As of today - April 1 - the era of Covid is almost officially over in Latvia. Almost, because some restrictions remain. Vaccination is still required for those working in medical institutions and prisons, as well as for teachers, until the end of this school year. Face masks remain compulsory in medical and social care institutions and in public transport.
The era of Covid is over, not only in Latvia but also worldwide. Here is how US President Joe Biden put it on March 30: "Because of the strategy we executed over the past year on vaccinations, testing, treatments, and more, we’re now in a new moment in this pandemic. It does not mean that Covid-19 is over; it means that Covid-19 no longer controls our lives." Biden admits that Covid-19, that is, the bureaucracy associated with Covid, controlled the world for two years. It was allowed to do almost anything it set its mind to, and the public submitted to this control quite willingly.
It is now apparent that this was just a kind of opera overture before the curtain rises and the "real thing" begins. The real thing started on February 24 this year, and the "pandemic" unofficially ended on the same day. This word should be put in inverted commas in this case, because it does not mean the actual pandemic, but the one that dominated the information space when the news was dominated by medical statistics and descriptions of political battles to lift or tighten restrictions; where, on whom and for how long.
After February 24, these statistics suddenly lost almost all relevance. Talking of restrictions and the wearing of face masks seemed almost indecent. Compulsory booster vaccination has been forgotten and is no longer even mentioned. It is also clear why. The world is now facing a much more serious threat. That makes it all the more important to grasp the lessons of these two years of the Covid era.
So what are the lessons? 1) It turns out that the big global financial centers - above all the US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank - can double the value of their balance sheets by issuing trillions and the world financial system does not collapse. What is more, it did not even wobble. Just like a skyscraper during a major earthquake. There may be some as yet invisible cracks in the system, which will be revealed later, but so far everything looks stable.
If one wants to invoke high inflation rates at this point, the well-being losses that humanity has been forced to pay for all this must be seen as relatively small, given the vast lockdowns, the enormous expenditure of resources on Covid containment, testing, vaccination, treatment and other things.
2) It turns out that people give up various freedoms quite easily, provided that there is a compelling justification and, very importantly, that the majority of society recognizes that it is a good thing. The bar at which people are willing to give up these freedoms willingly is astonishingly low. It does not even require the existence of war or the threat of war. A massive fear propaganda campaign is enough. The Covid era proved that the values of so-called liberal democracy have much shallower roots in people's consciousness than many used to think, and still think.
3) At the end of the pandemic, when the illusory meaning of many restrictions and compulsory face masks was revealed, the political undertones of the struggle bubbled to the surface. Namely, it turned out that under the banner of the fight against the pandemic, there was actually an ideological struggle between the loyalists (those who are always obedient to the authorities and who are aligned with the majority of society) and the "wrong" dissidents, who for various reasons do not want to follow everyone. It turned out that most of the compulsory measures were compulsory only to force the disobedient to comply. Make them submit just for the sake of submission. On principle. At its deepest level, this coercion to submit was not much different from the coercion exercised by authoritarian regimes, even if the external pretexts were seemingly different. The actions to repress these protests in the West and in the East were not even visually very different. It should be noted that in Latvia, against the background of some Western countries (Australia, Canada, the Netherlands and others), these struggles even looked quite civilized.
4) And finally, but perhaps most importantly, the Covid era demonstrated Western society's paralyzing fear of anything that could threaten human life and well-being. People are prepared to do anything to minimize these threats. Some Putinologists, such as Stanislav Belkovsky, consider the Western reaction to Covid (in his view, it was inadequately hysterical) to be one of the arguments that prompted Putin to invade Ukraine. Putin's possible train of thought as interpreted by Belkovsky: "If they are so afraid of the virus, they will be even more afraid of my nuclear bombs and will not interfere. With nuclear blackmail, I will force them to 'bow down' and submit to me. In the end, they will all dance to my tune, not just Macron."
Let us not try divining how far the West will really be prepared to "bow down" and how justified these "dreams" of Putin are, but this undisguised fear of any somewhat serious threat to their well-being has become one of the world's dangers. Nothing encourages the violent to act violently more than the fear of the victim. Just as nothing deters them from violence more than the possibility of getting severely hit back.
So the key lesson of the age of Covid is that excessive fear and caution have no effect on viral behavior. Nor was a strong correlation shown between long-term supranormative mortality and the stringency or looseness of Covid restrictions. Just as the emphasized effort to "not anger Putin" has no impact on Putin's plans.
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