[tehjoker]

That chunk is heavily influenced by the propaganda that over a million dead people isn't a big deal. The propaganda is economically incentivized because slowing down the economy is bad for business even if it protects human lives.

[maxerickson]

Do you consider this significant failure a collapse?

I fell into the other poster's trap, talking about something emotionally charged that isn't really responsive to what I said initially.

[tehjoker]

Nearly all collapses are of limited temporal duration (except for extinction events....). I think it is fair to call a health system that failed to protect the nation and world a collapse. It failed to perform its function in a dramatic way. Now, the fact that most of us survived at least is being exploited to say it was no big deal and actually, why not trash every public health institution so the economy is never shut down again?

Sad whomp whomp horn: the economy is going to be negatively affected by covid disability and death on an ongoing basis and a new pandemic will still cause so much fear the economy will shut down.

[LorenPechtel]

We have plenty of small scale collapses that weren't of limited duration. It's just that such things are typically only noted by archeologists. We only see the survivors and thus conclude that collapse isn't an existential problem.

I do agree on Covid disability. Early on we saw some pretty dire predictions, but since then it's mostly been an exercise in muddying the waters. Lots of wheel-spinning about what constitutes long Covid when they should have simply been collecting data on the various symptoms. Better to not see the problem than have to deal with it.

Look at how we were handling AIDS before we discovered it was HIV destroying the immune system. Long Covid is still at that stage--we are seeing a slew of highly varied effects rather than the mechanism.