw the return of community influenza circulation in the spring of 2022, coinciding with easing of NPIs, which was characterized by a late, low-intensity, and brief seasonal influenza epidemic ((9)). This 2022–2023 influenza season saw the first re-emergence of pre-pandemic-like influenza circulation patterns in Canada ((10)).”
Saskboy's Abandoned Stuff 