Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
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John Quiggin 
We still don’t take COVID-19 seriously enough. It’s essentially because our governments won’t take it seriously enough because they don’t want to upset their donors. Our governments have lied to the people, ignored the research, covered up statistics and even stopped testing and/or collecting statistics in many cases.
“If you think the COVID pandemic is done and ever-evolving variants pose no significant threat, consider these two realities.
The first is a recent U.S. study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It tracked 150 million workers and their absences in the workplace in the United States since the end of the so-called public health emergency in 2023.
Its central conclusion: “Health-related absences from work continued to track COVID-19 circulation and were 12.9 per cent higher in the post-pandemic period compared with before the pandemic (140,000 monthly absences).” Absences were highest in occupations with the greatest exposure to the public.
The study added that continuing circulation of COVID variants has created “a new year-round baseline for work absences” that amounts to adding an additional flu-like season in the workplace.
Reality No. 2: excess deaths. That’s the level of mortality above what it was before the pandemic. This metric has not returned to normal and remains significantly elevated.
Just last month Swiss Re, a global insurance firm that analyzes mortality risk by forecasting future life expectancy trends, pegged that number of excess deaths at two per cent above the pre-pandemic annual mortality rate. When you extrapolate that number to North America’s population of 617 million, that works out to be 120,000 unanticipated dead people per year. That’s roughly the equivalent of two fully loaded standard commercial jets crashing and killing everyone aboard every day.
Last month Neil Sprackling, a CEO with Swiss Re, cited long COVID as a significant factor contributing to that two per cent jump in excess deaths, particularly in people over the age of 65. He also projected that this excess mortality could last until 2030, or longer.
These two realities underscore a fact that is scarcely mentioned in the media and has become politically unpopular to say. Nearly six years after the arrival of the COVID pandemic, the virus continues to undermine public health, rattle politics and unsettle the economy.” – The Tyee.
The full article is here:
https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2025/10/31/Physicist-COVID-Seriously-Enough/
There are numerous links in this paper to peer reviewed science papers which support the above picture.
The most dangerous thing about COVID-19, when it is not immediately fatal or seriously damaging, is that it can slowly and continuously degrade the human immune system and many other organs and systems. The results of multiple infections, certainly in the unvaxed, under-vaxed and/or un-boosted will be, in most cases, accumulating damage to the immune system. The long term effects will be in the range of debilitation to premature death.
In my opinion, this is a long term disaster which slowly but surely will result in unsustainably high percentages of incapacity and invalidity across the entire population. The disease burden of the endless COVID-19 pandemic, via the policy of tolerated endemicity, will incrementally and finally seriously damage our societies and economies. Other pandemics will take hold too because weakened immunity population-wide.
If not acted against, the combination of runaway climate change and this endless COVID-19 pandemic, plus the further pandemics and disasters all this will engender will be enough, on their own, to drive global civilization to collapse. But they won’t be on their own. There are other existential risks to address too.
If we continue to live in denial and do nothing to halt these disasters, global civilizational collapse is assured and human extinction probably more likely than not.
I put this question to the AI in Google search.
COVID-19 damages the immune system of many people who catch it once or multiple times. In a state of endemicity of COVID-19 will this process eventually result in most of the population having damaged immune systems? The answer is thought-provoking to say the least.
“It is unknown if COVID-19 will eventually result in most of the population having damaged immune systems, as this depends on the long-term effects of repeated infections, the severity of the virus, and the effectiveness of future vaccines. Some research indicates that SARS-CoV-2 can directly damage immune cells and lead to immune exhaustion, but it is still unclear how widespread and permanent these effects will be in a population that is constantly exposed to the virus over many years, says the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
There are enough dangers and unknowns here to make us very concerned about this if we can directly and validly deduce the most likely conclusion. If the majority suffer chronic and increasing immune system damage and dysfunction from multiple infections, then the conclusion must be that an ever rising proportion of humans will begin to suffer severe immune dysfunction until some kind of asymptote limit is reached.
The bolded “if” above is doing a lot of work. At the same time, the general picture already is that multiple reinfections increase immune system damage risks each time.
“Yes, multiple COVID-19 reinfections can increase risks for the immune system and overall health, potentially leading to long-term complications like Post-Acute Sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC), especially in older adults and those with pre-existing conditions. While the severity of each reinfection may be similar to the original infection, the cumulative effect of repeated exposure to the virus appears to raise the risk of negative health outcomes,” – Google AI.
There are a number of links, in the Tyee article in my post above, to peer reviewed papers, some of which refer to this issue, at least in broad terms.
I for one cannot see how the human race can avoid this outcome while permitting COVID-19 to circulate freely, continuously and interminably. There is no end to the process until an evolutionary asymptote limit is reached. For example, 90% (say) vulnerable to this process die out and fail to reproduce. The 10% who can survive and reproduce would the new COVID resistant population in a de-populated world. They would also be battling climate change and the collapse of modern civilization.
Other limits could be reached much earlier. I simply don’t know what these limits are likely to be. Perhaps C-19 could evolve to genuine mildness and benignity. However, there appears to be no evolutionary forcing pressure on it to do this during the period where it circulates freely and its damage is long term and insidious. The only other possibility is that the long term dangers become fully comprehended not just by scientists but the general population and leaders. In that case, new measures to stop free circulation of COVID-19 could and possibly would be implemented.
I see no sign of new measures being implemented any time soon. The only possible conclusion is that not only has immense damage been done already, ever increasing damage will continue into the future for an undetermined length of time. IMHO, this unchecked situation constitutes an existential danger to the human race just as unchecked climate change does.
COP-30 yawn
I confess not to be following COP 30 in Belém. Like many others, I feel that the processes set in motion by the 1991 Rio Treaty and the Paris Protocol of 2015 seem exhausted, with each annual jamboree making less progress than the one before. Consider the check list of possible benefits.
1. Stronger collective action through agreement
After the failure of the technocratic Kyoto Protocol, the last attempt to bind states to contractual emissions targets, the Paris accord opted for St. Augustine’s ama et fac quod vis. Each state sets its own targets in “nationally determined contributions” (NDCs): exposing themselves to peer review and public opinion, with mutual praise and shaming. This process has more or less ground to a halt. Even this weak tea was to much for Trump’s thin skin, demands for flattery and submission, and wholesale rejection of international law. The USA, historically the greatest contributor to global heating, has quit the international process. China has discovered that it pays no penalty for setting weak emissions targets that it routinely beats by large margins, and India has followed it. Europe plods along: not because of the absent criticism of the rest of the world, but because only serious external commitments allow its complex internal horsetrading and decisionmaking to work.
Accordingly, the collective ratchet hoped for in Paris has failed to materialise. NDCs are not getting more ambitious, and at national level green politicians are on the defensive against populists who would weaken green commitments instead.
2. Funding for poor countries
What funding? The rich countries with the USA and UK in the van, are slashing “foreign aid”, not increasing it. The negotiations for the Paris protocol were mainly about the attempts by developing countries to get the rich ones to recognize their historic responsibility for emissions and fork over guilt money to poor ones, and by rich countries to prevent poor countries exempting themselves on the argument ”it’s our turn to trash the playground”. The diplomats found weasel language to paper over this divide. The rich countries won, as you would expect. The gush of new money flowing to poor ones to be misallocated by their elites has not materialised, while many poor ones have realised that waiting for the fairy gold is not in their interest.
3. Coalition building
Corporate HR departments spend good money sending desk salarymen on commando survival courses for “team building”. Academics go to research conferences. Salesmen and engineers go to trade conferences. To an outsider it looks like a waste of money. But getting together with like-minded people meets some basic human need for morale-building and networking, on top of or in place of any actual work. The COPs are gatherings of the different septs of the climate tribe, and have a value beyond their agendas and resolutions. For this they do just fine, but the rest of us can mostly ignore them.
The action has shifted dramatically. Wavering government policy and political grandstanding is now much less important than technology and economics. From a stocktake of 2015 predictions https://eciu.net/media/press-releases/2025/how-they-got-it-wrong-pessimistic-predictions-upended-by-post-paris-momentum :
“Solar and wind have hugely exceeded expectations: the world installed 553 GW of solar in 2024 alone, overshooting 2015 International Energy Agency (IEA) forecasts by more than 1,500%. Coal is now in global decline. Total global solar capacity is over four times what was predicted in 2015, and doubling every three years. EVs have exceeded expectations: 2024 EV deployment is already 40% above the IEA’s 2015 projections, and on track to be 66% higher by 2030. The Paris declaration target of 100 million electric vehicles on the road by 2030 is on target to be hit as soon as 2027.”
Recall that the Paris Protocol was made politically possible, just, by the fact that the net cost of the energy transition to a representative country had fallen by then to roughly zero. It was a large net win if you included the health benefits of ending most air pollution. The intractable free rider problem had gone away, at any rate to rational policymakers.
The over-performance in green power capacity has not been driven by a huge increase in spending – though it has grown in renewables – but by rapidly falling costs. There was a bit of a solar glut in the last year, and an EV glut in China, but everybody in these industries treats the price dips as normal cyclical fluctuations. Current prices are basically sustainable and further declines are expected.
The decision landscape has therefore changed dramatically. Suppose you are the leader of Tanzania. In brief:
1. You can bring abundant renewable electric power to every village and slum in the country in a short time at low cost, making you very popular.
2. You can forget about the guilt money from rich countries, but you can borrow enough from hardboiled Chinese banks. (The counterpart of China’s surplus in trade is capital to invest abroad). 3. This is OK under IMF / World Bank lore because the assets will generate cash income, unlike health clinics and schools. You should worry more about Chinese control over your ports and railroads.
So go for it.
There is another factor that has grown in importance, for rich, poor and middle-income countries alike: national energy security. Importing oil and gas makes you humiliatingly and dangerousl dependent on a gang of very seedy and unreliable exporting countries: Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Venezuela, Russia, and the USA. Recall that the French build-out of nuclear power in the 1970s, the industry’s only real success ever, took place under de Gaulle and Messmer, and was primarily motivated by national independence, Germany’s switch out of Russian gas (55% of gas supply in 2022 to zero in 2028) is similar, and I guess larger in absolute terms. Buying solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and electric buses from China creates minor technical dependencies, but the risk is comparatively tiny, as the technologies are essentially generic and as-good spares can be bought from many suppliers.
It’s not all good. There is currently an absurd boom in paper projects for heavily subsidised nuclear reactors and hydrogen vehicles. It is tempting to see the hand of fossil fuel lobbyists behind these boondoggles, though Occam’s razor suggests the promoters may well be self-starting. At all events, these distractions are mere sideshows. WWS – wind, sun, storage – can and will meet almost all the world’s electrified energy needs at low cost and wthout any new technology. The remaining hard cases – steel, cement, aviation, shipping, and fertlisers offer a bewildering variety of distinct challenges and pathways to net zero, including an unknown degree of electrification. They will be competing for the constrained supply of sustainable biofuels. At all events, it is hard to see how the unwieldy COP jamborees can contribute usefully to a discussion on say the pros and cons of green ammonia versus biomethanol as a fuel for oceanic shipping.
I would recommend the attenders at COP-30 to enjoy Belém, take a boat trip on the Amazon, dance a samba or two, and go home refreshed to carry on the fight against the tireless fossil fuel and beef lobbyists and propagandists. They are losing where it counts, in the daily decisions of investors and households.