The World Health Organization acknowledged yesterday that the world had missed the opportunity to eradicate COVID-19 as the virus continues to spread and mutate: “We had a chance in the beginning of this pandemic,” Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead on Covid-19, said Tuesday. “This pandemic did not need to be this bad.” The video below updates on Delta, the fastest spreading variant to date.
Covid-19’s Delta variant is proliferating world-wide threatening unvaccinated populations and economic recovery. WSJ breaks down events in key countries to explain why Delta spreads faster than previously detected strains. Here is a direct video link.
In a related story, yesterday, the U.K. became the first western country to announce tax increases to support its state-funded National Health Service as it struggles to manage a backlog of millions of patients in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. The U.K. government will increase payroll and dividend taxes by 1.25%, respectively, to raise £12 billion, equivalent to $16.5 billion, a year starting in 2022. This is just a start; other countries will undoubtedly follow suit with more tax increases.
The larger issue, of course, is a government-subsidized food system in the west that is making populations sicker and more vulnerable to illness with diminished productivity and quality of life, every single day, from birth.
Until we address the food issue, literally, from the ground up, we will continue to have an unsustainable sick-care system that will suck ever-escalating funding away from everything else that we need to invest in.
