There has been much criticism worldwide over national governments' failures to act quickly enough to contain the spread of Covid-19; one needs only look at the frightening death tolls in countries like Italy, Spain and the U.S. to appreciate the merit of such criticism. But in my view, much of that failure is a result of our refusal to recognize the interconnectedness of today's world.
When the bug first broke out in Wuhan, China, our initial response was to check all passengers travelling from the afflicted area. Not a bad first start perhaps, but it was predicated on the assumption that such people could be effectively isolated, an assumption that quickly proved illusory. Before long, cases with no known contacts with travellers arose. Community spread had begun.
The rest, of course, is very recent history, and the story is still unfolding.
If nothing else, this pandemic has been a pointed reminder that, thanks to contemporary technology, no nation or individual can successfully isolate from others. And as the following report by Redmond Shannon makes abundantly clear, until all countries have ready access to the equipment and medical support necessary to contain Covid-19 (and whatever pandemics follow it), no one will ever be truly secure.
Please start the following at the the 16:15 mark:
Most of Canada's infections came from Canadian citizens returning from Europe and Iran. In BC Canadian citizens returning from China were involved. This does show the conectivenes but misses the point. Closing the borders did little because Canadian Citizens must be allowed to come home. Foreign nationals played a part but only a minor one.
ReplyDeleteAnd again, recognizing that border closures are simply band-aids that don't work well requires people seeing the bigger picture of world connectedness, rumleyfips.
Delete"Closing the borders did little because Canadian Citizens must be allowed to come home."
Deletehome yes but next time
home to border quarantine for three weeks in their winnabago
or home off the plane to the three week hotel stay
not a grand tour of canada getting to their house.
and remember a law with a fine is just permission for the rich. Revoking passports might get their attention ....say min 5 years, second offense... life.
Callous disregard for other peoples lives is not acceptable nor excusable by feigned ignorance of the consequences.
what charge for poisoning water supply or food supply?
oh woops
just jumped into the endless food destruction from Monsanto and glyphosate, or the tar sands and nonredeemable water ponds.
As I mentioned recently in a comment to The Mound, lunta, the lax screening at Pearson for returning travellers was appalling. I had friends and relatives who returned from abroad, and outside of answering a few questions n the kiosk, no vetting took place, no temperatures were taken, etc.
DeleteI do hope real, lasting lessons are being learned that can be applied when the next pandemic arrives.
Yes, helping the Third World is what we must do but I don't see the will to do it among the public or our leaders. Imagine what we would have to do, what we would have to do without, to free up the money and aid needed now, not when we're back on our feet but now.
ReplyDeleteWhile we're all hunkered down in our homes, we may overlook how this virus is ravaging Western economies. When we emerge we will find a different world than the one we knew before we went to ground.
Imagine in an economy the WTO warns will rival the Great Depression, trying to budget for altruism. The first thing that would have to go is the era of everyday low taxes. There would have to be tax hikes, more tax on income and revenues, and a powerful tax on capital, wealth taxes. That's hard enough to do in a boom economy. It's a tougher trick when the economy goes bust.
We were warned, after the 2007-2008 recession, that our governments were tapped out from all the stimulus spending. The US avoided outright collapse but not by that much. We were told if another recession like that came around government bailouts would be nigh impossible.
So now you've got an internal pandemic problem, a depression/recession waiting outside your front door, a defunded government and a moral challenge of Herculean proportions in the Third World. How do you square that circle?
My guess is that we're about to see the hollow shell of government created by four decades of neoliberalism. The building has been gutted. We just weren't paying much notice.
As Elvis might say, "We're caught in a trap." Did I mention that we have a minority government; a society that reveals stress cracks along so many lines - regional, cultural, political and economic; a bevy of existential threats - some looming, a couple already here.
There's a price to be paid for globalism and open borders and it has gone way up. Do we have the means to pay that price? I just don't see it.
In my heart I'm still in "my brother's keeper" mode but now that's more than a platitude. It's a burden, one that will possibly grow larger much sooner than we imagined.
I'm not confident that a world of eight billion people is a viable world. We've become what Lovelock depicted as a bacterial contagion, a planetary malaria, the source of a great fever by which the Earth will rid itself of its attackers. I guess what troubles me is that I really thought we would never have to see this in our lifetimes. Sure got that wronhg.
The egregious shortcomings of neoliberalism are now becoming manifest, Mound. Owen's post today on its implosion makes for interesting reading.
DeleteThe biggest question in my mind is whether, when this pandemic is over, people will hold to the new understanding we are acquiring about so many things, including the importance of having government that works for all the people and the necessity of paying for it with proper taxation. Or will we just go back to the old ways of thinking and living and simply wring our hands when the next crisis overtakes us?
Do you imagine that Canadians or, for that matter, the people of any Western nation, have the collective consciousness to formulate something new to displace neoliberalism? Think of the consensus that such a "bottom up" reformation would require. At best it would be just barely short of revolutionary - a political, economic and cultural recalibration - powerful enough to overcome the resistance of vested interests and power structures.
DeleteWho, among the ranks of our leadership, has any appetite for massive, structural change? Even if we had such people, which of them would have the vision needed to implement such change non-violently?