Take a Chill Pill

Tired of the current pandemic? Yeah, well, we’ve had them before but we survived them somehow.Remmeber when bird flu was The Thing, and then it was swing flu was The Thing, and we were all going to be wiped out by it? And then that peculiar thing referred to as ebola virus showed up, but got hammered back into its place by a vaccine. Otherwise, we were all gonna die!!!! That didn’t work, either.

Smallpox is still rootling around somewhere out there in the bush, just waiting for a carrier to take it home, never mind The Black Death.

The local news has a regular morning episode about 15 minutes long, with two reporters discussing The Pandemic with a local university’s infectious diseases department head. The mortality rate rose just slightly a couple months ago, and now, it’s dropping back again. A Large Bunch of people have been vaccinated, not just locally, but also statewide, so naturally, the infection rate is dropping, and the morbidity rate is dropping accordingly. No, morbidity is not the same as mortality.

Since the school spring semesters will be closing in a few weeks and college students and families will be looking for a chance to escape the Doom & Gloom Cafe, we may see an uptick in the fall, but for now, things seem to be moving right along in the desired direction. And we see upticks in the flu and colds in the fall, anyway, right?

Yes, there have been many other pandemics prior to the current fiasco, which suffered badly from all those egocentric, spotlight-hugging government bureaucrats at the helm. It could have been done faster and better if there had been more interest in getting vaxxes and curatives to people, but politics got in the way, as usual, and here it is, nearly a year and some months since this started, and we still have the “bug” rootling around, looking for more people to infect.

And guess what else? Financial analysts are forecasting a long-term recession, now that Trump is out of office, one that won’t end quickly or have a swift recovery. Remember the fiasco with the housing bubble and the financials houses of cards that crashed in the early 2000s? There’s one of those bubbles going on now in real estate, with no thought to the future involved at all.

The lockdowns in Europe seem to have dropped the mortality rates somewhat, but when Europe actually does open up again, it’s entirely likely that the whole nasty thing will kick start itself all over again, and we’ll go right back through this nonsense, which could have been avoided.

But there have been pandemics prior to this, some of which were just as lethal and widespread, and no one panicked about it. The return of US military from post-WWI Europe brought us the Spanish flu, an H1N1 virus (per the CDC’s analysis of tissue samples taken back then and preserved) which originated in China and was taken to Europe by Chinese immigrants looking for work.

Let’s not forget all those historic episodes, such as the Plague/Black Death (bubonic plague) brought to Europe from the Middle East by merchant ships loaded with flea-bearing rats that ran down the tie-ropes to the docks and spread out from there. Plagues go way back in history: The plague of Athens (3 times, 5th century BC) may have been anything from smallpox and measles to typhus and bubonic plague. The Plague of Justinian (5th century AD) was essentially the same: https://diasporatravelgreece.com/plagues-in-ancient-greece/

The Plague or Black Death that swept through Europe three times (maybe more) is generally attributed to Bubonic plague (yersinia pestis), but could also have been other diseases. As medicine in the Middle Ages was far more primitive and actually more lethal than it was even in ancient Greece and ancient Rome and parts to the east of both, the mortality rates of those Plague episodes were likely inflated by bad medical practices.

Here in our own country, there have recurring outbreaks of diseases with high morbidity rates and mortality rates. In the 1957 Asian flu pandemic, there was no vaccine available then to prevent it from hitting you, but there was far less panicky response to it than what we’ve seen with the current bug.

I think  I was in 7^th grade at school, nobody got sick to my knowledge, but we were all out on farms and only exposed to each other on the bus to and from school. Before that, polio would hit someone every summer, as did measles and chicken pox. My sister contracted polio at school, but it went to her tonsils and interfered with her breathing, which meant her tonsils had to come out. She was very lucky that way. But the next fall, everyone at school got the Schick test for TB, and we all were vaccinated for measles and polio. There was none of the overwrought nonsense that has been going on this time around.

When an Asian flu bug hit the USA in 1957, Dwight Eisenhower was the president. Maybe Ike just had more common sense, or maybe the partisanship that we see now hadn’t raised its ugly, self-involved, snot-nosed, spoiled brat head. “Wokeness” did not exist. A vaccination for that Asian flu bug was first priority, as indicated in the article at the link, and people got vaccinated, went on about their business, and did not change their routines.

https://www.nationandstate.com/2021/05/01/niall-ferguson-how-ikes-1950s-america-beat-the-asian-flu-with-science-common-sense/

In my view it is very, very strange, that the 1957 Asian flu epidemic was treated as if it were something normal – just stay home, take care of yourself, get some rest, eat properly, etc., – and the vaccine for it was developed just as quickly and successfully as Ike’s getting the government to send out word to people to use a little common sense. No shut-downs, no “mask up” stuff, none of that. People got together, went to the beaches and amusement parks like Coney Island, and generally didn’t act like frightened children.

Granted, there is a distinct difference between a real influenza virus and the shifting antigen corona virus #19 that we’ve been facing.  But the first priority of all should have been get the vaccine out to people, period. What caused the delay? Too many head cases were involved, and we see them on the TV news now, preening and patting themselves on the back, and I don’t mean anyone from CDC.

Getting the vaccine to people STAT! is what happened with the polio vaccine. That was when doctors still made house calls, FWIW. And those combo shots you get now? The measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine (MMR) and diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis vaccine (DTaP) are supposed to be given to children, but you probably got them again at boot camp when you signed up. I have two smallpox scars, thank you: one from being a very small two-legger, and one from boot camp.

But now,this episode of “How To Scare the Peasants” is all wound up in bureaucracy and tangled webs and layers of media stuff meant to panic people, which doesn’t make any sense.

That might account for those who believe it’s all a government hoax or conspiracy and refuse to knuckle under. The thing the “ain’t gonna get it” crowd don’t understand is that its lethality for each individual depends a lot on the individual’s immune system.

Since the current puppet show is run by the control freaks in the current government, one can only hope that it pisses off enough people. And then we can just start over.

Category: "The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves", "Your Tax Dollars At Work", 2020 Election, COVID-19, Historical