With 900,000 Americans and 1.6 million Europeans lost to Covid, the U.S. warns that Russian invasion of Ukraine may kill 50,000.
(Originally published Feb. 7 in “What in the World”) The United States and allies from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization are flying weapons into Ukraine ahead of a Russian invasion that White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan says could come any day. The U.S. has already sent 2,000 troops from bases in Germany to Eastern Europe to shore up defenses there, but U.S. President Joe Biden has made clear no U.S. troops will come to Ukraine’s defense.
Sullivan’s warnings came after top U.S. military and diplomatic officials spent six hours briefing Congress, telling lawmakers that an invasion could cost 50,000 lives and spark a refugee crisis in Europe (Ukraine has so far lost more than 100,000 to Covid and Europe 1.6 million, so this doesn’t seem all that alarming). As the escalation continues, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will travel to Washington today to meet Biden, who is doubtless eager to get Germany to play a less ambivalent role than it has so far buttressing Ukraine’s defenses. French President Emmanuel Macron is meanwhile scheduled to meet today with Russian President Vladimir Putin in an attempt to defuse the crisis, presumably by offering his vision of a European security architecture less beholden to Washington and NATO.
The growing tension in Eastern Europe is raising nerves in Asia, too, after Putin met with China’s President Xi Jinping last week in Beijing ahead of this week’s Winter Olympics. The French are warning that U.S.-led confronation will push Moscow into a tighter alliance with China. And China is accused of Russian-style cyberattacks against U.S. interests, the latest being a hack of journalists’ email at News Corp.
Cyberattacks have also enabled to North Korea to swipe more than $50 million in cryptocurrency that the regime of Kim Jong-un is using to pay for the country’s seemingly advancing missile program.
The daily death toll from Covid-19 continues to climb, with the U.S. now having lost more than 900,000 people to the virus. With reported case numbers falling, pressure is building to lift restrictions despite the fact that many asymptomatic infections simply aren’t being detected. Omicron is spreading so quickly that at least one of every three tests in the U.S. comes back positive. That suggests that many, if not most, new cases there remain unreported.
People tired of what has been a half-hearted fight from the start are becoming increasingly defiant in their determination that governments surrender to Covid. Many argue that the continued cost in lives, being largely borne by older people, is disproportionately costly to the economic opportunities of the younger. Some even argue—in a macabre application of supply-side economics—that Covid restrictions exacerbate inequality by depriving economic growth from the poor, ignoring the fact that Covid imposes a disproportionately heavy toll on the poor in the first place. It’s the poor who are more often forced to work and live in crowded places where transmission is highest, and who cannot afford the quality of healthcare that makes Omicron such a “mild” disease to rich Westerners. Most, in fact, live in countries where vaccines and boosters aren’t even yet available. Nor can they afford to travel to places where they are, so they can sit around kvetching about restrictions on travel and gathering.
The defeatist manslaughterers also seem to have forgotten that the reason Covid restrictions have been in place for so long is because we all did such a lousy job of complying with them at the outset. The assumption that Covid’s toll primarily affects older people with fewer years left to live is, in addition to being disturbingly cynical, flawed in many ways. One is that the notion that the death of an old person is less costly than the death of a young person and doesn’t affect the economic prospects of the young. Another is that Covid primarily affects older people. Younger people who catch Covid may face a lower risk of severe illness, but they are vulnerable to long Covid all the same. And a new estimate from the Brooking Institution estimates that long Covid may have put 1.6 million Americans out of the job market, contributing to the overall labor shortage in the U.S. economy.