A New Reality

[AndrewP]

There's a friend of mine who often posts on social media thoughts of love, solidarity and how COVID is a plot by Big Pharma and Bill Gates to implant mind control chips. They have been vocally anti-mask and anti-social distancing.

A recent post of their's though which I decided to respond to with a "PLEASE mask up" got a massive surge of people who really strongly pushed back on them. Sure there were some people who I will call nut-bars who responded saying that it was all a hoax or that "they" weren't worried because it was just the sniffles and they got smacked down too.

The original poster responded a couple of times with "love and kindness" but nothing else.

I do like that some people are speaking up for what I think is common sense. And this includes a lot of people who were originally on the "this is no big deal" bandwagon and in my rural, lightly affected region.

I don't know if they will change their own minds. We are now in a mandatory mask for inside spaces order so if they want groceries, a mask will be required. It's now changed here - because of the mandatory mask order - where seeing someone with no mask is now highly unusual.

Hope your niece is keeping safe in Portland. The news out of there - on a variety of topics - is extremely frightening.

You and your's are keeping safe? I would imagine that CMM is going bonkers trying to keep everyone around him sanitized

[kml]

Denial is an extraordinarily powerful human response. I saw the same thing during the start of the AIDS pandemic. People would rather believe bullsh*t than face the frightening reality of this virus. Worse here in the states because it has become a political statement to not wear a mask.

The reality has changed very little from my initial estimates. Deaths about 0.5% of all people infected, which sounds small until you multiply it by 200-300 million people. 9 out of 10 people will have a mild or asymptomatic case. But mortality doesn’t include morbidity and while most of my patients have recovered well, I’m a little unnerved by seeing two young women with “long- haul” symptoms out of my small sample.

My niece is very careful but also very paranoid. Since they lost her dad in September to sepsis, she’s terrified of losing another family member. Strips in the mud room and puts her clothes straight into the washer, then straight to the shower in her dedicated bathroom. She’s seen too much death already this year.

[kml]

Oh and I've (mostly) mastered the habit of wiping the kitchen surfaces and handles down with a chlorox wipe before cooking. CMM has resorted to ordering groceries online since he's never satisfied with what we bring home (plus I think he just likes being back in control of something again). He's feeling a little friskier since he's had this break from Chemo - scheduled to start again on August 7th possibly.

[DonH]

Denial is an extraordinarily powerful human response.

Deaths about 0.5% of all people infected, which sounds small until you multiply it by 200-300 million people.

While there are some out there that think covid is a hoax or whatever, there are also people who think the fact that we went to the moon is a hoax. They are the clear minority.

- All of the botched statistics
- Changes from nearly day-to-day from the very same people and groups saying masks are not needed and not recommended now saying the opposite.
- Only reporting positive and not negative results
- Reporting the same person being positive 5 times as 5 different people
-People getting positive results for tests they never took...

It's all of these things that have people not believing what they are being told and then also turning that into conspiracy theories.

So much of what has been done makes no sense. You can have 250 people go into a big box store to buy a mattress but you can't go into a mattress store with 3 other people to buy the very same mattress. Schools can't return to having children in them but daycare centers already have. The contradictions are endless.

Then the details are often not talked about. Yes the death rate seems to be about 0.5%. However, about 1/3 of those who have died are over the age of 85. They of course had/have other conditions that contributed. Less than 3% of deaths are under the age of 44 - yet we don't want teenagers exposed?????? 14 years and under make up 0.0143% - less than one seventh of one percent. A huge percentage of deaths have happened in nursing homes and extended care facilities. New York is a great example of this. There are always exceptions and you can always find one person who just does not fit the norm but it's so abundantly clear that the average person under 50 years old is going to do just fine with covid. It's when people try to claim otherwise that the naysayers start saying it's all made up.

Then there is masks. OMG. First it was wash your hands and save lives. Then stay home and save lives. Now, 4 plus months into this, it's now masks that are the golden savings to all of this. That's a crock! I'm not saying masks won't help or not to wear them. The problem is, somewhere around half the people I see wearing a mask is constantly touching it, adjusting it, taking it down to talk, eat, drink. They are hanging from one year, below the nose, below the mouth, flapping around, off, then back on, then back off, back on again. What good is this doing? But then, let's just say masks are somehow very, very effective if we somehow got people to actually wear them correctly. The bigger problem is a mask can only be effective on someone who has and is shedding covid - that's about 2% of the population. So for 98% of people wearing masks, THEY ARE USELESS because you can't block a virus from shedding that you don't have. So we are trying to shame or force or mandate 100% of people to wear masks that will only make a difference on about 2% of people. This is the only time in my 57 years on this planet that we have tried to quarantine well people. We always used to quarantine sick people. But under the guise of we don't' know who's sick and we don't know how it spreads and we don't know if someone covid positive with no systems can spread it - let's just use the shotgun approach and make EVERYONE effected. What a joke - everyone wear a mask even though really only 1 or 2 percent of you need to and will make any difference.

In the end, covid, after about six months, has worked it's way through absolutely no more than 10% of the world population. It's reported as way lower than that but I'm factoring in those who have it but were not tested. Let's even say it's hit 20% in 6 months. That means we are going to be dealing with this for YEARS - likely several to many years. It's not going away and if anything, all we are doing is slowing the inevitable spread. It's not going to go away - even if we get a vaccine which will likely not be 100% effective and for sure won't be accepted by more than 70% of the population - some say 50% in the first 18 months. COVID is with us for a long time whether we like it or not. The sooner we stop denying that and stop trying to change the universe, the better we are going to be. It is not killing millions like first predicted - that's a good thing. No, 0.5% death is nothing to be excited about although we are doing way better at treating it and again it's much more deadly for the elderly and vulnerable. Our efforts should be to protect them - not the 16 year old that has an overall 0.013% chance of dying from it.

But wear your masks if it makes you feel better - because frankly that's what it's doing mostly, making people FEEL better and FEEL safer because again, for 98% of the people wearing them, they are USELESS - and the sooner we stop denying that, the better for all of us.

[kml]

Half the Covid hospitalizations in LA right now are under 40 years old. And besides deaths, I'm trying to point out that even when young people survive, there seems to be a significant number who have potentially chronic problems afterwards that we are only beginning to understand (this was true of many SARS patients too).

Wearing masks cuts transmission by 85% and that helps save lives of the most vulnerable (and likely reduce infertility and low testosterone in men who get this so you should be interested in that!). It also protects healthcare workers and reduced the strain on our ICUs. If everybody did it we would be able to reduce our transmission to European levels which would then allow us to do containment instead of just mitigation. The reason we are not open right now is because people are too stubborn to wear a mask and social distance.

(BTW Fauci was dead wrong to announce in the beginning that masks weren't necessary. This was done largely to keep people from buying up all the disposable masks so they could be saved for hospitals, but also out of deference to Trump who wanted to avoid panicking the markets by treating the pandemic as a real crisis. I objected to Fauci's statement at the time. We have always known masks decrease the spread of respiratory disease.)

BTW I don't consider 14,000 dead schoolchildren to be insignificant and I doubt their parents would either.

[kml]

(The difference between containment and mitigation for those who don't know:
If you get your numbers down low eough, like Europe has done, you can do containment: contact trace everybody who has been around an identified case, test them and quarantine them for to weeks if negative, That's impossible to do right now becaue we have way too many infections.

Mitigation is what you do when the infection is too widespread to do containment. You simply do what's necessary to reduce overall numbers - this is where the lockdowns come in. If everybody wore masks and social distanced we wouldn't need the lockdowns.

[kml]

BTW the problem with not wearing a mask is that you are infectious for days BEFORE you develop symptoms. So yes, we all need to wear masks because we cannot identify who is or is not spreading the virus at any given moment. Countries where mask wearing is accepted have done much better than we have with this virus and the WHO study showed 85% reduction in transmission with masks. People where I live wear them and most of them correctly in the stores I shop in so it can be done. It has to be done.

[Ginger1]

I guess everyone in the operating room shouldn’t wear masks if they aren’t effective? Or the nurses going into the COVID rooms, because they don’t help?

[kml]

Of course it would help tremendously if our president did a public service announcement and demonstrated the proper way to wear a mask.

[DonH]

I never said masks were not effective. NEVER. What I did say and what you and anyone else seems not to want to address is what good is a mask if 98% of the people wearing them don’t have the virus they are wearing the masks for in the first place? The masks for 98% wearing them are useless only because they don’t have covid in the first place.

I wore masks for years, N-95, Face shields, SCBA... those all were to protect ME not my patients. It’s the same in the OR Ginger which you certainly must know.

Again, it’s the failure to answer these points or create other distractions that perpetuate the naysayers. For the longest time it was stay home to save lives. Now it’s wear a mask. Wonder what will be next. Really I wonder what we’ll do two years from now when we still have covid - if our economy survives that long.