FEAR AND LOATHING IN AMERICA
There is dread and fear all around us.
Some of it is because of the unknown, what we don’t know, or aren’t sure we can believe that’s claimed to be known.
A lot of it is the chaos we are confronting that’s always been there just beyond our normal work a day patterns, giving us all a sense of security, and now it’s revealed for the chaos that lurks behind what we cherish.
Our customs and habits no longer hold.
A society somewhat out of balance on a political basis suffers another body blow.
We are confronting a microscopic enemy.
The outcome is uncertain for many.
It’s a form of roulette whether one contracts this foreign body transmitted by another person or not.
The name of our invisible invader is the Coronavirus.
There is hardly a person on the entire planet that has not read, heard or feared this invader or does not know it by its name.
It arrived in the final days of December 2019, a new virus, a variant of earlier scourges, with pneumonia-like symptoms, originating in Wuhan, China, and it spread like wildfire, progressing geometrically from one person to the next especially in densely packed communities.
It’s a virus that originates in animals, and jumps species to us humans like the SARS outbreak in 2002 and the MERS outbreak in 2012.
Of course, some think China revealed data that understated the crisis, when it alerted the World Health Organization (WHO), and, it’s suspected, alerted not soon enough.
But we are past the moment of casting blame.
We are in a crisis.
There is time to assign blame when this is over, whenever it’s over.
The official name of the virus is COVID-19.
Co for corona, Vi for virus, D for disease, and 19 for the year the disease emerged.
The virus gets to any one of us from another by droplets that are transmitted by coughing or sneezing.
This is most easily accomplished where people are in a small community and interacting all the time.
The droplets enter your nose, eyes or mouth.
They take root in the back of your nasal passages and in the mucous membranes.
You may have seen images of the spiked proteins that hook onto your cells and then, this is the bad part, find their way into the cell.
The virus takes over the cell, and breaks out of that cell and into other adjoining cells.
It starts in the back of the throat, crawls down the bronchial tubes, inflames and damages our lung sacks.
The authority describing how this works is Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University Center.
If the lungs fill with liquid, there is a range of unfavorable outcomes from painful to death.
If the virus takes over and damages the sacs that hold our air and the oxygen we need, we may not get the oxygen in our blood, or dispose of the carbon dioxide we normally “exhale.”
CT scans can reveal ground glass opacities but not early on in the disease.
In truth, not enough is yet known about this virus.
We are in a world-wide pandemic — declared by the World Health Organization — originating in China, and spread to South Korea, Italy, Iran and the United States.
The New York Times this past Friday published a report that revealed the CDC had run scenarios of the spread of the virus that found, in the worst case scenario, anywhere from 160 million to 214 million people could be infected. Hundreds of thousands even more than a million could die.
The trick is what we do to reduce the risk that makes the worst case scenario a reality.
According to the Times, Lauren Gardner, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering, said, “When people change their behavior … those model parameters are no longer applicable …there’s a lot of room for improvement if we act appropriately.”
So, it is up to us and there are things we must do to give us all room.
Rough statistics, we are told, of those who may get the virus, from various sources, indicate 80% of those infected will have mild symptoms. 20% are going to be worse. That’s 1 out of 5 persons. And 2–3% of that 20% may be fatal depending on age, and pre-existing health conditions.
Mr. Trump announced somewhat belatedly that this is a national emergency — after the bottom fell out of the stock exchange, and the market hit lows not seen since 1987, so bad that a recession may be imminent. He instituted a travel ban. He has been associated with persons who have been infected but he was only tested himself this past Friday.
This virus has delayed the Louisiana democratic primary, because we don’t want crowds increasing the chances of spreading the virus.
We have closed out the Boston marathon, as well as schools, colleges, sporting events, senior centers, the upcoming St. Patty’s Day parade in Boston, Disneyland and Disneyworld, and you can be sure there’s more to come, whatever meeting you were going to attend today or this week.
Travel on trains and planes is way down.
When I went to visit a client at jail, they wouldn’t allow the visit because of the pandemic.
At present, I’m due in court Tuesday morning.
Will that be canceled?
Should it be canceled?
Our best defense appears to be isolation, don’t touch others, don’t sneeze or cough, keep your distance, think 6 feet, wipe everything down with alcohol, drink a lot of water, it can wash the mucous into your stomach, one physician insists, stay away from those who are ill, don’t travel if you don’t have to travel, stay away from crowds, from public gatherings.
There have been false signals from the politicians.
For example, the WHO declares a pandemic and Trump says he’s going to have rallies, and shakes hands with persons who are now in quarantines. He first said it was like the common flu. But there’s not much common with the common flu.
Trump disses the Dems for conforming with a Governor’s request the Dems not have a rally, and then, at last, cancels his own rallies.
Trump exhibits this bravado like he knows something we don’t, and that he should perhaps have gone into medicine.
The statement has to prompt a reaction that Our Chief Exec is not up to the task.
Mayor Pete Buttigieg made a point about the importance of having a President who knows what he’s doing and that we can see the nation doesn’t run on automatic pilot; it needs someone at the controls.
While there can be carriers of the virus who are not affected, the experts tell us that the epidemic does not get transmitted by asymptomatic carriers.
A sick person can transmit to an average of 1.5 to 3 people.
Of course, this is an estimate.
On FB we are discovering, as I write this, that persons in our County have the virus but they have not been identified in our county stats; that’s troubling.
The community reaction is akin to hysteria in some cases — and that’s in part because, in the US, we’ve been slow to the fight, and we are getting conflicting and inaccurate information.
The nearby grocery store had bare shelves where shoppers cleaned out certain supplies — particularly toilet paper.
Coming out of the gym, one man said don’t go near Costco, the place is jam packed.
Why don’t we have a handle on this virus?
For one thing, we don’t have enough test kits to confirm one has the virus or not.
Worse, we don’t have enough kits to determine how the disease is penetrating into our communities.
We need the more general information to study how it spreads.
We can’t ignore HIPPA but it would be helpful to conduct random tests with people who waived any objection — if they were willing.
We can’t draw conclusions if we don’t have data, sufficient samples.
I have a Masters degree in Information Science and the simplest expression of the discipline is that we collect data, so that we can obtain information from the data, and knowledge from the information.
If the data points we have are few, and dispersed across a nation, say it’s only 11,000 tests, the data is miniscule, anorexic to the task at hand, that is, in order to draw conclusions more generally, then we have to find a way to collect more data and quickly.
We have circulated a total of 11,000 test kits total since the first virus alarm, while South Korea is using 10,000 kits a day.
In South Korea, there are drive-through kiosks, hospitals, local clinics, hundreds of sites through the country and the tests are largely free.
Two weeks after South Korea reported its first case, on February 4th, the government approved Seoul-based Kogene Biotech to move ahead with test kits.
Whatever happened to the can-do nation that put several men on the moon?
The lag in supplying test kits in the States is not defensible, but Mr. Trump has said, he doesn’t take responsibility for the failure to supply the needed kits.
If not Trump, who then?
Of course, a fair suspicion is that some in the Administration including Trump may wish not to know the truth, to minimize the full extent of this outbreak so, when it passes, whenever that is, if we haven’t collected the information to tell us for certain, the real scope of this world wide virus tsunami, then the Administration can say it really was not that bad.
How ridiculous a tactic, if that’s what this is about, when you consider, we are seeing this happening world wide and to people only one or several separations from ourselves.
And not knowing the data only improves the chances of a worse outcome.
Many workers are staying at home, to be safe, to take care of family, but they are not being paid, they have no sick leave, and they are not paid when they don’t work.
In addition, when one needs to have a test unlike South Korea where the test is likely free, the patient may not have the insurance or even the funds for the co-pay for the test.
Mr. Trump and the Republican Caucus was prepared to bail out Wall Street but recoiled from helping workers protect themselves.
Former VP Biden underscored our nation’s failures to act and urged the nation to listen to medical experts and to follow the science.
After his speech, there was some positive action and agreement among the political parties in Congress.
From late Friday night, proceeding into early Saturday morning, Congress put together a bipartisan vote of 363 to 40, to pass HR 6201, The Families First Corona Virus Response Act, pulling together billions to address the coronavirus crisis.
The 40 votes against the bill were Republicans, though the rest of the Republican Caucus voted for the much-needed funds, and Mr. Trump agreed to support the bill at about 9 PM on Friday.
You have to ask, given what we know, how could anyone defend a no-vote?
The package included a guarantee of free coronavirus testing for those in need, a boost to state unemployment insurance programs, nutritional aid (mostly food grants), a new paid-leave benefit for employees affected by the outbreak (14 days at not less than 2/3rd their regular rate), medical leave (up to 12 weeks at not less than 2/3rd their regular rate)(doesn’t apply to business smaller than 50 employees), and an increase in federal Medicaid spending (up 6.2%).
Of course, the fly in the ointment is whether a struggling business can comply with these terms and avoid bankruptcy, even with the 100% tax credit they receive for making the payments. A tax credit is only of any use if you make enough income to benefit from the credit.
It now goes to the Senate and it’s expected to pass and be signed by Mr. Trump.
You may not be surprised to know that Speaker Pelosi and Mr. Trump exchanged not a word to each other on this subject; perhaps it was their difference over the impeachment. Just perhaps.
Mr. Trump had sought a payroll tax cut but both political parties objected to a payroll tax cut that wasn’t targeted to those who are actually affected by the virus. Again, the problem with this proposal is that you have to have income for the tax cut to benefit the taxpayer.
By the way, Congress is closing its offices, and some members are self-quarantining themselves.
No one is immune to the effects of this plague-like virus.
Camus wrote in his novel, “the Plague,” that “[e] verybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.”
We are now well past the Wuhan surprise, and its spread and devastation.
It is time to band together to resist and fight this disease as if we were at war and the sky above were releasing shells on our so recently pleasant communities until we can hear sooner or later the all clear sirens.
JPF
