A Memorial

This marks a year from the death of George Floyd, in that same year 965 others who were killed at the hands of Police, some known some not. We need to know their names as well.

And with that I will say that Police Reform in some States has moved forward while the federal reform promised has stalled as the issues surrounding the rise of gun violence, crime and physical assaults on people of color and of faith has risen as well, making everyone still angry, still afraid and still looking for answers.

I don’t think anyone in this country reads anything. I have said that my loathing of Millennials leads me to have a cognitive bias towards that Generation as they are very demanding of safe spaces and in mandating change yet few of them seem to have ever read a history book, picked up a newspaper or read a journal that covers said issues in detail. To note I was discussing Feminism and a young millennial declared Camile Paglia, her Feminist idol, (a farce given her views she is not), so when I referred her to an current article about Camille Paglia, who is now Trans and still not a Feminist, (odd) said: “That is a lot of words could you just sum it up for me with the important part.” I refused and said, “Try reading, you may learn something.” Not the first time I have had that discussion with that group, proffering articles and magazines and knowing that they are tossed aside upon my departure. The young man keen on getting into my pants was discussing this very issue of Police reform and I gave him an article from the NYT to review. He never discussed it and then wondered why I was not ever going anywhere with him. Truly what would our convos other than him touching my hair or commenting about me getting laid would we have? Oh yeah the part about what he wants on his sammie after he is done servicing me.

And with that the barometer of how I feel about sex and sexuality is my own and I would never presume, just like my own Atheism, that anyone has to agree with me nor even understand its history, but just treat me with respect and know that I have come to these places with full knowledge and time spent working through it. This folks is what is called “my truth.” And for many all of this is an ongoing learned process through encountering others not like you, reading and more importantly taking the time to do the work. Name me three millennials who do. Yeah, me neither. So the protests for George Floyd, were in my mind for all the thousands who have come before and since.

And with that we now are coming to day 438 of Covid Theater, the drama never ends even as we begin to resume to normal. There will be mass evictions I suspect and despite the demand for employees we are seeing fewer return to the work force by choice due to the low wages and crappy working conditions that existed prior to the pandemic. The exodus from the cities will continue and the debate about a centralized workplace will also be examined as this is not simply a light switch that turns back on. Even Biden is considering making some Government positions to permanently remain off site. Again he never ceases to amaze me each day.

And what about Covid itself, will we ever get the answers and the truth about the virus? Yes and no. We still have quite a large failure on the part of the Trump Administration to acknowledge their failures regarding this among many, don’t look for a January 6th commission anytime soon, so it will largely become a project I suspect for scholars to analyze with regards to the mistakes and severity of it all in decades to come. But the real truth, the origin of the virus itself is coming to light. I early on communicated with a Biology Professor who was sure that it was not Zooinotic and that it was an airborne flu-like virus that was almost random in the way it affected individuals who contracted it and at that point they were unclear as to the length and distance it traveled and remained in air. Since then we have decreased the space between people from 6 to 3 and the time frame was once considered 30 minutes now due to variants sits at 15. The CDC has finally acknowledged it is airborne and admitted well into the pandemic it was not tactile, that asymptomatic transmission is possible and yes folks being outdoors is the least likely way to contract Covid. Poor ventilation, air circulation, veracity of the virus in the host and close, prolonged contact is the source which again months spent on cleaning and other bullshit means, such as temp taking and erecting barriers did nothing to actually STOP THE SPREAD.

There is now clear information coming out that the lab in Wuhan as early as November 2019 had cases of two workers with the same symptomatic illness and in turn hospitalized. This is from Pro Publica’s research and collection of information regarding Covid.

Early in the pandemic, President Donald Trump and some scientists speculated about the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 was created and accidentally released by Chinese virologists doing some sort of research. That hypothesis was quickly and vehemently dismissed by the scientific establishment, which noted that the genetic makeup of the virus showed no signs of human tampering. I encouraged several ProPublica reporters last year to poke around on a slightly different theory: What if the beginnings of the pandemic were the result of a lab accident in which scientists studying the characteristics of coronaviruses inadvertently became infected with a wild virus and spread it to others. Lab leaks are far more common than one might think and have occurred in the U.S. elsewhere. Our reporting turned up some officials who shared that suspicion. But none could offer any direct evidence that it had happened. This situation is among the least favorable arenas for investigative reporting — a debate in which all sides are drawing conclusions from minimal evidence released by a foreign government renowned for its tight control over information. The credibility of the lab leak theory wasn’t helped by the breathless coverage by Trump-supporting media outlets that took as given China’s culpability. We moved on, but, partly based on my experience reporting on germ warfare, I continued to believe that a lab accident was one possibility among many that would explain the pandemic’s origins. In the year since, theories about the virus originating in a lab have gained traction, even among those who initially doubted it. A growing number of scientists feel China was less than transparent in its recent dealings with a visiting World Health Organization team that was attempting to gather evidence on the beginnings of the pandemic. In a May 14 letter to Science magazine, 17 prominent researchers from around the world called on the WHO to look more closely at the lab theory. “We must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have sufficient data,” they wrote. “A proper investigation should be transparent, objective, data-driven, inclusive of broad expertise, subject to independent oversight, and responsibly managed to minimize the impact of conflicts of interest.” Days later, Harvard’s Marc Lipsitch, one of America’s most respected epidemiologists, added his name to the letter. “There just aren’t any answers yet, one way or the other, about how the coronavirus that’s now ravaging the world began,” Lipsitch told WBUR, a Boston radio station. “What we are saying is that the existing evidence has not ruled out a laboratory origin, nor has it ruled out a natural origin. And there’s really no positive evidence, either. It’s just pretty much a lack of evidence right now.” The absence of facts fueled a frenzy of internet speculation, a fair amount of which has focused on the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a government-funded lab. To conspiracy theorists, it cannot have been a coincidence that China happened to be doing research on coronaviruses just a few miles from where the pandemic broke out. The head of the institute, Dr. Shi Zheng-li, reminded me of many of the dedicated scientists I interviewed for the book “Germs.” Press accounts portray her as someone deeply committed to the battle against microbes. After China was hit by the SARS coronavirus in 2003, Shi led teams of researchers into caves to capture and take samples from bats that might be harboring more dangerous strains of the disease. When an inexplicable outbreak of pneumonia struck Wuhan in December 2019, she worried that a coronavirus had somehow escaped her lab. She told Scientific American that she frantically reviewed records about the genetic makeup of her samples. Li said she was enormously relieved when she learned that SARS-CoV-2 was only 96% similar to its nearest relative at the institute — decades of evolution away from a match. “That really took a load off my mind,” she said in her interview with Scientific American. “I had not slept a wink for days.” The Chinese came up with the now well-known theory for the origin of SARS-Cov-2. It began in bats and jumped to an intermediate animal that was sold at a wet market in Wuhan. Questions quickly arose about that narrative. Chinese authorities had destroyed all of the animals at the wet market soon after the outbreak began, and researchers have never been able to identify the intermediary animal that transmitted the virus to humans. Then, the British medical journal The Lancet published a paper that poked another hole in the wet market theory. It reported that nearly one-third of the people initially treated in Wuhan hospitals, 13 of the first 41 patients, had no link to the market or to one another. The uncertainty about the origins of the pandemic have only deepened over the past year. More facts emerged about Shi’s training, including that she worked with scientists who spliced together coronaviruses, creating the same sort of chimera viruses the Soviet germ warriors were experimenting with back in the 1990s. The 2016 paper documenting that research is now a central element in some of the online conspiracy theories. It had what turned out to be a prescient title. “SARS-like” coronaviruses, it warned, were “poised for human emergence.” The likely source? Chinese bats. As ProPublica President Dick Tofel likes to say, investigative reporting always begins with a question, not an answer. On Sunday, The Wall Street Journal quoted U.S. intelligence reports that three members of the Wuhan institute had become sick in November 2019 and required hospital care for unspecified illnesses. The head of the institute, Shi, has said that all of her lab workers tested negative for exposure to SARS-CoV-2, a result some analysts viewed with skepticism given the prevalence of the virus in Wuhan. The history of germ weapons shows that even eminent scientists can misread the evidence. In the early 1980s, Matthew Meselson, a Harvard geneticist and molecular biologist, disproved allegations that Hmong anti-Communists in Laos had been attacked by a mysterious Soviet chemical weapon known as “yellow rain.” Meselson and a colleague’s inquiry showed it was bee feces. On the other hand, Meselson backed the Soviet cover story that an outbreak of anthrax in the town of Sverdlovsk was due to consumption of contaminated meat. It turned out to be an accident at an anthrax factory. After the fall of Communism, Meselson was allowed to investigate in Russia and concluded that it was indeed a leak from a weapons facility. So where does that leave us? As I’ve watched the theories about the pandemic’s origin wax and wane, I believe more strongly than ever that reporters should begin their research agnostic and remain skeptical as new facts come to light. No story is ever really over. Certainly not this one.

We are a long way from ever knowing the full truth behind the origins of the virus and if it was intended to be a biological weapon, but never in the history of the globe has a virus done this much damage to as many countries at a single moment as Covid has.

I was reading Salaman Rushdie in the Post and he said this: We are not the dominant species on the planet by accident. We have great survival skills. And we will survive. But I doubt that a social revolution will follow because of the lessons of the pandemic. But yes, sure, one can hope for betterment, and fight for it, and maybe our children will see — will make — that better world.

To repair the damage done by these people in these times will not be easy. I may not see the wounds mended in my lifetime. It may take a generation or more. The social damage of the pandemic itself, the fear of our old social lives, in bars and restaurants and dance halls and sports stadiums, will take time to heal (although a percentage of people seem to know no fear already). We will hug and kiss again. But will there still be movie theaters? Will there be bookstores? Will we feel okay in crowded subway cars?

The social, cultural, political damage of these years, the deepening of the already deep rifts in society in many parts of the world, including the United States, Britain and India, will take longer. It would not be exaggerating to say that as we stare across those chasms, we have begun to hate the people on the other side. That hatred has been fostered by cynics and it bubbles over in different ways almost every day.

As I wrote in the post Chrysalis, I am not sure as we emerge from our cocoon’s we are able to fully grasp the seriousness of this pandemic and for those who are still afraid they will continue to be. Those who never took it seriously, never will and so on. I am at odds with most people in the best of times so my contrarian nature found myself living my best life during the early days of the pandemic. Perhaps because I was armed with scientific facts and a knowledge of history, and a well developed sense of personal responsibility I thrived. It was only in the waning days of winter with the endless cold that I became despondent, and with that dropped my “No Compromises” mantra to try to make friends with a Millennial! What was I thinking? But today that is behind me and the light is ahead of me. I believe in the power of science but not of medicine as those are two different worlds to me. The Medical Industrial Complex once again proved to me that it is as dangerous and deadly as any virus and that they are staffed and manned by incompetents whose idea of care is charging more and making you believe that you need it. This is one thing that too must change to go forward. But we shall.

Fluing around

I have never waivered in my belief that Covid is a stronger version of the Flu mixed in with Whooping Cough. Flu transmits at a 1:1 ratio with Whooping Cough 1:4. Covid 1:2.5 in other words two or in the cases of high viral loads that can extend to a third. So a family of four, that would be the two adults and one child. And the asshole who exposed me that day confirmed it when he made a pit stop for takeout on the way to testing. Thanks for telling me you had asshole. Well you did a year later.

As I look back on the varying reports and studies I stumbled on this about the Flu and I share it with you. Note the date: July 2020. At that point they were starting to accept the belief that it was aerosols (aka your breath via speaking, singing or even heavy breathing) was a transmission factor over that of droplets… the insane notion that led us to wash down packages. Yes if the person handling them had just coughed or sneezed on it, then tossed it to us and we in turn wiped our faces sure. Or worked in say a lab experimenting with viruses and walked out with some RNA on our shoe and then into say a market and walked into blood and that in turn touched an animal or food product that was then consumed. Sure I see that. I like this explanation of how RNA transmission works. Ever wonder how that bat got out the lab, well he might have been Bat Boy versus Batman. Or maybe they let him out for a walk and he got away!

We will never know the origin of Covid-19 and that debate will go on forever. But understanding the Covid virus should enable you to manage your behavior and in turn alter those that put you at risk if you decide to be the anti vaxxed crowd. The issue at hand is how long the virus lasts in the air and here they put the flu at 3 hours. That seems to be again a vague number as if a room is ventilated, air is circulated that may lessen how long it lingers and as Covid is so similar that then Covid is now top 10 on the list of fuck all viruses. To put in into perspective, Measles lingers for 2-3 hours. This is when I go FUCK! But that may explain the tear through Nursing Homes, Meatpacking plants and of course Hospitals. But again this is the issue of viral load and that first 72 hours I again believe is when one sheds the virus. For adults I think it is higher and for children it again is like the Flu, a load of 1:1. So many people don’t think Children get it, they do and they were not tested nor treated in hospitals only the kids who had the random serious kind. Again folks less than 10% of all Covid POS people went to the hospital and they almost all had a preexisting condition – from smoking to being overweight.

So expect another uptick in POS tests post Memorial Day as the two twains shall meet. The anti and the pro vaxxer and there will be some crossover as the variants and the sheer lack of coverage by the J&J folk. Good luck and have fun on that picnic.

The Flu May Linger in the Air, Just Like the Coronavirus

As scientists race to understand how coronavirus aerosols may spread indoors, a new study on influenza offers some clues.

The New York Times July 14, 2020 By Katherine Wu

The coronavirus is not the flu. But the two viruses have something crucial in common: Both have been described as spreading primarily through close contact with symptomatic people or the surfaces they’ve touched.

Mounting evidence may be starting to turn the tide on that message. Last week, the World Health Organization modified its stance on coronavirus transmission, acknowledging that the virus may also hop from person to person by lingering in the air, trapped inside tiny aerosols that can traverse the length of room.

A wealth of evidence has shown the same is true of flu viruses, which also attack cells in the human airway. Researchers have even isolated infectious flu viruses from exhaled breath. But examining the relative contributions of different modes of transmission — whether through contaminated surfaces; tiny aerosols; or large, liquid-laden droplets expelled by coughs or sneezes — remains a daunting task for experts in the field.

“We’ve been studying the flu for 102 years and still don’t know for sure how it’s transmitted,” said Dr. Don Milton, an environmental health researcher and aerosol transmission expert at the University of Maryland.

A new study from Dr. Milton and his team, published Monday in PLoS Pathogens, contains some of the latest data supporting an aerosol route for the flu. The researchers deliberately infected 52 volunteers with a strain of influenza, a setup called a human challenge trial. They then had these “donors” mix and socialize with 75 healthy “recipients” for four days to test how often the virus got passed to others.

Under these conditions, Dr. Milton and his colleagues expected the virus to spread to several of the recipients. That was certainly the case when his colleagues, also authors on the new paper, ran a pilot study in another group of volunteers under similar conditions in 2009: After just two days of bunking up, about 8 percent of the recipients were infected.

In this new experiment, the researchers doubled the number of days the study participants were allowed to mingle. But they found only one new case of flu among the 75 volunteers who hadn’t been intentionally dosed with the virus — an infection rate of just 1.3 percent.

The biggest difference between the two experiments, Dr. Milton said, was their backdrop. In its first iteration, the study took place in poorly ventilated hotel rooms; in its second, the researchers housed their participants in a research facility with much improved air flow. In the new study, “we had at least seven times more ventilation per person,” he said.

A multitude of factors, such as past exposures to infection, can influence a person’s vulnerability to a virus. But “the fact that they only had one transmission event, compared to what the pilot study suggested, indicates that ventilation is important,” said Linsey Marr, an aerosols expert at Virginia Tech who wasn’t involved in the study.

Editors’ Picks

While good ventilation can dilute aerosols, it is far less effective against droplets, which are much wider and heavier — in the same way that a passing breeze would perturb the trajectory of a Ping-Pong ball, but not a cannonball.The Coronavirus Outbreak ›

The study points to a more “important role” for aerosolized flu transmission than some might assume, Dr. Marr said.

Determining the exact size of that role, however, is another matter entirely. “It’s very hard to conduct these human challenge studies and separate the different modes of transmission,” Dr. Marr said. That problem applies across respiratory viruses, including the coronavirus.

Part of the problem is the continuum on which aerosols and droplets exist. Though they go by different names, the two categories really belong to the same group: globs of fluid that come in varying sizes. Blobs less than five micrometers in diameter are termed aerosols, which can exit the airway at the slightest breath and waft away; anything larger is a droplet, hefty enough to fall to the ground within a few feet of its source. The boundary between them is somewhat arbitrary, though generally speaking, the smaller the particle, the farther it travels.

When people expel fluid from their airway, it tends to manifest in a mixture, some bigger, some smaller and everything in between, said Seema Lakdawala, who studies influenza transmission at the University of Pittsburgh.

Even after they exit an individual, these fluidic blobs remain dynamic. Large droplets, for instance, can disperse or evaporate into little aerosols in midair. Others might scatter onto a surface or a hand, lingering for minutes or hours before encountering someone new. And the rates at which all these events occur can shift, depending on the force with which someone, maybe a loud talker, expels these droplets or the amount of air flow in an area, Dr. Lakdawala said.

“Everyone thinks transmission is a very binary concept,” she added. “The reality is that there is a continuum of aerosols.”

Still, researchers have come up with some truly innovative experiments to investigate transmission for certain viruses in the past, Dr. Marr said.

In the 1980s, researchers in Wisconsin dosed a group of male volunteers with rhinovirus, which causes the common cold, and sat them down for 12 hours of poker with their healthy counterparts. Some of the recipients, who were susceptible to new infections, were given large, plastic collars or arm restraints that kept them from touching their faces. In this setting, aerosols and droplets were likely to have been the most feasible route of transmission, Dr. Marr said. Though the study was small, its participants seemed to be infected at similar rates, regardless of whether they’d been restrained.

That experiment probably couldn’t be conducted today, Dr. Marr said. But perhaps a variant of it could help tease out some of the dynamics of flu or coronavirus transmission.

These studies grow more pressing as researchers home in on how long the coronavirus can persist while adrift in the air. In March, a study in the New England Journal of Medicine suggested that, under ideal laboratory conditions, the virus remained viable for up to three hours in aerosols; a more recent study, led by Chad Roy of Tulane University, found the germ’s longevity might be even more impressive.

There’s still a long way to go before scientists fully understand exactly how and when the coronavirus most easily spreads, Dr. Marr said. But recent events appear to have breathed new life into the study of aerosol transmission.

“I’ve been studying this for more than a decade,” she said. “In the last four months, I’ve seen a greater willingness to consider the importance of aerosols than I’ve seen in the last 12 years.”

Haste Makes Waste

The decision to do this lockdown/quarantine was done without thought, careful planning and analysis and largely some half assed duplication of Wuhan that is a city within an oppressive country that in its own way mishandled and was somewhat deceptive as to the extent of the virus spread and danger to the larger world’s health. In turn WHO failed to grasp the demands of what this meant despite a history of similar virus outbreaks in the last decade, H1N1, SARS, Zika and of course Ebola.  There were already vaccines in development and tossed aside a decade ago as not profitable and of course then we have the United States own issues with bureaucracy, the CDC and the Trump Administration that I will go to the grave believing that they saw this as a great opportunity for political gain, not fully grasping the reality of what this virus was and its aggressive persistence.  So in the haste to figure this shit out the lack of centralized competent professionals and guidance the States had to rely on their own to contain the spread and manage the chaos from the demands it would cause on the health system.  So whoever came up with the lockdown was the person who saw this in Wuhan and said, you do it too.  There was no debate, no discussion and no actual analysis done to show how this would work, for how long it would need to be done and what that it would do to the bigger picture across the board.   And lockdown it was. The histrionic daily broadcast with the lottery readings were done to somehow raise fear and encourage compliance, no Scientists were working in tandem in fact many of the models used were competing if not contradictory further adding to the confusion. Then we have the contradictions and confusion by the White House and the two Doctors whose handprints are all over some of the most egregious decisions that enabled further chaos.

Many did not agree and they were dismissed as contrarians, curmudgeons or crazy as each day another restriction, another executive order, another retraction, contradiction were added to the never ending list.  No mask, mask, no parks, open parks, curfew, no curfew, cut bus transport and then cut the amount allowed, testing, tracking and tracing, only limited to those who met a narrow criteria to then opening the floodgates to have testing.  Then the stage phased opening that was quickly retracted when other states started to have case count rises. Schools open then not and on and on and on.

I never understood any of it.  I took the personal responsibility plan which was keep the fuck out of closed in spaces, wear gloves when out (it stops you from touching your face as a great reminder), wearing masks, limiting time in grocery stores, public transport and monitoring my health daily.  As for washing hands I always did so why did I need to do it more often and longer, who knows but it is about personal hygiene that I suspect has long been an issue and is why we have had many food borne illness outbreaks of late.  Again we are nasty filthy people clearly.

But shutting doors, designating businesses as essential or not, with little planning or involvement as to why and finding alternative ways for these businesses to remain open or coming up with everything from what we currently have, curbside delivery to appointments with limited entry numbers.  This would have enabled many small vendors to accommodate this and in turn make the decisions themselves what they should and could do.  But nope the reality was this was about the lack of available testing, no clear plan for the long haul and of course the crush of hospital patients so they took over conference centers, brought in ships and tents and simply setting up a centralized communication and access to patient data and needs to move those in critical care to those not in need  to one facility over another never happened.  The lack of clear organization and well established channels to track and trace the origin of the virus spread further leant to the confusion and does to this day.   Not one Governor or Mayor clearly communicated with each other and in the case of New York literally negated each other, personal vendettas, scores and other issues were settled over the lack of actual facts and numbers plagued (pun intended) state after state with many health care leaders of States since leaving their jobs at the same rate and level as Police Chiefs.

We have no real idea of the true numbers of Covid patients, deaths and of course overall Covid positivity in any community.  We only know of them if they are tested, if they are in turn treated and the overall outcome if it is death. We have no way of knowing if they contracted the disease, from whom, how long from exposure to actually displaying symptoms to how long they carried the virus from day one to day 14.  As that seems to be the time frame but that has little to do with those who don’t have the virus and why they would quarantine for any time frame other than 72 hours when they should be tested to see if they are in fact positive but asymptomatic.  The reality being that if they are pos and then the average run is 14 days that would mean in actuality only 11 days of quarantine following that as that includes the three days prior.  But nope the endless cycle of news had one day it was waiting in a bush to catch you, another in lurked inside for hours to it can travel 16 feet. It is one fucking amazing virus.  It is blood borne, aka in the body fluids and transmits like a virus in the air under close contact where air droplets or breath are extensively exchanged for a long period. That was 30 minutes it now seems to have been cut in half with no reasoning or explanation as to why.  Now we have the single case in Hong Kong of one who has contracted Covid again.  This should be fun as the daily does it or doesn’t it game the media played for months announcing cures, treatments, histrionic fear stories.  Yes we are heading into the second wave.

I am not bothering to discuss the endless “cures” and “treatments” as that list is endless, but again the excessive need to ventilate was a panic button switch that likely ended lives sooner than necessary and that the medical community has admitted; Yet,  I have read of lung transplants and of course other drugs and treatments that have led to serious issues as having to lose limbs in which to survive that course of action.   Really are you using these people as guinea pigs as that it was it seems.   So far no single orderly process and protocol has been established so this is just throw the shit against the wall see what sticks plan.  The long term issues and problems from the health industries sheer idiocy and panic mode will lead to many many more significant health problems for decades to come. Never underestimate the incompetency of the medical industrial complex.

But what is the most egregious of it all was the sheer idiocy of the local Governments both States and Municipalities to do this shit on their own with their own posse of morons who have since left their jobs and in their wake a mass of shit.  The Wall Street Journal did an excellent article about this issue that closing it all down, not actually attempting to find a structured way of quarantining the most at risk, being aggressive with testing ALL those in work places that were the essential front liners regardless of them being in China, knowing someone in China, touching China or even eating Chinese food would have been the first thing to do. By limiting the access to testing you opened the door to spreading the virus as it did untethered and unbothered by the man made caveats to finding the disease.  The lack of coordination between the private and public sector to come up with a manageable plan regarding their workforce and how to stop or reduce the spread by altering commute times, RIFF’s that would be covered by Unemployment while trying to again to reduce pressure on public transportation and means of travel that contribute to the spread.  Immediately stopping mass gatherings but allowing facilities to cut their occupancy rates to allow them to remain functioning but with clear mandates and enabling them to work on ventilation and other issues relating to spreading a virus, such as hygiene theater and mask requirements.  And of course rapid testing.  Funny how that with months closed that no one tried a temporary school concept during this time, such as staggered days, offsite learning and  the other ways mentioned above to educate the kids, but nope, wait til the start of the school year to fuck that one up.

One of the many issues the Journal discusses is how the lockdown was an overtly blunt and economically costly too.. They are near to impossible to do long enough to actually stamp out a virus and in turn the confusion about what ultimately it was to accomplish. The words “mitigation” “suppression” and “containment” were used interchangeably and in fact they are all three different concepts.  The favorite was and still is “flatten the curve” and that really only applied to hospitals and their admissions not the virus spread itself.  If you were to lockdown the country to actually mitigate a virus we would still very much be in Stage 1 right now.  But as we have seen across the country the bending, and flattening has been largely non-existent if not impossible.  And despite the rise in numbers in California a slight decline has begun by simply limiting public gatherings and indoor contacts.    Surgeries and other “non essential” health care has resumed and of course the mask mandate has been in existence now since July.  Funny that being outdoors rather than indoors the current state of health and human services director of California, Dr. Ghaly,  has noted. And he and other epidemiologists and economists have also noted this, as we all have learned a great deal since April which was a month into lockdown.  You know like discouraging masks and yet here were are finding out just how effective they are. So it is now these esteemed intellects  are now realizing that and perhaps it was not a necessary to close and cease all business.  So this proves that in fact had they had time to actually look to other countries and discuss with them their plans, Iceland, New Zealand, South Korea, the United States might be in better shape.  But nope the idea of States doing this on their own may in fact  have lead to more deaths, rising hospitalizations and of course a shattered economy.  Good plan.

To quote James Stock, a Harvard University economist who, with a Harvard epidimiologist, Michael Mina, realized that you can avoid a surge in deaths without a deeply damaging lockdown by simply being disciplined.  Simple policy mandates, simple communication and coordination and yes clear leadership would have offset much of this.  But nope we had to play Good Trump Bad Trump. Again I believe that while Trump is inept much of his staff and the CDC are equally inept and our local Governments are not much better they just play better on TV.   This lockdown bullshit was never part of the pandemic playbook and it was not used in the 1918-19 flu epidemic nor in the one in 1957. It was copied from the Communist playbook, hmm interesting. And even when Italy did it there were few in the European Union that agreed with that and it was only again until the modeling capabilities of another player, the Oxford University, further elevated the fear factor in Britain did Johnson then go into lockdown; however, he had handled it in the beginning like Trump so this is not surprising and his medical committee is one that is secretive in the best of times making Igor and the Bride seem  chatty and honest.  Uh those two are about as ethical as the rest of their community of pols.  We should, coulda, followed SE Asia but the CDC botched the testing kits, the rollout and as a result limited the testing and countless infections went undetected for months.  So we pay the price.  And while we trashed or tried to with regards to Sweden, their death mortality rate rose as it would with a highly infectious disease but not to the point requiring the lockdown and in turn their economy is less damaged. Shocking, I know. Not really. And their current death rates and infections are on par with the rest of Europe so while herd immunity may have been an ideal they were willing to comply and cooperate with a change of behavior. Again that requires a massive amounts of personal discipline.  That is not America nor Americans in the least.  But we are paranoid motherfuckers that much is certain. Just watching the RNC proves my point, scared shitless of black people but a killer virus fuck that we got this. Yeah ask Herman Cain about that.

Head Scratcher

If I am having a cocktail I may watch portions of the Trumpaganda talks on the nightly news but most often I do not.  There is not a time during any of it I scratch my head and think, “What if I have head lice? Who will treat it and will it infect my home that I clean 10 times a day?”  Then I take a drink.  I am now a raging alcoholic which may also be another problem to treat along with the OCD and my mental health break I plan on taking.

Let’s first examine how this shit happened:

First:  The CDC and the Trump fuckwits failed to do their duty in a timely and effective manner.

Second:   Jared Kushner and his shadow cabinet.

Third:  Endless Trump fuckups, here and here and here again.  Or how about Dr. Trump. Or just Baby Trump.

Fourth:  Airlines that want bailout money also did not help with this.

Lastly: The big fucking Kahuna!  Nearly half a million flew here post Wuhan even after restrictions were set in place. See above as to how that and why that happened.

The bulk of the passengers, who were of multiple nationalities, arrived in January, at airports in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Seattle, Newark and Detroit. Thousands of them flew directly from Wuhan, the center of the coronavirus outbreak, as American public health officials were only beginning to assess the risks to the United States.

Now look at those cities and see a pattern emerging?  I do and I am an idiot okay not that but I am losing my mind.

Flights continued this past week, the data show, with passengers traveling from Beijing to Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, under rules that exempt Americans and some others from the clampdown that took effect on Feb. 2. In all, 279 flights from China have arrived in the United States since then, and screening procedures have been uneven, interviews show.as many as 25 percent of people infected with the virus may never show symptoms. Many infectious-disease experts suspect that the virus had been spreading undetected for weeks after the first American case was confirmed, in Washington State, on Jan. 20, and that it had continued to be introduced. In fact, no one knows when the virus first arrived in the United States.

Okay so now the paranoia will spread faster than the virus and when I theorized that civil unrest would be the next phase directed this time to those of Asian descent, well this should do it.

 About 60 percent of travelers on direct flights from China in February were not American citizens, according to the most recently available government data. Most of the flights were operated by Chinese airlines after American carriers halted theirs. 

I think this is when the idiots who kept telling me to SHUT IT DOWN might apply it to this.

Now instead of directing their ire at Crazy Dopy Grandpa and his ship of fools that a vessel right now docked off Pennsylvania Avenue which is clearly infected with some kind of crazy, the Trumptards will of course misdirect their anger to the people of Asian descent.   Statues are so 2019 and this is a new decade bitches and this hate has to find a new home.

Again we are all under house arrest regardless of our health. Some of us me by carriers, some of us may be utterly immune and in turn have no way of knowing. The insanity of this as we come out of it in June we will have about three months before its time for what? FLU SEASON.  Oh this is fucking priceless.  As by then we will not have a proven vaccine and the hysteria of trying to get said annual shot (which I do regardless as every year that shot is based on the prior years outbreak so its basically kinds sorta useless, but hey) will become a money maker as we fight for it like toilet paper.  Then we start again with the protocol which means for me, gloves and mask on pubic transport, hand sanitizer and the rest,  as I learned from school kids that I don’t want their shit and now I really don’t so yay for me on that social and physical distancing.  I cannot believe how that will allow me to work and not ever have to have any contact other than writing the shit on the board and not speaking! PRAISE BE on this Palm Sunday!

I bet all the terminated and staff that quick the Trumpland ship of fools look back not in anger but relief.  Now I have to have a drink its been too long.