Venn Master🟢🔴 on Twitter - "When you see the backtracking Remember that they didn’t want you to be able to be part of society Didn’t want you to be able to make a living Didn’t want you to be seen as human All because you questioned the now-crumbling Science (TM)"
Aramis 🏳️🌈 rhetoric on Twitter - "So apparently I don’t have a cold … tested positive for COVID. Yes, fully vaccinated. Yes, wear my masks and carry hand sanitizer. So far, things are manageable. Mostly, I’m just mad that despite precaution someone around me wasn’t doing their part 🤬"
"Man finds out COVID is basically a cold, still gets mad."
Maybe he was mad it wasn't as bad as he was deluded into believing it was, so his narrative crumbled
How Sir Patrick Vallance ‘rolled his eyes’ to crush dissent at controversial Covid rules - "Prof Robert Dingwall had been pushing for a study to find out if children really needed to wear face masks in school. It was the late summer of 2020, schools were due to reopen after the coronavirus lockdown and the professor wanted to know what the evidence was for such a draconian measure. At the Government scientific meeting, held remotely on Zoom, the eminent sociologist called for a pilot study to examine the need for masks. Out of the corner of his eye, he said, he could see Sir Patrick Vallance, the Government’s chief scientific adviser, seemingly rolling his eyes in apparent disapproval. Prof Dingwall got the message and cut his imploring speech short. “I was persona non grata from early on,” recalled Prof Dingwall. He was concerned about the effects of lockdown and other stringent measures - such as the two-metre social distancing rules - and had expressed his dissent. “The problem was the social and economic voices were not considered”... The Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) was the senior body tasked with providing - and the clue is in the name - scientific advice to the Prime Minister and his Cabinet on tackling the Covid-19 pandemic. It was co-chaired by Sir Patrick and Sir Chris Whitty, the Government’s chief medical adviser... Rishi Sunak, the chancellor at the time, has now, in the closing days of the Conservative leadership contest, come out swinging. Boris Johnson’s administration “empowered scientists” to such a degree, he said, that he claims he was banned from discussing the “trade-offs” of plunging the country into lockdown against the harm caused by shutting schools or mounting NHS backlogs... “Sage is better understood as a network with a powerful clique at the centre of it,” said Prof Dingwall. “I characterised myself as a loyal opposition. I accepted the science but I didn’t accept the inevitability of the policy conclusions"... Prof Dingwall was arguing for a randomised trial to examine if mask-wearing in school prevented the spread of Covid. He is adamant now that shutting down schools was a terrible error, evidence that a “biomedical bubble” of scientists was dictating policy to the Government... Dr Gavin Morgan, an educational psychologist at University College London, told The Telegraph how he also felt out on a limb on another of the committees feeding into Sage - this one called Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours, or Spi-B for short. “During those early meetings of Spi-B, I often found myself a bit of a lone voice,” said Dr Morgan. “This was in early March 2020, when we were meeting several times a week. With the benefit of hindsight, there may have been a bit of groupthink going on in those early meetings. Things were a fait accompli, it had already been decided that school closures were a good thing.”... The Prime Minister had repeatedly insisted his administration was “following the science”, effectively giving final say to Sage... The delayed publication of Sage documents meant that government policy was essentially settled days or even weeks before the public had any sight of the evidence on which it was based. The system meant there was often little effective public debate. As the pandemic progressed, Number 10 took to releasing some key data as Downing Street press conferences, where new restrictions were announced, were about to take place. One major example was models used by the Government to justify a second national lockdown in Nov 2020, with graphs suggesting England could see 4,000 daily deaths the following month. It later emerged that the models were out of date and that the death projections may have been four times too high, but by that time the lockdown had already been announced... Privately, scientists said that from “day one”, the Government’s proclamation that it would do “whatever the science tells us” was problematic. One insider on Sage, who declined to be named, said: “For many of us working on Sage, Boris saying we will follow the science set alarm bells ringing. He was removing himself from responsibility and putting it on us. That shouldn’t have happened.”"
Rishi Sunak wins support for criticism of over-powerful Covid lockdown scientists - "Rishi Sunak's claim that the Government gave too much power to scientists during the Covid lockdowns has been backed by other Cabinet ministers... Mr Sunak said ministers were banned from talking about the "trade-offs" involved, adding that it was "wrong to scare people" with posters showing Covid patients on ventilators. "A number of government ministers" were concerned about the lack of information from scientists regarding the impact of lockdowns... Former Cabinet colleagues, scientists and senior MPs have echoed the leadership contender’s criticisms of the influential Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), which Sir Patrick chaired - describing as “frightening” the lack of consideration given to lockdown harms... One ministerial aide said the decision to "follow the science" meant that in trying to give ministers "a clear outcome or message... it got condensed into one version of the truth". The aide added: "The output tended to be a summary, one consensus opinion. What became obvious is that even within that there was probably differing views."... Mr Dowden had to rely on external research to stop officials banning him from reopening arts venues where choirs might be singing. "There was this whole thing about whether singing was dangerous - it was killing the arts - and we did not have the counter view," the source said. "Eventually, a study from Bristol University was done that found that singing didn't seem to be a super-spreader."... “Clearly in retrospect we did do too much. It was too draconian… I don’t think we should have closed schools.” Ms Truss said the decision to shut schools meant “a lot of children have ended up suffering - educationally, with mental health issues”. She vowed to Tory members that she would "never impose a lockdown if I am selected as prime minister”... “Sage is better understood as a network with a powerful clique at the centre of it.” Robert Halfon, chairman of the House of Commons education select committee, described closing schools as “the biggest and most catastrophic mistake the Government made during Covid”... the Sage set-up effectively “bullied” politicians into lockdown, because scientists were “marking their own homework”... government scientists abandoned the standard medical criteria - quality-adjusted life years (QALY) - for weighing the benefits versus harms of interventions, which would have given more prominence to the harms of lockdown. In unpublished comments to The Spectator, Mr Sunak questioned why decision makers had abandoned the nuanced medical analysis usually performed when judging whether or not to make an intervention at a population level. Adopting so-called “quality-adjusted life years” would have taken account of the fact that the “average person who died from Covid was aged 83” rather than “a crude balance of lives lost”."
Opinion: Draconian COVID measures were a mistake, let's not repeat them - "Almost two years ago, community measures including lockdowns to suppress COVID transmission had widespread support, with a movement (“COVID Zero”) that promoted more draconian measures, hoping to eliminate COVID altogether... Most of these measures were ineffective, many were harmful. Has anything been learned from these mistakes or will they be repeated the next time case counts go up?... It is time to accept that COVID-19 cannot be stopped and will continue to evolve. Full faith was first placed in the vaccine, and then in boosters as “our way out of the pandemic.” However, the vaccines don’t stop infections of transmission as much as originally hoped — nor do boosters. The COVID Zero movement is dead, and many early proponents have recanted. It is impossible to stop a virus that spreads before symptoms appear, and with super-spreader events that can infect most people in a room. The other challenge is that COVID reinvents itself quickly. As one strain transmits through the community, population immunity emerges and the next strain is selected to keep itself going — this is viral evolution. It’s like the iPhone: when the market gets saturated with the latest version, a new one is released to fill the void... How long before the newly released bivalent vaccine, targeting the original COVID and Omicron strains, is also out of date?... One thing has remained constant since the pandemic began: the young and healthy under age 50 seldom have severe outcomes from COVID-19, so guidance on vaccination should be tailored to age, immunity and risk factors. While a very small number of people remain vulnerable, either prior infection, or vaccines received many months ago still prevent serious outcomes for almost everyone — that’s what matters most to protect the health-care system. Even our higher risk elderly are seeing disease that is less severe than what we see with other common viruses, including other coronaviruses. The mortality rate for those in elder care homes was eight per cent with other (non-COVID) coronaviruses, similar to what we see with COVID now. Likewise, it is folly to believe that more vaccination uptake (adult rates in Canada are at 91 per cent for two doses), or that more booster doses of the latest bivalent vaccine will stop transmission or the emergence of new variants. This is because vaccine protection for infection falls off (wanes) within a few months following a dose. Consider the latest NACI guidance regarding boosters being needed every three or six months: Dosing this frequently is unlikely to further lower hospitalizations and will be very hard to accomplish — coverage rates of third and fourth doses for those under age 40 are well below 50 per cent and five per cent respectively. As discussed in a recent New England Journal of Medicine article, it is also impractical to give boosters more than once a year. While it is tempting to blame new variants on low vaccine uptake, this causal link is far from clear. Evolutionary dynamics, especially with fast-mutating coronaviruses, make the emergence of new variants inevitable, regardless of vaccination rates. There’s a bigger picture issue here: in 2020, COVID had a more significant health-care system surge impact than other respiratory viruses. By 2022, with significant population natural immunity, vaccine immunity, or both this is no longer the case. Our health-care system is currently strained for various reasons unrelated to COVID. Testing and isolating everyone is neither sustainable nor necessary. The brouhaha over Ontario’s latest guidance to no longer require five days of isolation for those who test positive is unjustified... Keeping people at home after their symptoms have resolved, or even when they do not have symptoms, will not stop ongoing circulation of the virus, nor will it protect people from the majority of cases that are unsuspected. Testing less doesn’t hide the problem: we can still estimate COVID-19 by testing wastewater and those with symptoms. It’s similar to political polling — we don’t call everyone, but we still get a good idea of party popularity. In general, testing should be limited to people who might benefit from drug treatments, or if there is confusion about the cause of illness to allow more targeted care. Remaining vaccine passports, such as for attending university and visiting hospitals, as well as workplace policies need to be retired. Even before vaccine mandates and passports were introduced, vaccination rates were well over 80 per cent. Of course, there were those who, for whatever reason, chose not to get vaccinated. Passports infringed on the principle of informed consent, the most basic tenet of which is the lack of coercion, yet did little to dramatically increase vaccine uptake. They also did little or nothing to stop transmission, polarized our society, and punished many low-income people in front facing jobs, many of whom were infected before everyone else. Health-care workers who refused vaccination were lost. These folks are needed now more than ever, whatever decision they made. While most of the government vaccine mandates are gone, burdensome and inconsistently applied testing mechanisms at Canada’s borders have done nothing to reduce importation or transmission of COVID. In the current era, there is no remaining justification for “othering” the unvaccinated nor need to test the unvaccinated more so than the vaccinated. Some with limited access to vaccination in developing countries who wish to come to Canada to work are still subjected to needless quarantine and testing. ArriveCAN is an international embarrassment, and Canada can do better."
Covid hystericists are going to be very upset by what these experts say. I've seen them still claiming that vaccination mandates are justified to reduce variants
Is long COVID still a concern? - The Hub - "Long COVID occurred in 4.5 percent of Omicron and in more than double, namely 10.8 percent, of Delta infected persons... Some of the persisting anxiety and depression seen after infection was likely related to PTSD associated with the trauma of hospitalization, especially ICU care, and fear of impending death... Many people now have much less fear of becoming infected, especially if they only suffer a relatively low-grade cold, as I did. There is greater fear of developing persisting long COVID symptoms. Fortunately, even most of these symptoms are relatively mild and resolve within a few months."
Biden says ‘pandemic is over,' catching White House officials off guard - The Washington Post - "President Biden’s surprise declaration that the coronavirus pandemic is “over” has thrown a wrench into the White House’s efforts to secure additional funding to fight the virus and persuade Americans to get a new booster shot, while fueling more Republican criticism about why the administration continues to extend a covid “emergency.” Biden’s comments, which aired Sunday on “60 Minutes,” reflect growing public sentiment that the threat of the virus has receded even as hundreds of Americans continue to die of covid each day. Forty-six percent of Americans have returned to their pre-pandemic lives, according to an Axios-Ipsos poll released last week, the highest share of respondents to answer that way since the pollsters began asking the question in January 2021... Biden’s remarks caught some senior officials off guard as the White House mounts a fall vaccination campaign, lobbies Congress for billions of dollars to purchase more coronavirus vaccines and treatments, and weighs whether to extend its ongoing public health emergency when it expires next month. The president’s comments also triggered a sell-off on Wall Street, as vaccine manufacturers Moderna, Novavax, BioNTech and Pfizer collectively lost more than $9 billion in value on Monday... Biden also invoked the covid emergency last month to forgive student loan debt, citing a federal law that allows student loan rules to be modified during a crisis... Many Americans remain wary of the virus, said Liz Hamel of Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan research group, citing its July polling that found 39 percent of adults were still worried about serious illness, and 44 percent of parents were worried about a child becoming seriously ill."
The covid hystericists are going to be very upset, since their narrative continues to crumble and they must desperately seek a new source of meaning in their lives. Too bad so many are still living in fear because they don't believe the vaccines work
Opinion | Biden was wrong to say on '60 Minutes' that the pandemic is over - The Washington Post - "Mr. Biden has not ended the official pandemic emergency. When the official emergency ends, some 15 million will lose Medicaid coverage; the reason for a student loan repayment pause will end; the rationale for Trump-era border restrictions, still held in place by a court, will disappear. All this policy transition must not be done carelessly or hastily."
Stephen L. Miller on Twitter - "And this is why they are scrambling to put out this fire."
The pandemic will never be over
Robert Freudenthal on Twitter - "It is striking reading articles like this from a year ago, written by senior people in public health, how badly they have aged. Not just a bit off, almost every single point listed here has been proven demonstrably and categorically incorrect. Yet this was pushed at us by much [not all] of the media, political and medical establishment for best part of two years. Will there ever be a reflection on just how wrong we got it? And when so many ordinary people could see through it all, but the institutions and intellectual elites could not. How do we ever learn to trust institutions again?"
"All countries should pursue a Covid-19 elimination strategy: here are 16 reasons why. Michael Baker and Martin McKee", professor of public health at the University of Otago and professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
Anyone who doesn't "trust the experts" and "follow the science" is a dangerous purveyor of "misinformation"
Corey A. DeAngelis on Twitter - "Fairfax teachers union president opposes reopening schools in person full time next fall even if all teachers are vaccinated... "Of course, there's no plan to vaccinate most students—because the vaccines aren't even approved for kids younger than 16. What Adams is suggesting is essentially that schools should remain mostly virtual indefinitely.""
From Jan 2021
Doug Ford breaks own gathering rules; police refuse to charge - "Ford was photographed at one such campaign event well in excess of the people allowed per gathering. Jeffrey Smith, a litigation paralegal based in Ontario, contacted TBT with a transcript of his report to Durham police, asking why enforcement action was not taken against Doug Ford, citing equality under the law in Section 15 of the Charter. The paralegal noted that others in the Region of Durham were charged for hosting similar gatherings, but unlike Ford, were not so lucky as to avoid fines."
From 2021
Covid-19 in Norway can now be compared to the flu thanks to vaccines, says health chief
From 2021
The arts industry – and the country – cannot wait ‘years’ for large gatherings to return - "it’s extremely dispiriting - nay alarming - to hear a flip comment from Tim Spector, a professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London, on Times Radio that restrictions on large gatherings are likely to be in place for “the next few years”... Just because someone is scientifically astute doesn’t mean they can’t still put out the wrong messaging sometimes, he observes. “If the vaccine works, as all the data says it does, then why are you saying such nonsense? What are we worried about?” Prof Spector’s rationale is that we should continue to do “the easy things, keeping our distance from each other in public, masks, handwashing etc, since they “don’t cost really anything to do.” That quote will likely have every event organiser, venue owner and theatre producer punching a wall in frustration. Has no one listened to the numerous industry leaders spelling out exactly how financially ruinous social distancing and audience capacity caps are to the entire arts sector?... The upfront costs of mounting a big show, festival or tour - from creative development and venue costs or hire through to marketing, travel, wages and more - have to be offset by the return from ticket sales. Margins are incredibly slim. Many only just break even, or manage a slight return... It would also seriously damage audience confidence in returning to live events... Fennah thinks that even mask wearing is too draconian, and that no one is going to want to sit through a play with one on after they’ve been vaccinated. “If the vaccine is working and you’re not going to catch it, then what’s the point? You might be sitting next to someone with hepatitis B, or flu - are you not going to go out until you’ve got a jab for everything? We live with these things all the time. We need to take the paranoia out of it.”"
From 2021
Facebook - "The reason why leftists use the term “passport” for vaccine passports is because they’re vaccine ID’s, but they’ve spent years vilifying the idea of ID’s by calling Voter ID’s “racist”, so they didn’t want to dissuade their useful idiots to get them, or to be so obviously caught in a ruse."
The G7 and the arrogance of Covid theatre - "All of the G7 leaders will have been vaccinated. All have been getting tested for Covid every day. So why do they insist on going through the motions for the camera, only to jettison the rituals moments later? They could not have made it clearer that this is all for show. Clearly, major diplomatic events like the G7 summit cannot properly function with social distancing or masking rules. Sometimes the informal get-togethers, the quiet chit-chats in between the official meetings, can be just as important for getting a diplomatic breakthrough as the official roundtables. What the G7 leaders fail to recognise is that the same is true for the rest of society. Social life, business and creativity are all being sacrificed to Covid theatre, even as the threat from Covid recedes... We are bound to see even more of this hypocrisy in future. Climate change will eventually overshadow Covid-19 as the threat that most concerns our elites. As with Covid, we can expect them to implement restrictions on travel and on economic activity in response. We are already treated, every year, to the spectacle of private jets and helicopters descending for gatherings like the World Economic Forum, so that the global elites can decide which of our freedoms should be sacrificed for the good of the planet. Many citizens are currently banned from the skies thanks to Covid restrictions. Perhaps we will be kept out by exorbitant carbon pricing in decades to come. But we know the rich and powerful will continue to travel as they please. "
From 2021
The Evaporating Effectiveness of Covid-19 Vaccines as Shown by the Newest Ontario Government Data - "These results indicated that the effectiveness of currently available vaccines for Covid-19 was collapsing. Indeed, C2C’s evaluation of the official government data for Canada’s largest province suggested that the effectiveness had actually become negative – that is, fully vaccinated people were more likely to become infected than unvaccinated people. As noted, these results were consistent with the conclusions in a scientific paper by 12 Ontario (plus one U.S.) public health/university scientists published on MedRxiv on December 30, 2021. A subsequent C2C article looked at data from international sources and found the same phenomenon. This article referenced a British study published last September that found vaccine effectiveness already decreasing with Delta from that achieved against the ancestral strain that was used to develop the vaccines. It also quoted a Wall Street Journal article co-authored by a Nobel Laureate in Medicine referencing a Danish study published last December which “found that after 30 days the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines no longer had any statistically significant positive effect against Omicron infections, and after 90 days, their effect went negative – i.e., vaccinated people were more susceptible to Omicron infection.”... Given the ample evidence available by January 2022 pointing to the futility and even counterproductivity of vaccine mandates, it makes sense that all provinces have since taken steps to reduce, phase out or even eliminate them. One wonders, however, why the Government of Canada continues to defend and maintain various vaccine mandates – such as for air travel and employment in the federal government and its agencies... As before, C2C does not dispute the prevailing belief that the mRNA vaccines have reduced the risks of mortality or serious morbidity from Covid-19, particularly for older ages. Our focus has been on whether vaccines limit transmission and, in turn, on whether vaccine mandates have any utility."
From April
Negative Vaccine Effectiveness Isn't a New Phenomenon – It Turned Up in the Swine Flu Vaccine
Readers reply: if everyone isolated for a month, would all transmissible diseases disappear? - "As a public health doctor, the simple answer is no. This is for several reasons: chronic infections, colonisation and animal/environmental reservoirs... Colonisation. Many people carry microbes that cause transmissible diseases asymptomatically, for example on their skin, or in their throat or gut.
So much for that covid hystericist fantasy
I’m Realizing My Friends Are Racist. What Should I Do? - The New York Times - "Although Sydney, Australia, has been my home for almost 40 years, I am temporarily living in Melbourne to be close to family. The Covid-19 situation here has caused a lot of anger among many residents. We went into a second lockdown following outbreaks in aged-care facilities and in the city’s public-housing estates, which have a high concentration of Sudanese and Asian immigrants. The handful of friends I have in this city live in the very affluent eastern suburbs (as do we) and have relatively little cause for concern. Yet they are fuming over the fact that we are inconvenienced because of people whom they repeatedly refer to as “these ethnics.” This is clearly intended as a racial slur and causes me much angst. My friends, like me, are Jewish; unlike me, they are children of Holocaust survivors. Should they not feel greater compassion for the suffering of those recent immigrants escaping violence and ethnic cleansing in their home countries?"
In other words, demonising the unvaccinated is good if they are white, and we must pretend there is no link between minorities and vaccine hesitancy. Of course on Facebook lots of people were sanctimonious and nasty, saying OP shouldn't remain friends with them
Claire Lehmann on Twitter - "Regardless of what one thinks about the necessity of lockdowns, I think all decent Australians can agree that firing rubber bullets into a crowd exercising their democratic right to protest is a grotesque overreach of police power. It's also disturbing to see how many Australians on this website are *cheering on* brutality against the protestors. You may not agree with them, but if you can't understand why people could be at breaking point after 200 days of lockdown, you might have a severe lack of empathy."
Opinion: Doug Ford’s pandemic response has been the worst of Canada’s premiers - The Globe and Mail - "[It] has been a rudderless ship with a neophyte captain, drifting wherever public opinion blows, usually with a two- to three-week delay. Premier Doug Ford has incessantly repeated that nothing is more important than protecting the health of Ontarians – and also keeping kids in school, and protecting our seniors, and supporting small businesses, and safeguarding our economy – which together means that nothing has really been more important than anything else. The effect has been a government that lurches from celebrating reopening plans to issuing dire warnings about ICU occupancies over a matter of weeks; an approach to governing rooted so nakedly on staying in the public’s good graces that the Premier will openly ask for “consensus” on school reopening plans before making a call so as to shield himself from accountability... Other premiers made tough, controversial, choices: Mr. Legault put in-class learning above freedom of movement. Mr. Kenney arguably put businesses and livelihoods ahead of health care infrastructure. Mr. Ford, meanwhile, has staggered from one priority to the next, taking Ontarians along with him for an unpredictable, unnecessary and unpleasant ride."
From 2021
Chris Selley: We need multiple inquiries into Canada's pandemic management - "A recent study, co-authored by federal Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam, is likely to inform that self-congratulation. It is also likely to confirm the popular but simplistic notion that the stricter the rules a jurisdiction had in place during the pandemic, the fewer people succumbed to the virus... The assumptions underpinning the modelling are more interesting than the highly hypothetical numbers. For starters, the study seems to assume that had public-health officials not done what they did — closing venues, banning activities and gatherings, etc. — the virus would have spread unchecked... Why were some Canadian jurisdictions (most notably Ontario) seemingly more preoccupied than anywhere else in the world by the risk presented by allowing kids to go to school? Were they right to be? How much damage did we do to those kids in the offing, and was it worth it? What worked and what didn’t? Tam’s co-authored study, along with many others, points to a so-called “stringency index,” developed by the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University to measure how seriously the world’s governments were limiting normal life to try to control the pandemic. The most common conclusion from academics who cite it (including Tam and her colleagues) is that higher stringency correlates with better results. But it’s far more complicated than that. Notoriously laissez-faire Sweden actually has a slightly higher overall average stringency rate than its far-better-performing neighbours Norway or Finland — but a much higher death rate. The U.K.’s average stringency was higher than all three of the aforementioned nations, yet its death rate was far higher still than Sweden’s... The simple fact is, none of us know exactly what just happened to us, or why, or how we could have made it better. Public-health officials don’t even seem to have noticed the full-blown crisis of confidence they have created, across the political spectrum"
So much for bashing Sweden for letting covid rip
How forcing employees back to the office could backfire | The Star - "Employers “need to recognize people are concerned about coming back. They may be immunocompromised, or they may have immunocompromised people at home. They have very real reasons for not wanting to come back to work, so they need to respect those concerns,” said Janet Candido, a human resources specialist and owner of Candido Consulting Group, which provides HR services to 125 organizations... She estimates that 25 to 30 per cent of employees are raising COVID-19 health concerns and some are leaving their jobs entirely... But she urges employers to be more flexible. Unemployment is low and recruiting new talent could be difficult... 78 per cent of employees surveyed said they would be willing to take a pay cut to continue working from home, with Gen Z respondents being the most willing to do so... The global shock of the pandemic has made people much more aware that anything can change at any given time, said Shimi Kang, a clinical associate professor at the University of British Columbia’s psychiatry department. “People are rethinking their priorities including how they spend their time and their days. We’re seeing this play out in the ‘Great Resignation’ which has people choosing a better work-life balance”"
Presumably 25-30% of the population is immunocompromised or is very sick, and thus is afraid of covid. What an unhealthy population
