When it all began in March and April, NYC became the epicenter of COVID death in the United States. The reality was so harsh, so brutal, so traumatic, so beyond the experience of anyone alive under the age of 107, that those of us reporting on all major hospitals being ringed with six or more refrigerated trailer trucks (as pictured above) were denounced as liars, or worse. It was hard to get angry at them. It was as traumatic and terrifying here as it was unbelievable everywhere else. Then came the explanations/rationalizations.
We were told that the virus had already gone through the nation since October of 2019. Everyone had an Uncle Louie or Aunt Matilda who was really sick with some strange flu-like affliction that defied Nyquill. It was New York’s turn. That’s all. (No word on why WE had scores of refrigerated morgue trucks packed to the gills and 30-day wait lists for cremations)
We were told that New Yorkers were more susceptible to the virus than the rest of the nation. (An assessment I’d agree with if the viral manifestations were F-bombing and straightforward talk with the bark on.)
We were told that obviously the rest of the nation had hit herd immunity ahead of New York with strains of the virus that were milder than ours. (The first quasi serious-sounding assessment.)
We were told that Floridians and Texans had so much sun (in the winter) that their bodies were just little factories of Vitamin D production that we pale northern-types could only envy and That’s why they had practically no cases in the Sunshine State. (These sunny epidemiologists were nowhere to be found when cases spiked in late Spring and Summer, when Floridians shed their sweaters as the frigid 60-degree temperatures climbed into the 90’s and sunshine exposures increased ten-fold.)
We were told that doctors were categorizing every death as COVID to take advantage of the partial compensation the Federal Government was giving for patients on respirators. So follow the logic here. Docs put everyone within arm’s reach on a ventilator, including the passing janitors, in order to score $38,000 bounties from the Feds (a compensation, as the government asked hospitals to shut down all elective surgery in order to use those ventilators). Then after putting people with slight coughs on ventilators and killing 80% of them, they said it was COVID, in order to cash in.
No, seriously. That’s essentially what was being said: People not needing ventilation were being hooked up so hospitals could cash in, then their deaths were being called COVID when they really died from comorbidities hitherto stably managed.
And all to get a bounty for the hospital. Who knew that free money could make more liars out of physicians than the IRS and golf combined?!?!
Who knew that free money could make the best docs anywhere a pack of Josef Mengeles?
But that was the New York experience as told by an army of Google epidemiologists and microbiologists. Meanwhile, this new peer-review committee of Google scientists was telling this scientist (at it since the 1980’s), that he didn’t know what he was talking about as he refuted their echo chamber expertise.
I have no way of breaking it gently to the denizens of the Google Faculty Lounge, but, really, I’m not their peer. As Jefferson said in the Declaration of Independence,
…accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
What began as an understandable level of denial morphed into denial masquerading as political statement, and with that silliness (deadly, to be certain), it really is time to clear the faculty lounge and have the voices of those who actually are trained to deal in truth, who follow the science wherever it leads, being heeded for the first time in almost a year.
I and many others have predicted pretty much every turn of events throughout this pandemic. It’s not that we are the Amazing Kreskins of microbiology and epidemiology, but because there are laws of physics and biology that do not genuflect to politics. Those laws, when coupled with human behavior tell us which direction the pandemic will take two months distant. So, when not wearing a mask became the mark of a true Conservative, a true Catholic, the real scientists knew the squall would become the perfect storm.
If facts couldn’t shake people from their panic-induced denial, it was all but certain that they could never risk membership in their tribes by engaging in heresies such as mask-wearing. But here is where the well-rehearsed tropes of the late Winter and Spring would become so very deadly:
People began to believe their own press releases. As cases rose across the country on the heels of a maskless rebellion, it seemed that the doctors in the rest of the nation were as greedy and deadly as the New York doctors.
So profoundly entrenched in popular culture was the accusation that there were no increased deaths in the US, that the CDC in October published a report showing that indeed there was an increase in deaths, year-to-date, that slightly exceeded the COVID count. Read it here.
Indeed, Johns Hopkins reports that on October 23, the date that the CDC issued that report, there were 224,500 COVID deaths, so that tracks perfectly with the CDC estimate in the graphic taken from the article. (Of course, every time I mention this on FaceBook, at least 20 people from different states all tell me of the motorcyclist run over and flattened by a UPS truck that they scraped of the pavement and brought to the ER, where the docs promptly declared the cause of death to be… you guessed it…. COVID-19! And another $38,000 into the till!)
But now the nation is in serious trouble. Another of the great tropes fell today. The one where we were told that the flu is deadlier than COVID. According to CDC, an average flu season sees 35.6 K deaths. Today the US reached a milestone of 357,300 deaths. For serious adults, that’s ten times the number of deaths as an average flu season. (The Google epidemiologists will immediately discount the 321,700 motorcyclists run over by delivery trucks and grudgingly admit that they were wrong, that COVID kills just as many people as the flu.) We still have two more months to complete a full year of COVID, so it’s not impossible to imagine this thing being 13 times deadlier than the flu.
And then there was our being told by the deniers that a 99% survival rate argued against closures. That meant that if everyone in the country was infected, 3.28 million would die. Oops. So much for the flu being deadlier.(You can forgive the Google epidemiologists. Evidently Google doesn’t require inconvenient subjects like statistics for their degrees.)
This week the cracks in the dam have given way and the flood waters of misery are bursting forth all over the nation, no longer able to be denied. Los Angeles County has instructed their ambulances to leave the critically ill who can’t be saved and declare them dead in the field. This tracks with what happened here in NYC in the Spring, when paramedics were told that there were to be just two rounds of defibrillation and CPR for heart attacks and the show had to be wrapped up in 20 minutes instead of the customary 45, among other dire changes in protocol. (That, too, was denied by those west of the Hudson River)
Los Angeles has such an overflow of patients that they are running low on deliverable oxygen, as the lines freeze up if too much oxygen is drawn from the storage tanks too quickly.
All across the South and West we are seeing shortages of beds and the silent appearance of the refrigerated morgue trucks.
And STILL there is a hearty band of deniers who swear that California, having the strictest mitigation protocols and restrictions in the country, MUST have an undiscovered source of COVID infections. (They would just love to say it’s in the water, but California has little of that at the moment.) Having laws is one thing. Heeding them is another, especially when you move the illegal gatherings indoors and justify your 60-person Thanksgiving dinner as a funeral for the family’s turkey, in order to get around the 10-person limit for parties, etc.
But most Americans have awakened to some brutal reality: We are in the midst of a pandemic with an aerosolized virus that isn’t attached to a six-foot leash. Six feet gets you safely away from most of the droplets in a typical sneeze, but aerosols that linger in the air for three hours don’t travel six feet, then hang out and have a beer. We are in deep trouble because we have had unserious political leaders on one end of the spectrum, and opportunistic population controllers on the other. In between we have had public health officials repeatedly lie to the American people, squandering their credibility.
It’s a new year, and the deadliest wave of fatalities hasn’t hit us yet.
What we need desperately is adult leadership, and a population more willing to bite the bullet than take one.
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