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I was in Oaxaca, Mexico for 3 months when "the news" started to focus on Coronavirus - first the ravages in Italy, then in Spain.
There was no doubt this novel virus was real, unlike Malignant Messiah's disdainful reference to a "hoax" that could be ignored. "It will go away just like a miracle."
At the same time, I felt from the beginning -- and wrote about my feelings several times -- that the press was overplaying the threat.
It is, after all, the nature of the press to "sell newspapers" and, as you know, sensationalism sells.
"If it bleeds, it leads."
That's just "the way of the world," and we can't complain much.
It is also true that at the beginning of any "mysterious unfolding" (such as a disease of unknown origin and unknown virulence) fogginess prevails while the facts get sorted out slowly - never an easy task.
Before long, it became clear that among septuagenarians and octogenarians, the death rate for COVID sufferers was about 7.5%. (These odds are half as deadly as Russian Roulette. Would you play Russian Roulette if there were twelve barrels in the revolver instead of six? I didn't think so.)
At 73 years of age I am in the half-as-deadly-as-Russian-
About one in seven Americans are in this age group.
And many of us elders - at least those who can afford prolonged self-quarantine - are pretty much staying at home, having very little to do with the outside world.
We do not stay at home because "the authorities" are forcing us to - depriving us of our liberty.
We stay at home because we have observed that those of us who do stay at home rarely get sick, and therefore, rarely die.
When we quarantine in our own freestanding homes (as opposed to those who are confined to elder care facilities with scores of staff people coming-and-going everyday), we know that we will be safe.
And the nearly complete protection afforded by SELF-quarantining is a hell of a lot better than playing a new variation of Russian Roulette.
You can determine these same facts on your own.
Ask all the "self-quarantining" older people you know if they know anyone who has died from COVID, and the chances are very good they don't. (I happen to know one person who died of COVID but he was a nursing home resident.)
However, if you just "go to the other side of the tracks" where people can't afford prolonged quarantine, lots of people know someone who has died.
Probably more than one.
Send one of your reporters to investigate this story.
*****
It seems to me that Christian conservatives are increasingly prone to treat death (particularly the "death of others") cavalierly.
This may relate to the "end time" sentiment that "whispers" we're about to die anyway.
But whatever the origin of this disdainful --- almost taunting --- attitude toward death, it is crazy, just plain crazy, to see so many white Trump supporters go ballistic because they have to wear a mask.
C'mon snowflakes, surgeons wear masks half of their waking hours, decade after decade... and y'all can't wear a mask for the hour or two a day you're in grocery stores or other public places.
It's crazy.
Just plain crazy.
I conduct a twice weekly Zoom Spanish class, and last month I posed a question to my mostly septuagenarian students: "When we were growing up in the 1960s, what percentage of people do you think would have disobeyed public health (and political) authorities calls to wear masks to prevent the spread of communicable disease.
And all of us, myself included, agreed that disobedience would have been unthinkable: there would have been complete compliance - every man, woman and child.
And that was back when EVERYONE agreed that "America was great."
Disobedient "death flirtation" by so many white Christian conservatives is one of many reasons I do not admire conservative Christianity which impresses me as unusually selfish, right down to its obsessive desire for personal salvation. According to the "received wisdom" everyone else can bloody well fend for themselves.
I see these people who refuse to wear masks as latter-day snake handlers, proudly defying death by taunting it. In my view, there is something selfish, egotistical and "hot dog show-offy" about such behavior.
We know, as a matter of fact that older people who stay relatively isolated in their own homes do not contract COVID.
They just don't.
Contagion is function of close physical proximity.
Nevertheless, to this day I think (although I cannot be certain) that the danger of COVID-19 has been overplayed.
But in any event, it is a huge threat that has already killed 200,000 Americans (and counting) and those who spread the disease by refusing to wear masks or just by "going out" whenever they feel like it, make a statistical contribution to the death of people who would not have been infected if people had maintained social distance, minimized "out and about time," worn masks and washed their hands frequently.
Again we know that such isolation prevents contagion in those senior citizens who stay home and have little-to-no contact with the outside world.
It's about contact, and although we can debate the efficacy of masks, it is a fact - plain as potatoes - that masks are a kind of "portable quarantine."
It is also a fact that we have 4% of the world's population and 25% of the world's COVID cases. https://www.cnn.com/
In any event, when people remain in isolation, there is little-to-no COVID transmission, and for us older people that means we don't have to play modified Russian Roulette.
Meanwhile the anti-maskers -- soon to become anti-vaxxers ? -- deliberately invade the protective isolation of others, and in some statistically measurable way, they contribute to "negligent homicide."
Tell me.
Do you wear a mask?
Do you keep more socially distant than before?
Do you wash your hands more often?
Will you get vaccinated?
Even if we accept the "dry tinder" rationale, the number of COVID dead in the United States is about five times the amount of "tinder" that was lying around from last year's mild flu season.
This is a huge fact contradicting a fundament of the Irishman's argument.
Sure, there was tinder to burn.
And after it was all burned there was conflagration of COVID fatalities which continues to this day and is showing signs of a second wave.
DATUM: "About 5% to 20% of Americans get the flu each year. More than 200,000 people are hospitalized, according to the CDC. And since the 1970s, between 3,000 and 49,000 people have died from the flu each year. This is largely due to other infections and complications that can occur when you have the flu, particularly pneumonia." WebM.D.
And so, let's say that the average number of fatalities due to seasonal flu is 25,000.
Already, eight (8) times more Americans have died from COVID.
Left over "tinder" from last year's unusually low influenza death rate? I don't think so.
COVID is real.
And it's a Big Deal.
And we still don't know where the death toll will end up. Or if there'll be a second -- and possibly worse -- wave.
For perspective, about 38,800 Americans died last year in car crashes.
Through desensitization, lack of compassion, or even fondness for cruelty (an increasingly common trait in Trump's America) we can "blow off" anything.
But I will bet dollars-to-donuts you wear a seat belt every time you get in a car even though six times as many Americans have already died from COVID -- in six months -- as died in car wrecks all last year.
As for the assertion that prophylactic measures had no effect, it is certainly true in most states -- the majority of them "red" states -- that fewer people have died because there are relatively fewer Big Cities in "red" states and the rest of the population is more spread out too, a kind of circumstantially enforced social distancing.
"Do the math" Elaine.
If entire communities obey the rules of "hard lockdown" and pretty much remain in quarantine -- and when they do "go out" they wear masks and maintain social distancing, there will be far less risk of infection just as there has been little incidence and minuscule mortality in China, Vietnam, South Korea and New Zealand.
Strict quarantine works (and it's almost certainly less damaging to the economy than no enforcement, little enforcement or sloppy, careless social behavior.
The economies of the China, Vietnam, South Korea and New Zealand are doing just fine thank you.
Concerning the Irishman's statistics...
It is no secret that statistics can be massaged, and notably, the data sets the narrator cherry picks do not focus the near absence of infection in China and other countries that have been very strict for very short periods of time. And these "safe" countries taken together comprise about 20% of humanity.
It can be done. People can be protected and economies can flourish.
It's just that Trump doesn't choose to do it.
I predict we will look back on the Irishman's presentation the same way we look back on hydroxychloroquine just two months after every conservative in America was extolling its praises as if Jesus had returned.
Now, it's nothing.
Nothing. Nada. Niente. Nihil. Nichts. Zilch.
***
Speaking of "data massage..."
Remember.
I can prove -- in the following paragraph -- that NO projectile EVER hits its target.
Let's say that an archer shoots an arrow...
First that arrow traverses half the distance to its target.
And then that same arrow traverses half the remaining distance to its target. Etcetera.
Ad infinitum.
And since the remaining distance can always be subdivided by half, the arrow NEVER reaches its target.
Sophistry, data massage and rhetorical tricks aside, what we do know about coronavirus is that the (equivalent) population of my birth city, Rochester, New York, has been wiped out by COVID.
In six months.
210,000 Americans are dead.
And the number is rising.
There may be a second wave.
But the intractable fact remains that those countries which invoked rigid prophylactic measures -- Vietnam, South Korea, China and New Zealand among them -- have experienced astonishingly few deaths.
Furthermore, the video you sent paid NO attention -- ZERO -- to the nasty chronic effects of COVID infection.
Here is Mayo Clinic's summary of those effects. https://www.
It remains to be seen how many hearts, lungs and metabolic systems have been permanently damaged by this disease.
But back to national demographics...
Israel -- with a very right-wing government and one of the most scientifically-trained populations on earth -- just ordered its second hard lockdown.
How can it be that in a country where NO ONE claims subversion by a "Deep State," the right-wingers who "run the show" just invoked a SECOND hard lockdown.
Netanyahu and Trump are two peas in a pod but Bibi invokes a SECOND hard lockdown.
I will also note that the narrator of the Irish documentary made no mention of that fact that Sweden's actual incidence and mortality rates are nowhere near as good as they first appeared, which only goes to show that statisticians can always cherry pick data that supports their view.
Here is a week old update on the situation in Sweden. https://www.forbes.
***
Returning to my belief that the threat of COVID has perhaps been overblown...
Since we humans are endowed with a fundamental urge to feel "safe," it is not surprising that when facing a new, unknown pathogen -- a pathogen of unknown virulence -- that extraordinary measures are taken to "play it side."
And this is true on both sides of the aisle.
It's just that conservatives and liberals feel threatened by different things.
Finally, the Irish narrator of the COVID video you sent disproves his own theory.
All by himself.
Near the end of the documentary, the narrator says that if it wasn't for public health authorities imposing prophylaxis measures that prevented "community immunity" from "taking hold," we might already have "community immunity."
So there you have it, plain as day.
The narrator admits that public health prevention measures WORK.
In fact, by his own admission, they worked well enough to prevent the MASSIVE INFECTION RATE that's needed for herd immunity to "kick in."
And even on the remote chance that there would be community immunity if we took NO public health measures, the FACT is (as our president tells) that there will be an effective vaccine with the next few months.
And now, we will have opportunity to see whether all the conservative anti-vaxxers get the vaccine or if -- in their benightedness -- they will insist on killing off a significant percentage of themselves and their children
What do you think?
I think conservatives ignore well-trained knowledgeable elitists, preferring to believe in some simple homespun solutions, which - as happened with the hyping of hydroxychloroquine as a cure, just don't "pan out."
This preference for homespun "wives tales" over "scientific knowledge" is intimately bound to the twin templates of "the invisible hand of the marketplace" and widespread Christian belief in (and preference for) "miracles" over "science."
All humans have to do (at least until a "spot" shows up on YOUR lung x-ray) is to get out of the way and let the power of the unregulated marketplace -- and the power of God -- take over and "work its magic."
The trouble is, there's nothing magical about 220,000 Americans who died of COVID-19 with countless thousands more "on the way."
"The Invisible Hand Of The Marketplace" and the dependability of God to protect us from COVID and to make the affliction "go away" miraculously" are mostly wishful thinking.
It requires a trained, intellectually elite, surgeon to cut out the spot on your lung, just as it requires "regulated capitalism" to provide good healthcare for all Americans just as European countries provide good healthcare for all its citizens.
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