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Lockdowns Make Time Stand Still
Rembrandt van Rijn Student at a table by candlelight c.1642
The discussion has been stuck in an All Else Being Equal (Ceteris Paribus) mode, but all things do not remain equal. It’s not even as if you get rid of the disease, all your problems go away. Not only do various COVID measures inflict huge damage on economies, on people’s jobs and incomes, they also cause entire new sets of health problems.
Epidemiologists and virologists are not equipped for such massive problems. They may be able to say the odd wise word in their field -and even that will be 90% rear-view mirror stuff, because they must compare what they see to what happened in the past-, but the disease doesn’t only affect their field. It affects many fields they have no knowledge of.
Their ideas are then taken on board by economists, not exactly the most scientific of sciences, and off go the government policies. But that was 6-7 months ago, and we learned so much since, right? By now we have involved for instance mental health experts on a large scale, right? Yeah, sure.
The point is, you can’t force lockdowns, masks etc. onto people, without looking at what the consequences of that will be. Because all things do not remain equal for 6-7 months.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Rising Threats To Our Health
The Rising Threats To Our Health
Though evidence of a looming global healthcare crisis is plainly visible, few seem to realize the consequences will be catastrophic to individuals, households and national economies.
Here is a list—by no means exhaustive—of major health issues threatening hundreds of millions of people globally.
Air & Water Pollution
Photos such as these provide graphic evidence that air and water pollution are serious health hazards in many developing nations around the world:
Source: Kyodo News
Source: Independent.co.uk
The statistics are equally horrendous: roughly 40% of all deaths in Pakistan result from polluted drinking water, 500 million people in China lack clean drinking water, and in India, 90% of human waste flows untreated into rivers.
Though the winter smog in Chinese cities is infamous, many other Asian nations suffer from equally poor or even worse air quality:
The health consequences of severe air pollution are many, and a rising number of deaths are attributable to air pollution:
(Sources)
Air and water pollution do not stop at borders, and so severe pollution in developing economies has become a health issue in neighboring developed economies as well.
Ageing Populations
As populations age, health costs rise while the working-age population that must support higher healthcare expenses declines, burdening the middle-aged workers who must support the elderly and the young. Caring for a rapidly expanding population of elderly retirees burdens governments and economies as well as households: as income is taxed to pay for care, there is less money available for other programs and investing in future productivity.
We all know why healthcare costs rise as the population of elderly retirees grows: chronic non-communicable diseases go hand in hand with age. The costs of treating these lifestyle/ageing diseases (metabolic syndrome, heart disease, high blood pressure, etc.) soar as the population and incidence of these diseases both rise.
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