A frightening perspective on how the virus spreads, what it does to your body, and how you die, while others never notice that they carried the virus and they gave it to you…and to countless others. And a short video from an expert saying what Trump should have said weeks ago.
Today’s post is very short, just a link to one important article and one short video. But before I introduce the article and video, I want to share something: I am afraid, we both are. We are afraid for ourselves, our kids, our grandchild, and all of you.
This is unraveling very quickly and we have a national leader incapable of conveying how fearful the times have become, and so someone has to speak up and say it: I am afraid. Likely so are you, and it is important to make that okay. This is going to get much worse before it gets better and we need to be honest about that. And it has to be okay to be afraid. That isn’t panicking or spreading panic. It is being honest.
Today’s article and video below explains why I am frightened and why I have hope, and the video is definitely worth watching as it portrays how our leaders should be talking to us.
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How the Coronavirus Could Take Over Your Body (Before You Ever Feel It)
The Intelligencer is an excellent online publication produced by New York Magazine. On the March 18, they published a chilling narrative of how the virus spreads and how one person’s simple lunch date led to him contracting the virus. If you don’t understand fully how COVID-19 spreads and why it is ESSENTIAL YOU STAY HOME, then you need to read this piece. Along with explaining very precisely how this virus is spread and how easily the most innocent public moment can lead to your contracting this virus, it also provides a vivid personal picture of what an over-run hospital system looks like and what it feels like to die on a gurney in a hospital hallway.
We have to get serious folks. So if you know ANYONE who is still skeptical about the desperate crisis we are in and the absolute need to STAY HOME, please share this with them AND CALL THEM and BEG THEM: PLEASE STAY HOME.
Click here to read the full Intelligencer piece. Even if you think you grasp what is happening, read it and share it. We need each other, and we need everyone to pull their weight.
A Powerful Message from Someone Who Knows How to Communicate
Infectious disease expert Dr. Emily Landon spoke during the Illinois governor’s #COVID19 press conference on 3/20/20. Hear her explain why the statewide order to stay at home is crucial to protecting everyone. Her message is filled with compassion, urgency, and pain. She does exactly what our President is incapable of doing: be candid, be courageous, be clear, and be inspirational.
Please, stay home, be safe, be smart.
In solidarity,
Paul & Roxanne
Categories: Uncategorized
We have a friend who continues to “deny” and leans on her self-description as a “rebellious hippie chick from way back” as justification for failing to grow up–she is 73 years old. We will share your documents with her and then have a talk. This may well be the end of a long-standing friendship. We are using our new extra hours for some self-reflection and I hope others will do the same.
Does your “hippy chick” friend realize that she’s in the highest risk age group?! Young at heart is a good additude, but she needs to act her age! Otherwise, she may well end up dead. And so could others in her orbit.
Does your “hippy chick” friend realize that she’s in the highest risk age group?! Young at heart is a good attitude, but she needs to act her age! Otherwise, she may well end up dead. And so could others in her orbit.
Look at the bright side the skies are clearing over big metropolitan areas and animals are coming back. Dolphins have returned to the bays in Italy.
We have watched and been effected by a nation built on vapor. Hopefully the virus will be a wake up call, but there are still lots of denials, and alternate facts. The bottom falling out of the oil market, like the virus could have been predicted, with simple math. Our country has run on denial, lies and alternate facts for decades, so there are quite a few, that have not figured it out yet.
The dumpf administration along with it’s facilitators in corporate media, are still trying to manage and massage the numbers. It took weeks for anyone to take this seriously, and even now there are plenty of petty schemes to mislead, and profit from the misery. Hopefully this will show the necessity for a functioning government, and some basic rules. It is clear to see how little meaningful innovation, we have actually had in the last 40 years. People are still not catching on to how the big tech companies, helped to facilitate a Viral Pandemic, and then sought to profit from the mayhem.
It looks like the virus is going to be around for a while, we may have to limit our activities through the Summer. We can be sure the actual death toll won’t be reported the numbers will depend on the belief system of the ones doing the reporting. The virus doesn’t care about our beliefs, our age or our social status, it will quietly pick through the population. They are already working on clever alternative narratives to explain it all. These won’t play so well next month.
For a lot of us, the Virus has not changed our lives that much, those of us that saw the writing on the wall years ago. It is amazing that something lie this took so long to happen. Having low expectations, can be a good thing, then we can be pleasantly surprised when something positive happens, There are plenty of people still drinking the Neoliberal Kool Aid, the ones that believe their selfishness, is a good thing. They don’t care that someone else may die, or that they are spreading a contagious disease. We saw it all with the Flu, denial is profitable. There are plenty of snake oil sales people, infesting the media and social media. It was all good because doubt and ignorance is profitable.
The corporate media is still trying to spin the idea that these corporate monopolies are a good thing. While the lobbyists are in DC with their hands out, keeping the government from a decisive response, their PR people are doing damage control in the media. The Virus forced all of the protest and discussion online, where it is already siloed. People are so addicted, gaslighted and manipulated, they are not even questioning this. The media is already working on scapegoats and safe places to vent any anger that comes up. State government is telling us to practice “mindfulness” a good way to numb ourselves out, to the facts. At least they think it is better than nothing.
This is a letter to the Washington Post I wrote yesterday after reading the article about Dr. Landon’s comments.
“Landon and others are encouraging us to ‘not panic,’ because that is the biggest dis-ease that will emerge, and the side effects of panic could potentially spell miserable chaos for most, if not all.
Water, food, energy, shelter and homeostasis are the ONLY critical elements needed to survive. But if panic takes charge, many of these five will be imperiled, if not partially or completely destroyed.
From everything we now know of this virus, it is virtually ubiquitous. Unless it has some sort of built-in half-life, and mathematically follows that, and there are no mutant strains that start the clock all over again, at some point in time and space it will be gone.
Not likely to happen. Why? Because much, if not all, of what I just said above will not happen.
Ms. Landon was, hopefully, speaking about the only available way (short of a cure-all vaccine that can be produced worldwide and put inside every living being) to put brakes on the spread of the dis-ease and allow those who do not succumb to weather its effects without crashing the dis-ease care industry.
But to say that ‘nothing’ will happen if we all self-quarantine is not mathematically possible. Reports that China is now reviving are speculative, at best. The incidence may or may not be going down (probably so) but it will not drop to zero, without that half life I spoke of.
Depending on the severity of the illnesses caused by the virus, or the worsening of already existing illnesses by the virus, some percentage of humans will expire, heroic measures aside. This is plain reality. It is just another of many death and quality-of-life challenges any species endures.
And panic is already well underway. Food, supplies, guns, ammo, fuel, medicines, batteries, etc. etc. are already dwindling where I live, in a state with less than 40 cases and only three cities with more than 100k citizens.
The line between prudence and insanity is rice-paper thin. Think mob behavior.
Be calm and reason carefully.”
Mick Nickel
There are posts on my FB page, Maggie Washburne, that I have made public. I’m a microbiologist/biochemist with 40 years experience. I don’t know everything but I like solving problems, increasing communication to avoid unnecessary emergencies, and helping people reduce stress by understanding the science and seeing what the weeds are. I don’t love FB, but it is a good medium right now for this.
Here is an interesting article, I am not sure how this will play out here.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/y3mkjv/what-is-mutual-aid-and-how-can-it-help-with-coronavirus?utm_campaign=sharebutton
Note the “glitches” in Fakebook, they are not an accident. The last thing Fakebook or Google want is anyone working together without a financial incentive. Their profits depend on division, and transactional relationships,which is why they brought us dumpf!
“The organizer from New Hampshire added that this is tied into the greater history of mutual aid. “People who do mutual aid and direct outreach, and have been doing it for a long time, are extremely used to operating in a hostile environment,” he said. “Even before the rise of the internet, existing institutions have always been hostile to mutual aid,” he said, noting that there are laws in many areas of the country that prohibit people from giving food or money to the homeless. “We see that the policing of individual behavior is really focused on trying to make people dependent on institutions, rather than dependent on each other, so going forward what we need to be doing is thinking creatively.”
“Existing institutions, have always been hostile to mutual aid.” Charity is a business, and they need to take their cut of the action.
The big tech companies all want a piece of that action too. The people making money with apps that take a cut! Notice that whenever the media says something about small business, they are really protecting the big corporations and fast food industry. If we really wanted local restaurants to thrive, we would Boycott the fast food industry! After all they rely on low wages, worker exploitation, wage suppression, and taxpayer subsidies.
They have been heavily advertising the apps that take a cut of all food delivery sales, Cashing in on a Pandemic just business as usual!
That Effin guy Bezos, told his employees that they could just “donate: their sick days to co workers who get Corona Virus. This stimulated some online outrage. He is probably already working on polishing his image with a photo op or media release, where they will gush all over his staged “generosity.” There might be a petition somewhere, but of course no local media covered it. Bezos is making money profiting from a Global Pandemic, yet he still callously refuses to take care of his employees. It doesn’t occur to him that they can’t work if they are sick, he is planning on desperation and poverty driving more disposable workers, into his clutches.
People around here like to think they are special, they believe the marketing hype of the tourism and real estate industries. In the Midst of a Global Pandemic they are still marketing!
I’m sure Bezos realizes people cannot work if they’re sick. He just figures he’ll hire new workers. The elites of the world have done a good job ensuring that there is a ready supply of work-hungry people; most working-class people feel desperate enough that they’ll work for low wages, in jobs that risk our health.
People everywhere are upset and worried and angry that there are no tests and masks . I’ve got one box of size small gloves for size 8 hands that hurt with my arthritis . I’m going to use an inadequate cloth kerchief for a mask. It’s better than nothing…I can’t get back surgery now so I’m in alot of pain and dealing with a lot of limitation.
I’m glad the fossil fuel industry is falling into a big black polluted hole….I’m sad about the elections, the campaigns that wretched DNC Perez manipulated you squeeze out WOMEN and people of color after refusing to hold a climate debate. That guy has to go..along withMcConnel.
Maybe T will get the virus and pass it to
His corrupt Republican cohorts who refused to impeach T… Not a mindful comment but a real one.
The world is going to “hell in a hand basket” as my father used to say. This pandemic will hit the refugee camps and kill millions amidst their suffering for wanting and needing to be taken humanely and seriously. This is the Armageddon we anticipated. Will this mutant species human survive ? And if so will we have learned anything well enough to make changes and actually do something about it? Or will it be “business as usual” til our last dying breath? Capitalism is a lousy bedfellow for Democracy…
Pamela, 73
I just read this article in The New Yorker “Keeping the Coronavirus from Infecting Health-Care Workers
What Singapore’s and Hong Kong’s success is teaching us about the pandemic.” While serious, it is far less chilling than than The Intelligencer article. This is just part of the article.
The link to the complete article is: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/keeping-the-coronavirus-from-infecting-health-care-workers?
By Atul Gawande
March 21, 2020
Consider a couple of data points. Singapore so far appears not to have had a single recorded health-care-related transmission of the coronavirus, despite the hundreds of cases that its medical system has had to deal with. That includes one case reported this week of a critically ill pneumonia patient who exposed forty-one health-care workers in the course of four days before being diagnosed with covid-19. These were high-risk exposures, including exposures during intubation and hands-on intensive care. Eighty-five per cent of the workers used only surgical masks. Yet, owing to proper hand hygiene, none became infected.
Our early experiences in the U.S. have so far been similar. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in the face of limited information, recommended stricter precautions than have been employed in Asia, putting health-care workers on fourteen-day self-quarantine if they are exposed to an infected person for even a few minutes without protection, including a mask and goggles. That policy was implemented at U.C. Davis Medical Center, where the first case of community transmission was diagnosed, in late February. Eighty-nine health-care workers involved in the patient’s care were put under self-quarantine. None, it turned out, had been infected. Sacramento, Seattle, and San Francisco became coronavirus hot spots; as of this writing, however, significant occupational transmission has not been found.
Meanwhile, the strict policy has been threatening to close entire emergency departments. So, out of necessity and based on the early evidence, public-health authorities in San Francisco have loosened restrictions, letting exposed employees stay at work as long as they wear a surgical mask and don’t have symptoms. At least one hospital in Seattle is now following a similar policy, with the support of state public-health officials and the C.D.C. Other hospitals across the country will likely soon follow. The factors that appear to be important in protecting health-care workers from the disease have been insuring meticulous hand hygiene and cleaning; restricting clinics and hospitals to necessary patient visits; shifting as much care as possible to virtual channels (such as phone and video); and applying standard droplet precautions (surgical mask, gloves, and gown) with respiratory patients.
For those who cannot stay home, the lesson is that it is feasible to work and stay coronavirus-free, despite the risks.