New Brunswick's Abandiversary
February 24, 2023 marks one year since New Brunswick Public Health has addressed the province regarding the ongoing pandemic. One year since the wholesale abandonment of 800 thousand people to a highly transmissible, ubiquitous, neurotropic, vasculotropic, cardiotropic pathogen.
On February 24, 2022, New Brunswick Public Health recommended the removal of all mandated pandemic protections, at a time when New Brunswick had just experienced the highest covid death counts of the entire pandemic and showed no signs of slowing down. The year since has been cruelly lethal.
Communication was replaced by silence, and in the vacuum there grew a malignant complacency which has led to mass infection, mass disability and the highest death rate in the Atlantic provinces.
The absence of message became the message, reinforcing the rhetoric that there is nothing to be concerned about. The inferred absence of hazard created a real-world absence of incentive for people to protect themselves and others.
The social solidarity we had experienced in the prior years of the pandemic became extinct, crushed beneath the momentum of the manufactured, wide-spread sociological acceptance of a lie.
The lie that 'the pandemic is over.'
It was not over.
58% of all NB covid deaths have occurred since New Brunswick Public Health last felt the pandemic was important enough to discuss with the public. 474 people have died of covid in that time. Approximately 39 people in Fredericton. 43 people in Saint John. 49 people in Moncton. The table below shows the estimated Covid-19 death toll in the thirty-five most populated New Brunswick municipalities.
It was not over.
Infection prevalence went from 8% of the population at the end of February 2022 to 85% of the population by the end of the year. Many are on their second, third, or fourth infections.
It was not over.
Hospitalization and death are not the only negative outcomes of covid infection; they are just the only negative outcomes Public Health acknowledges. Over 20 thousand New Brunswickers are now experiencing debilitating long covid symptoms which limit their daily activities.
It was not over.
But not once did Public Health deem it prudent to address the province. Not once did they explain what was happening. Not once did they break the year of silence to correct the disastrous course, to counter the disastrous misinformation, or to stem the disastrous outcomes.
Not once did Public Health attempt to bring the material reality of the ongoing pandemic into the public consciousness. In fact, throughout the silent year, they took active measures to prevent it.
From the Chief Medical Officer of Health fabricating evidence to the suppression of information on the prevalence and severity of long covid to continuing obfuscation of data, it has been a banner year for government negligence.
This silent year has been deafening. It has been disheartening. It has shown the depth of rot in the state, in the culture, and in our own communities. Still, we find hope and resilience one moment at a time, even as the harrowing silence of abandonment continues.
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