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?

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          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.

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          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.

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          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.

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          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.

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          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.

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

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          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.”

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          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