A Tale of Two Cities
“Death may beget life, but oppression can beget nothing other than itself.”
“Detestation of the high is the involuntary homage of the low.”
– Charles Dickens, “A Tale of Two Cities”
On the first Saturday of December, I got home from work, straightened up the back deck, iced the beer down, tuned on the outside TV to watch a lesser game, and waited…
… for the Southeastern Conference Championship in Atlanta, the crown jewel of all the championship games and – with no respect to any pro sports or other college conferences – the most important title in the entire sporting world, bar none. Full-throated, tailgating overindulgence, scream-till-your-vocal cords-bleed joy was back in full, unrestricted capacity down South this year, and what a thrill it was to re-embrace who we are. I haven’t been to the enormous iris-roofed Mercedes Stadium (yet), but the sellout crowd on TV in the mad throes of fan grandeur in the biggest game of the season was beautiful to behold.
But that, and the regular season games, the great majority of which were sellouts, were huge super-spreader events in the Dark Age of COVID, leading to massive hospitalizations and hundreds of thousands more deaths, right? How dare we cheer a frivolous sport when we should be taking the sensible precautions of masking up in the shower and hiding under the bed until the UPS man gets off the porch? To borrow from College Gameday mascot headgear funnyman Lee Corso, “Not so fast…”
The Hill just published some interesting numbers:
“We examined the weekly new COVID-19 case rate in the home counties of the 14 SEC universities …The average COVID-19 infection rate peaked at 0.49 percent for the week before football games began, and then steadily decreased to 0.08 percent for the week ending Oct. 31, after which it remained low. The average weekly infection rate for the five weeks before SEC football began was 0.44 percent, while the average weekly infection rate during the SEC football season was 0.18 percent. No evidence suggests that SEC football activities have led to COVID-19 outbreaks in the communities hosting the games.” Well golly, THAT doesn’t sound right. The Fauci was on multiple shows nodding his agreement with the moronic softballs pitched him, calling the public’s rush back to the stadiums “really unfortunate” but tragically, the perpetual gloom peddled by the Man of Science just hasn’t been backed up by actual data. It does, however, suggest that the lockdown lunacy pushed by Fauci and Birx, sold as tasty fear porn by everyone and I mean EVERYONE from CNN to Fox to the government to compliant, lawyer-fearful corporations to comfortably smarmy academicians … all of them were wrong. The “two weeks to slow the spread” was as dishonest as it was destructive when it became 18 months, and damn our pathetic profession for not taking a stand, instead of shuffling our feet, mumbling through ineffectual masks, and submitting to everything a couple of corrupt bureaucrats with medical degrees ordered.
Fast forward two weeks from the SEC Championship game, and New York City is once again leading the nation in paranoic virtue signaling. Omigod, Omicron!! The Rockettes cancelled their late season Christmas shows, most of Broadway shut down, restaurants are closing or requiring vaccine proof to enter, and still these beaten, cowed urbanites are lining up for hours at a time in the cold…to be tested. In the name of all that is fun, why??? Everything thus far observed about the Moronic Variant indicates that it is very contagious, and far milder than previous strains, and this may well turn out to be a blessing to us all by infecting us into a broader population immunity. It’s probably good to see the New Yorkers out in the fresh air, but their doctors should counsel them to ditch the face diapers, take daily zinc and Vitamin C, exercise, exercise, exercise, and follow up if they have actual symptoms. Mass “positives” from these testing lines are designed to stoke the fear, and will not have a practical benefit except for those peddling panic.
Those required to have a recent negative test to travel abroad, work, or visit are being victimized by absurd foreign governments, their own limp-wristed employers, or their pearl-clutching family members. As was proven in 2020, none of this will help anything, but it can still expand the damage. While delirious Bama fans and shellshocked Georgia fans were thronging out of Mercedes stadium and packing the Atlanta restaurants and bars, New Yorkers were preparing to herd into place to accept another season of loss and sadness. TV docs on every major outlet across the political spectrum are tailoring their opinions to keep their producers happy (and depositing their checks), and ignoring the obvious – hundreds of millions in this nation have already been infected and recovered, and the regions that have returned to normal life are faring no worse than the neurotic cities of the northeast and west coast that cannot grasp the futility of their choices. As the variants diminish in potency, physicians should return to what we were trained for, objective analysis, beneficial interventions, and reassuring our patients. We should, and can, encourage our patients and ourselves to reject nonsensical edicts, and return to living life fully and joyously.
Which admittedly, if you’re not a fan of SEC football, will be a little tougher to achieve.
The story of COVID-19 reaches back to that of two of its cousins, SARS and MERS. The first epidemic of SARS was in the early 2000’s with a case fatality rate (CFR) of 11% The next occurrence, our present pandemic, presents with a peculiarand protean manifestation from serious disease to asymptomatic infection, in the manner of the West Nile virus, another RNA+ strand virus with largely asymptomatic infections. The MERS infections in 2012 and 2015 presented with cycles of much higher lethality. The outbreak in South Korea had over 30% mortality, and spread principally within hospitals.
It was in dread of a pandemic of virus with similar lethal capacity but higher transmissibility that we prepared The Big Hammer for such an outbreak. We got an epidemic of a middle-range virus, but didn’t prepare any mid-size hammers. A great degree of the outcry against public health fascism is due to the nature of what we got. Had we had MERS, we would have had morgues at every outpatient clinic, and primary care would involve a certain amount of lugging and digging; and all the fuss over masking and handwashing would be more muted.
None of this prepared us for the viral outbreak of malignant brattiness pouring out of a once-proud civilization. Adults seem to have the whiniest tantrums, coincidentally, in the places where toddlers do – checkout lines, fast-food restaurants, etc., anyplace requiring even the slightest expression of patience and emotional continence.
Also, public health is now dominated by the politicians, who have a running game given to them in the form of the Pandemic Influenza Plan (aka the Big Hammer) and who are as entranced by its shininess as Gollum was by the Ring. We are now seeing the turn of seasons for COVID, which is its vanishing into obscurity, a la the H1N1 pandemic in 2009. (Ummm….does anyone remember that crisis?)
In more sober times, the public heartily embraced “Sh*t’s over, let’s go home.” (See WWI, WW2, etc.)
This dire observation is nearly 200 years old, and is more stunningly riveting than any blowsy prediction attributed to Nostradamus. We could at any day declare the public health measures now in place obsolete, and just stop them. Why we don’t is a more malignant disease than these mere RNA viruses, which are wont to run their lot, and disappear.
There was a time that America lived in this manner, to listen to the trained and respond. Now we prefer to be bratty Karens bawling and thrashing about in the local gas station shop, bellyaching about this or that injustice heaped upon us, in the same tone used by toddlers when mommy will not buy us candy. We do not deserve candy; it is questionable whether we deserve liberty.