So, I missed last week as I was away. Hope no one missed me too much, lol.
I am going to start something different on here. Up until now, I have used this place as more of a diary. From now on, I am going to start including more serious topics. These will be more like essays on various subjects. So, let’s begin.
This week, I want to talk about covid, as is seems like people still don’t get it. As you already know, I used to be an ER nurse. That means that I don’t take my own family members to the hospital unless they are getting chest compressions or there’s a bone sticking out. So, when I say something is a serious issue, you can be assured that it probably IS a serious issue.
Covid has ravaged the planet, yet we still don’t have it under control. In many places, it appears that we are no longer even trying. Lack of direction from political leaders, mixed messages, conflicting priorities and a lack of understanding in the general population have all contributed to this. Until these factors are delt with, the pandemic will continue.
One of the most persistent beliefs out there is that we do not need to be concerned because the death rate is only 2% or less. The reality is that it is closer to 4%, but lets go with the 2% figure for a minute. One of the difficulties when dealing with such statistics is that people do not understand the numbers involved. After all, the total world population (around 7 billion) is a number so large that our brains have trouble understanding just how many people that is. Let’s look at it another way. Given how infectious covid is, it is not unreasonable to assume that the infection rate could be as high as 70% (this was the figure released by the WHO, and assumes that no precautions were put in place). This represents a total of 4.9 billion infected worldwide. At a 2% fatality rate, that means a death toll of 98 million people. That’s a lot of people to so casually sacrifice.
One of the reasons that people do not understand is because the efforts taken to combat covid WERE put in place. Many countries locked down right away, limiting the spread. This, ironically, produced a false sense of confidence. As rates of infection remained low in these countries, it helped to reinforce the mistaken idea that covid was not really that bad. For many, this was taken as proof that we had over-reacted. Since it is hard to prove a negative (that the crisis could have been so much worse), this myth is perpetuated in many countries.
This figure is also not indicative of the entire picture when it comes to covid. One of the most startling facts about covid is that people with covid have a 30% chance of developing complications. This is because the covid virus (in a way we don’t fully understand yet) causes the host body to overproduce clotting factors, leading to a whole range of problems. Many do recover, but many will face life altering medical conditions, such as: pulmonary embolism, heart attacks, strokes, liver failure, renal failure, etc. A great many of these will never recover. This has also contributed to another great conspiracy theory that medical professionals are deliberately inflating covid fatality rates by including people who have died from other causes (such as heart attacks). This is not the case, as these deaths are included because they resulted from the complications of covid. To look at it another way, the same can be said of HIV and AIDS. People do not die of AIDS, they die from the complications of AIDS (usually pneumonia).
Another of the big myths of covid is that it only strikes the elderly. I am not sure when we decided that our elderly population is expendable, but that is perhaps a topic for another time. I will instead focus on why this is wrong. The reality is that covid strikes across ALL age groups. It is simply that younger people recover from the disease, whereas older people are more likely to die from it. However, as I discussed in the last paragraph, the greater danger with the covid virus is that it causes complications. These complications seem to be dispersed across all age groups. Infants and toddlers in particular seem to be at risk from these complications, particularly to circulatory disruptions to the extremities (fingers and toes).
It is also a reality that young people with chronic medical conditions (diabetes in particular) also face a substantial fatality rate.
Health care workers are also at a far greater risk, again across the age spectrum. Regardless of age, health care workers are 10 times more likely to catch the virus and twice as likely to die from it as the general population. This is due to prolonged exposure or from multiple exposures. Over 600 health care workers have died in the USA from covid. Many more have required advanced life support measures to recover.
The truly sad part is that this could all be so easily avoided if proper and sustained precautions were implemented. The thing is, viruses require a host to survive. They need people. No host, no virus. Lock everything down for just three weeks, isolate those that are infected and enforce mask wearing for EVERYONE, and the virus is gone. Had we implemented such things back in March, we would be long done by now and life would be back to normal. Instead, we implemented half measures that leave us no closer to getting the virus under control even 6 months later. Instead, we STILL face a crisis that appears to have no end in sight.