It is long past time to revisit this COVID-19 topic. The first part was written in October around the time I lost my father. Even now I run into a rather large stream of Red Necks that refuse to mask-up. They are still parroting the same phrases you can read in the first part.
Why would they change? Most are still going to 4-chan, Twitter, Facebook, Fox News (Faux News), and LinkedIn for their news. There is no journalistic integrity in posts from the average Joe. It is really easy to push an agenda when you say something false then have four sock puppets confirm it. Everybody going there is looking to re-enforce falsehoods they already believe. They aren’t looking to actually be informed.
The flu kills more people than COVID-19 was B.S. when it was first uttered and it is a ripe steaming pile now.
Above is a screen scrape from the CDC Web site where flu totals are provided. I’ve included the link so you can go there yourself. When scientists found a new strain of SARS that seemed to transfer to new hosts more readily, they had a good idea just how deadly this could be. They didn’t just pull the word pandemic out of their ass.
Despite the Imbecile-in-Chief Tweeting out his arse that the flu kills 100,000 per year, you can see the reality in the CDC numbers above. From 2010 through 2017 no flu year ever got within kissing distance of 100,000 dead.
What we knew about SARS
As far as I can tell or read, we never figured out why SARS “just went away.” We did know that it was quite deadly but didn’t appear to transmit as easily as COVID-19. Not that Wikipedia is ever a fountain of reliable information, but here is a snippet from the current chart.
There seemed to be a tipping point. Once you got over 100 cases the percentage of fatalities started going up. Not a completely fair assessment given the timeline. November 1, 2002 to July 31, 2003 is only 9 months.
Unlike COVID-19, it wasn’t “global.” We didn’t have every every medical device company trying to develop a test for it nor every drug manufacturer pushing for a vaccine. Most of the world knew very little about SARS. The actual number of cases was probably much higher as people thought just had a bad strain of flu.
There was not a global panic because SARS (the first one) wasn’t easy to spread. Death rate with something new like this is always high early on. Medicine takes time to figure out effective treatments. At this stage of COVID-19 hospitals have a better idea of “what works” when it comes to keeping patients off of ventilators.
Keeping patients off ventilators keeps them alive
Physicians Weekly has a really good article on this topic. An average Joe can even understand it. While some of the disparity in the studies might have to do with quality of ventilators each country/hospital had, all of the studies point to a bad outcome once you need the ventilator.
A study from China says that 86% of patients put on ventilators died. The study out of the UK quoted in the article found that 66% of the COVID-19 patients put on ventilators died. Even your average Joe and Jane can realize you have less than a 50/50 chance of making it once you go on a ventilator. You are just too sick.
COVID-19 Disinformation decrease helps keep people alive
Numbers are trending down now. Not so much due to the vaccines. Mostly it is due to Twitter kicking the Imbecile-in-Chief off. Now that Fox News executives are desperately trying to stay out of prison, firing everyone who parroted false claims Trump made about everything. You can probably keep track of the cancellations on this site. Quite an about face from when Fox News used to fire everyone who tried to actually engage in journalism.
Yes, the death rate and Trump move in lock-step. False information was distributed widely. People refused to wear masks. Lots of people got sick. The death toll is now north of 500,000 and still going up. Yes, the daily death rate is coming down but they still add to the total. That mass grave picture above isn’t from some third world country engaged in genocide, it’s from New York about a year ago.
People have killed enough of their own relatives now
The other reason the numbers are going down is that people have learned the hard way “it was mostly nutters following Trump.” January 6th, 2021 kind of put brush to canvas on that painting for anyone capable of conscious thought.
With a hard reset came a re-assessment of beliefs. They couldn’t discard all of their nutter beliefs at once, no. One belief they could begin to drop is the idea “forcing us to wear masks is just taking away our rights one by one.”
It’s really hard to avoid the news stories of people who just had to have a wedding only to bury a group of family members from COVID-19 they caught while attending. Then families had to get together for Thanksgiving and they buried more people from COVID-19.
Let’s not forget Christmas and all of those airport pictures of people packing into planes to celebrate Christmas with the family. Who could forget the news footage of cops in California shutting down clubs holding New Years Eve parties? Seriously? You can’t drink and wear a mask dumb ass!
At this point most people now know someone who has lost family to COVID-19 or they have lost family themselves. I spoke on Friday with a friend and former co-worker who has buried five family members. Brothers, sisters, an aunt. I didn’t memorize the full list. They lived in different states and took precautions, but all it takes is some dumb ass refusing to wear a mask.
The death toll has finally gotten high enough people are starting to pay attention. Third world countries have handled the pandemic much better than America. You can click the link for the full article.
We have more deaths than the next two countries on that list combined.
Thank you for refusing to wear a mask!
[…] See part 2 […]