“We’re reluctant to follow China, but they did it…We’re nowhere near getting on top of this virus,” New York Times’ health and science reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. on Terry Gross’s Fresh Air.
Based on all the moving goal posts we now see the federal government will not protect us. There is no vaccine coming in the near term and we have no reliable treatments for active infection. Don’t be distracted by the spin. Keep your eye on what we know and where we are…No doctor or responsible public health official I know is advocating to stay home until we have a vaccine. We need to move forward. Let’s be smart in how we do it. First two Tweets of a long Thread by Dara Kass, MD@darakass who is: She, Her, Wife, Mom, Doctor, Boss, Ally, Advocate, and Accomplice.
You can call me a Grandma killer, I’m not sacrificing my home, food on the table, all of our docs and dentists, every form of pleasure (museums, zoos, restaurants), all my kids’ teachers in order to make other people comfortable. If you want to stay locked down, do. I’m not. Tweet from Bethany S. Mandel@bethanyshondark who says: Wife to @sethamandel | SAHM homeschooling momma to 4 | Editor @Ricochet | On @LadyBrainsCast | Neo-Nazi & grandma killer.
It’s wild to me that when daily new infections were 676/day and deaths were 6/day we shut the country down but now that we’ve reduced infections to 23,912/day and deaths to 1,262/day, it’s time to reopen. Truly the beacon on the hill. Tweet from Doctor Nifkinbio@DocNifkinobstetrician who says: I deliver babies and provide abortions. I save lives. I used to be somebody. Future resident of the Kingdom of Heaven
I’ve had a hard time writing this particular post, I started to say something but the world kept changing and my opinion kept changing and the post kept wanting to tell me, No, you’ve got it backward.
The pictures and stories Google and Facebook’s mysterious algorithms choose to show me are of thugs carrying assault rifles and waving anti-Semitic signs out of cars, threatening mayhem if we don’t open up. My instant reaction is anger and it bothers me that I’ve somewhat trained my digital world to make me angry. In the real world, driving around, I don’t see thugs with assault rifles, what I see are normal people not wearing masks as they walk the streets or wait in line for takeout at a restaurant, what I see is that the parks are busy on weekends and people are going to the beaches. What I don’t see are many masks, what I don’t see is the level of caution I would like, but the real world is already opening-up, relaxing the rules. As much as I dislike and disrespect the thugs – and, I want to stress I think it is despicable that these people are in the public space with their people-killing-weapons, making threats disguised as clamoring for Liberty while waving anti-semitic signs – I think that the thugs are right. Let me explain.
I’ll start with the bottom line, our government is not going to protect us, it is literally – in the old fashioned sense – incapable of protecting us. For a long time, months at least, life is not going to get easier than it is right now. Our government is not able to protect us as well as China is protecting its citizens or South Korea, or Germany, Singapour, or almost any other Class A country in the world. We don’t have the ability to test as much as is required, we have supply chains that have increasingly prioritized efficiency over resilience, and, most importantly, here an individual’s rights trump – sorry – the community’s rights. In China, when you are tested – and everybody is tested and given a CT scan – you sit in a waiting room until the results come back, if you have COVID-19 you’re isolated instantly. The potential infectee doesn’t go home until they are clear, the infected people are separated from the uninfected. In Wuhan, they had six new cases last weekend, the first new cases since April 3rd, and they ran 11,000,000 new tests in ten days. But we can’t do that. Sadly, we can not rely on either our state government or the Federal Government to protect us. We have to protect ourselves and the only way to protect ourselves is by acting as if everybody we interact with is infected and can make us very sick if not dead.
OK, not everybody, not the people we live with because you will probably be co-infected or co-not infected. But from there on it just depends on how much risk we want to take. It’s a lot like sex in that we are not just interacting with one person but that one person and everybody they have interacted with over the last fourteen days.
I know that the problem with opening up now is that the virus is still here. Where I live, San Mateo County, California, the number of infected people is still growing at a rate that will double the number of infected every 38.3 days. However, if we wait six months or, even, eighteen months to open, the virus will still still be here. The whole point of sheltering in place – SIP, henceforth – the way we are doing it is to slow the curve down; our halfway measures are not going to get rid of the virus, they haven’t yet and they won’t going forward.
I went to the eye doctor last Thursday and then stopped by a restaurant to get lunch to go on the way home. Wednesday a week ago, I got Chinese to go, and the day before that I went to our local market. After all that, I’m still alive. I keep seeing pictures of kids at beaches or parties and my Facebook stream is full of friends talking – screaming – about how irresponsible the perpetrators are but their gamboling on the beach doesn’t bother me much. When I was in San Francisco a couple of days ago, I drove by Alta Plaza Park which had, probably, twenty groups of people most of them young and many of them closer than six feet to some other maskless young person. Sure, I can get angry, I can get myself stirred up, but their actions can’t influence how I interact with the world outside my front door.
Those that are paranoid – that think every unknown person is infected – are safe. The eye doctor had a sign on the door for me to wait for her to open the door, she made sure I didn’t touch anything but the floor, the exam chair, and the metal shelf I put my glasses on. I kept thinking, She’s overdoing this and then realizing, no, she’s not. Her paranoia made me safer too. Like her, I’ve got to protect myself and to do that effectively, I have to be paranoid. The butcher had a table blocking the door, which was open and my prepaid package was sitting on it waiting for me while the butcher, masked, stood at the back of the shop. I think that is going to be my life for the next year, at least.
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