It’s Not Over: Cases Up 17% (125,000), Hospitalizations Up 6.6% (41,000), Deaths Up 40% (430)*
Yes, 430 Americans are dying every day
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*Data are 7 day average in US, from the Washington Post, week of July 16, 2022
Numbers don’t lie, this thing is not close to over and this variant is deadly. Yet we go on our merry way, pretending everything is normal.
Have you looked around you lately? Nothing is normal, not a bit.
Of course we can’t blame Covid for all the world’s woes, but it is right in the thick of most of them.
The obvious one is inflation. Panic over Covid in China led to massive supply chain issues, with basic things like semiconductor chips bringing much of US manufacturing, including cars, to a screeching halt.
As a result, the average car purchase is somewhere around $50,000.
A lot of people left their jobs during the early days of the pandemic, not necessarily by choice, and many of them changed careers, resulting in huge labor shortages.
Labor shortages bring up the price of everything from junk from Walmart to food.
Covid was not responsible for Putin invading Ukraine, though there is speculation it was a distraction from the epidemic there, where their vaccines were so ineffective and untested that very few Russians got them.
Which tells us that a lot of them died and are still dying. We don’t get those stats for good reason.
Starting a war is the oldest dictator trick on the planet when things at home are bad. Unify the country and distract from the fact that your mother and father just died. That is reality in Russia.
The war did a number on oil and gas prices as they were the only real international asset Putin has to sell, and the West is working hard to stop buying.
The fossil fuel producers took full advantage, jacking prices and collecting record profits.
Is Covid behind this? You may not be able to trace a direct path, but it disrupted the world economy a hell of a lot more than you might think. The key phrase is ‘world economy’. The pandemic knew nothing of borders.
