WHY MUST I WEAR A MASK?

 

          On Friday, the Department of Health reported that Philly has had a total of 35,582 confirmed COVID cases.  In a city of 1.5 million people, this means that about 2% of Philadelphians are known to have caught it.  For some, the only evidence was a positive test.  For others, the virus was fatal.

 

          The 2% rate is common throughout the northern US---New York is 2%, Illinois is 2.2%, South Dakota is 2%.  (Most European countries are 1% or below.)  Of course, these are just the “confirmed” cases.  Undoubtedly, there were people with very mild bouts, who perhaps woke up in the middle of the night with a fever but were fine by morning, so they never went to a doctor or got tested.  How many?  We cannot know, but let’s say the number of real cases was actually ten times the number of confirmed cases.  That would mean 20% of the Philly population caught the virus in some fashion.  It seems like a large estimate, but let’s use 20% as our figure for the maximum number of residents who were touched.

 

          I like 20% as the maximum infection rate because it has other evidence to support it.  Remember the Diamond Princess?  This was the cruise ship locked down in Yokohama back in February.  It took weeks to get everyone tested and moved ashore and repatriated.  There had been no mask-wearing or distancing prior to its quarantine, and there is little chance to escape the close quarters of a cruise ship.  All 3711 passengers and crew, in other words, were exposed to the virus on board, yet only 712, or 19.2%, caught the bug.  There were many other “accidental quarantine” situations involving cruise ships and dormitories and military barracks (including a very recent one at the University of Wisconsin), and the infection rate in these types of petri dishes is generally somewhere in the 20% range.   

 

          That leaves 80% of us who never caught the disease.  Why not?

 

          Well, it’s not like we didn’t get the chance to.  Here in Philly, back in April and May, there were often a thousand COVID patients in Philly hospitals.  Average deaths in the city were thirty per day for those two months.  It seemed there was no escape from the virus.

 

          But then the deaths and the serious cases just dropped off the table.  On June 19, the Department of Public Health, which had given daily reports on hospitalizations, announced that “Hospitals are not under strain and are returning to normal operations, so going forward we will no longer include these figures in the weekly press releases.”

 

          And that’s what happened everywhere, at least in northern climes like the upper U.S. and all of Europe.  (The pattern in warmer places is slightly different.)  The curve shows a rapid rise and a peak that lasts for two to four weeks, and then a fairly swift decline in serious outcomes.  The numbers will vary from place to place but the curve looks the same, regardless of whether or when there were lockdowns, mask edicts, school closings, etc.  New York looks like Sweden which looks like Italy which looks like Germany which looks like South Dakota.

 

          Why?

 

          When deaths and hospitalizations go from hundreds a day to one a day, it is because the virus cannot “find” vulnerable people.  It happens because there are almost no potential victims left.  Almost everyone had either caught the damn thing or they were never going to catch it because they were immune.  That’s why in June and July, the serious cases and the deaths almost disappeared.  It’s why the ventilators went into storage closets.  The virus did not leave Philadelphia.  It just couldn’t find victims even though there were still at least 80% of us untouched by it. 

 

          We’re immune.  At least four out of five of us have been immune from the beginning.  There is no other explanation.

 

          There is certainly no other explanation for why I personally remain in the pink of health.  While there may be a few people in this city who completely isolated themselves from any contact with the bug (though I don’t personally know any), I am not one of them.

 

          I have worked continuously at my extremely busy big-box store through this entire year.  Though there are signs all over the sales floor and frequent announcements, social distancing is all but impossible.  Every day, I pass within inches of dozens of customers and fellow workers.  Masks were not required until April, and most people wear them, but they are frequently pulled down to the mouth or neck.  A show is made of spraying shopping carts with sanitizer before the customer takes one, but people touch everything else in the store, constantly, and it would be impossible to clean every surface.

 

          In addition, except when I am at work, I never wear a mask in public though I am required to do so by our Governor’s executive edict.  When an employee at a bank or supermarket I am visiting comes up to me and asks me to wear one, I do, but usually nobody says anything.  Though I’ve known from the beginning that mask-wearing is ineffective in curbing respiratory virus infections, I initially followed the requirements just to be polite.  No more.  The mask has become a political fetish object for the totalitarian Left, and that makes me angry, of course.  However, the main reason for my resistance is that there is simply no reason for me to wear one.  I’ve been exposed repeatedly---every day probably---and I never got sick.  I pose no risk to anyone.  I’M IMMUNE.

 

          And I’m not the only one.  All of my co-workers are in the same position, along with all the other workers at big-box stores and supermarkets.  A few of us have gotten sick during the pandemic, or at least “tested positive,” but the vast majority have not because we are part of the 80% of the population that was never at risk to begin with.

 

          Then there are all the people like my friend, an emergency room doctor at Frankford Hospital in Philly.  Through the pandemic, he has continued to deal with everything that walks through his door---gunshot wounds, overdoses, strokes, suicide attempts, heart attacks, diabetic comas, and yes, COVID patients.  Though he wears a mask and gloves and follows all the protocols, there is simply no way he was not exposed to the virus, yet he remains healthy and uninfected.

 

          It almost seems that the Executive Orders and Edicts and Pronunciamentos become more intrusive and restrictive as the virus itself fades into the past.  The need for universal mask-wearing (if there ever was one), is certainly lower now than it has been since the beginning of the pandemic, but the politicians and bureaucrats show no sign of slowing down in their efforts to regulate us.

 

          But why?  What is the purpose of this endless tinkering with our lives and our freedom?  We have all learned something about what each of us is facing and we have become more knowledgeable about our individual needs and what we are comfortable with.  Want to wear a mask?  I would never tell you not to.  But each of us is in a unique position to decide for ourselves what level of concern or precaution is reasonable.

 

          We are not children, and we do not need the Governor of this state or any other to tell us what is best for us.  We are all capable of making those decisions for ourselves, as responsible citizens have always done.  Faith in individual responsibility and freedom, in fact, is the foundation of our society. My position is a simple one: if there is no reason for me to wear a mask, and there is not, I should not be ordered to wear one, and there can be no legitimate legal authority for such an order.

 

Copyright2020MichaelKubacki       

CORONA---Tidbits

          I have nothing against vaccines.  Our son got his full package of dip-tets and whooping coughs and everything else.  I recently got a shingles shot and a pneumonia shot.

          But who will want the new Rona vaccine when it comes out in October or November or early next year?  I get a flu shot every year (though I’m starting to wonder why), but it’s a vaccine formulated not for last year’s flu but for the predicted next one.

          In the Northern Hemisphere, the Rona is dunzo pretty much everywhere, or will be very soon.  The 20% who were vulnerable to it caught it and recovered from it, except for the unfortunate few who died.  The other 80% of us were immune from the beginning, so why would we want a vaccine now?

          The fantasy of a vaccine rests on the assumption that the 80% of us who didn’t catch the Rona somehow were never exposed, so we are still at risk.  But how did I escape it?  I have worked at Target every day, sometimes with masks and sometimes without, and have passed within inches of hundreds of strangers (many unmasked), for months now.  None of my dozens of co-workers have gotten sick at Target either, though a few caught the bug from family members.

          And what of my neighbor, a doctor who works the emergency room at Frankford Hospital pulling bullets out of gang-bangers, rescuing the morbidly obese from diabetic comas, and reviving the dregs of Philly society from drug overdoses?  He has even treated Rona patients, plenty of them.  How come HE never got sick?

          I suppose there are a few people around who so thoroughly locked themselves away that they were never exposed to the virus, but I live in a city and I doubt there are many of them.  Even the most careful (paranoid?) people I know went out to shop or exercise or visit a friend at one time or another, and yet 80% of us were untouched by the virus.

          So what is the point of developing this vaccine?

*

          On September 2, 2020, the CDC website disclosed that out of the 169,044 U.S. COVID deaths in their database, 6% of the fatalities (about 10,000), were attributed to the coronavirus alone.  The other 94% of victims had an average of 2.6 co-morbidities (e.g., heart disease, diabetes).

          In a nation of 330,000,000, ten thousand deaths spread over six months is not a lot of people.  It’s about one per state per day.  Seven times as many Americans die of strokes.  Thirty times as many die of cancer.

          My point here is not to disparage or somehow denigrate the other 159,000 dead people who passed on with an average of 2.6 other co-morbidities.  They were people too and their deaths are just as heart-breaking for those they left behind.

          There is, however, a lesson to be learned from this information: there is no conceivable reason to close schools and colleges.  Normal healthy people under the age of fifty, a group that includes almost every student and every teacher, face virtually NO risk of catching the Rona and dying from it.  Each of them are hundreds of times more likely to die in an accident traveling to or from school than they are to become a CDC fatal data-point.

          On July 15, Reuters reported that in Sweden, which never locked down and never closed its schools, the number of children aged 1- 19 who died from COVID was zero.  In addition, Sweden’s Public Health Ministry reported there had been no difference in COVID risk between teachers and those in other professions.

          Elderly teachers, or those (including students), who are vulnerable for one reason or another should, if they wish, take this semester off.  But the current panic that has millions of children and university students sitting at home, isolated, watching lectures on a screen, is pure lunacy.  The actions of politicians, often at the behest of teachers or teachers unions, is unforgiveable.

*

          As the human body is subjected to stress through malnutrition or injury, the bodily systems that protect us are shut down in the reverse order that they appeared in the history of human evolution.  Since the immune system was the most recent system to appear in homo sapiens, it is the first to go when an individual is stressed.  This is why impoverished, poorly-nourished people get hit hardest in a pandemic.

*

          I’m in Rehoboth, Delaware on a beach vacation, and while the mask rules in Philadelphia and Delaware are basically the same (masks required in all public places, including the street), there are obvious cultural differences.

          Here, there are signs on every storefront, every lamp post, and every entrance to the beach.  Flashing highway signs that used to tell you how fast you were driving now tell you to wear a mask and distance yourself.  And not all the signs I see are government-issued.  Many are one-off items created and posted by individual store-keepers trying to distinguish themselves by their cleverness.  (“Simple Fact You Breathe Out Of Your Nose.  Unless You Are An Amphibian, Mask Must Cover Nose And Mouth.”)  You just don’t see much of this in Philly.

          On the other hand, obedience on the streets of downtown Philly is close to universal, while here in Delaware, there are plenty of folks walking around with no masks.  Another difference is that in Philly, you see more people with masks pulled down below the nose or below the mouth but still on the face, as if paying lip service to the rules.  In Rehoboth, the improperly worn mask is hard to find.  People either obey the rules or they don’t.

          My guess is that the difference is political.  Philly is a deep-blue city that gave Hillary 82% of its votes in 2016.  The liberal left tends not to question authority much, so they are mostly going to comply with the mask edicts.  Delaware is a blue area too, of course, but not to the same extent.  Also, there is a hillbilly culture in Delaware that does not exist at all in Philadelphia, and hillbillies have no problem at all defying authority.  If they don’t want to wear the damn mask, they ain’t gonna.

*

          In terms of the median age of its citizens, Japan and Italy are among the oldest nations in the world.  In Japan, the median is 46.9; in Italy, it is 45.1.  Yet their COVID experiences were very different.  Italy had 35,491 fatalities.  Japan, with twice the population, had only 1296 deaths.

          There are many theories about why this happened, and most of them are based in the fact that Italy, as nations go, is regarded as a basket case and Japan is not.

          One theory, however, is not based in healthcare infrastructure or nursing home rules, but in the fact that Italy is a well-established Vitamin D desert while Japan is packed with healthy and happy Japanese people bursting with all the Vitamin D they require.  The theory, and that’s all it is, is that a lack of D makes you especially vulnerable to the Rona.

*

          Sweden’s government officially said it was sorry for failing to protect elderly vulnerable people by immediately isolating them from the virus.  So far as I have been able to discover, the Swedish government is the only one, anywhere in the world, that has apologized for its mistakes regarding the virus.

*

          A recent study at Harvard reported that 25% of COVID positives across the country have one or more flu viruses as well.

*

          On February 3, 2020, the cruise ship Diamond Princess was quarantined at the port in Yokohama.  Over the next five weeks, following testing, passengers and crew were allowed to leave the ship for repatriation or hospitalization or land-based quarantine in Japan.  Of 3711 passengers and crew, 723 tested positive for COVID.  Nine died.

          There was a lesson here that was ignored.  The people on this cruise were in a confined space, eating at the same tables, walking around the ship and chatting with each other, with no knowledge that they were exposed to a virus.  Nobody wore masks until the outbreak occurred, and there was no distancing at first.

          Yet 80% of the passengers and crew never got sick.

          There were other isolated communities in army barracks or dormitories that were subjected to similar accidental quarantines, and the level of immunity was similar.  The case of the Diamond Princess was the most instructive since it occurred so early in the pandemic and since the group was so large.

          Nobody noticed that even at the beginning there was a large reservoir of immunity among us human beings.  Nobody noticed that COVID-19 could not possibly be “novel.”

*

          The NYT reported on August 29 that it did a study on recent PCR test results from Massachusetts, New York, and Nevada, and concluded that 90% of those people testing positive carried barely any virus.

          PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) tests detect the presence of genetic material (RNA) from the coronavirus, but the amount of virus in a sample is typically not disclosed to the patient, who is simply told he is “positive” or “negative.” The threshold used is so low that even a tiny amount of debris from destroyed virus can trigger a “positive.”  The actual amount of corona RNA is part of the test results, however, and this is what the NYT looked at in determining that the cases we see now may not be real infections.

          The widespread use of PCR tests is a possible explanation for the “casedemic” we are now seeing, where there are significant numbers of new cases in various parts of the country (e.g., colleges with returning students), but very little actual sickness and no deaths.

Copyright2020MichaelKubacki

CORONA---The Masquerade Ends

          The mask wars are over.  Science lost.

          I’ve written about mask edicts before, and the widespread belief that cloth or paper masks can protect the public from catching viruses like the Rona.  At this point, I think I’ve read everything that has been published on the subject in peer-reviewed journals for the last twenty-five years or so.  (It’s surprisingly easy to find academic articles these days, and it generally costs nothing.)  To summarize, there is no evidence that wearing a mask in the park or in a supermarket does a damn bit of good in stopping the spread of viral infections.

          In addition to these studies and findings, there have been a number of articles in the past few months (mostly not peer-reviewed and mostly published by “associations” rather than academic periodicals), all of which purport to tell us that cloth masks provide a “barrier” (a word they invariably use), to viruses.  The coolest ones use laser-enhanced photography to show colored plumes of aerosol droplets raining down ten feet away, at least until a mask is interposed.  They shed no light on the spreading of viruses, of course, but the pictures are great.

          You don’t really have to read all these articles, though it’s educational to do so because you will rather quickly discover how much of “science” (which you are paying for), is pure horseshit.  But rather than read all the articles, all you really have to do is watch a few interviews or podcasts about COVID featuring epidemiology researchers and professors and such.  Whenever the subject of masks comes up, they chuckle.  The reaction is involuntary.  Many of these people have dealt with deadly pathogens in labs, wearing elaborate haz-mat gear to protect themselves.  The idea that masks, even the N-95 variety, could prevent the transmission of viruses, is amusing to them.

          But you will never read this perspective in a newspaper or see it on TV because the effectiveness of mask-wearing has now been accepted by virtually all news outlets, regardless of their slant or politics.  Even scientists and doctors have stopped talking about the uselessness (and even negative effects), of mask-wearing, at least partly because some dissenters have lost research funding and others find their views taken down from social media sites with no explanation.

          The “illusory truth effect” is a phenomenon, identified at Villanova University in 1977, where people will come to believe a falsehood when it has been repeated often enough.  Familiarity alone, rather than any reasoning or factual inquiry, becomes the basis for an accepted truth.  This seems to be what has occurred with the belief that wearing a mask in public protects us from the Rona.  And now that this is the “truth,” no discussion is permitted.  It never was, actually.  I still have not seen an article in a mainstream publication (e.g., the NYT, the WSJ, etc.), where the past twenty-five years of medical research is even mentioned.  All you get is the same admonitions and the same scolding, from every newspaper, every bureaucrat, every health department czar, every Fauci-wannabe, every governor, every mayor---wear the mask, we’re all in this together, etc. etc. etc.

          The resolution of this issue is accepted even by many scientists who know that masking is pointless.  Ivor Cummins, an Irish biochemical engineer and science reporter, has said he doesn’t like to appear “churlish” by criticizing public mask-wearing rules since he understands the impulse people might have to “do something” about COVID, even if the thing they are doing is useless.

          OK.  I get it.  But I still don’t share this view because the powers enforcing mask-wearing are not uniformly benign.  It is being used by authoritarians in some places (i.e., Europe), to punish mask-dissenters with huge fines and even jail time.

          More importantly, accepting a falsehood as a ruling principle for society is fundamentally contrary to our basic values.  We in the West have become historically free and wealthy and long-lived because we have embraced reason and science, at least where public policy is concerned.  What possible good can come from a return to irrational beliefs and superstition in the face of a deadly medical challenge, even if it’s churlish to tell all the scolds and politicians and time-servers they are wrong?

          Besides, I’m irrational enough as it is.  I believe God spoke to Moses and parted the Red Sea and I believe Christ died on the cross and was resurrected to save my soul.  I believe these things with all my heart and I can’t prove any of them, and when I actually write them down they sound a little ridiculous but I believe them anyway.

          But that’s it.  That’s all the irrationality I can stand.  I’m not going to believe in mask-wearing too, no matter how many people want me to and how many nice people believe in it.  I’m not going to believe GMOs are bad for you either, or that OMEGA-3s make you healthy.

          God is love.  I’m cool with that.  For everything else, I need a double-blind study.

Copyright2020MichaelKubacki