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Glad to hear that you and yours are doing well, and saddened by the death of your friend.
I think the lockdowns at this point are being sustained by a game of legal chicken. If your negligence in not making everyone in a three mile radius wear masks 24/7 causes even one person to think they might have contracted the ‘rona then you’re going to get sued back into the stone age. Maybe. The way the law works now nobody really knows until the nine black robes decide it for us. It’s not healthy.
“Nine Scorpions in a Bottle.” Max Lerner
Sorry for your loss, Skip. Powerful stuff, from both you and Thelma.
This! I don’t mean to make light of those who have been sick with the disease – and especially not of those who have died from it. But the fact of the matter is, life continues; and trying to put it on hold is even now doing more damage than lifting the restrictions and letting people find their way back to normal would.
And thanks for this reminder from your Aunt Thelma. It’s something I needed to be reminded of:
My father never really mentioned his bout with polio that I remember. What I heard about it, I heard second hand through my mother. I’m not sure that he ever talked about it with her, either. What she told me had come from my paternal grandmother before she died. Too late to ask him about it now, though.
There’s that angle, I think it’s also about reassuring people. I remember after 9/11 when the government called out the National Guard and had men with automatic weapons standing guard outside all the airports. It had nothing to do with stopping terrorists, and everything to do with making passengers feel safe enough to fly again for the sake of the economy.
I suspect for many, the sight of everyone wearing masks makes them feel safer, and that may be necessary for a while to coax people out of lockdown and back into crowded public spaces.
At the same time, for other people (me included), the sight of masks is a reminder that everything is terrible, nothing is normal, and everyone is doomed. Going out is like being blasted with an air horn. “Crisis! Crisis! All is crisis! Oh, you’ve forgotten that we’re in the middle of a crisis? Well, let me remind you, then.”
Very good. Very helpful to hear some first-hand experience.
I’m so sorry for your troubles. Thank you for sharing. May G-d’s Strength and Peace Comfort you all.
What I remember is the Before and After summers: I was very little, but I remember a summer where all the adults around my sister and me in our family and the neighborhood were very anxious. Talking about something that they were all really afraid of. And that summer we didn’t go to the beach or the pool. That was Before. Sometime the next summer was the After: every person in the neighborhood went to the elementary school and was vaccinated with the Salk vaccine. After that it was safe. A cousin who is about 5 years older than I got a medium case and recovered but had damage to one leg, needing long therapy. He ultimately ran track in high school and went to college with a track Scholarship. He was Before. I was After.
My father was in an iron lung and then a wheelchair when he was eight and went through intensive therapy. He was later in the army and a policeman, so the therapy worked for him.
It is helpful to hear the stories of real occurrences, for which I am thankful to SkipSul. I’m glad his family is doing well, and am sorry for the death of his friend.
I wouldn’t give up on the masks, though. I am not quite as rigorous in the use of a mask when going out as my wife is, but I wear one where required. A mask may or may not keep me from getting or giving covid, but if it helps keep the viral load down when I am in the presence of sars-cov-2 in the air, I may end up with a less severe case. If I am wearing a mask and spend a lot of time in the presence of people with sars-cov-2 who are wearing masks, chances of avoiding covid-19 are not so good, but there are other factors, too, some of which are being studied by medical researchers. I also take my Vitamin D and do all the other things to keep my 70+ year-old immune system in as good order as possible.
I am so sorry to hear about your family’s ordeal these past few weeks. Good to have that stack of books after all. :-)
It’s interesting that not all of you got an active infection even living in the same household. That is really good news, but I’m really surprised by it.
I’ve already told about my father-in-law’s bout with polio in 1912 when he was twelve. He never talked about it, but I learned about it from others. Part of it was a story an elderly cousin of his told me not long after we were married, about how he handled corn-picking when he was recovered enough to try it. He fell a lot but he always picked himself up and kept going, which was the kind of person he was all his life. I thought that story was common knowledge, but years later when I told it in the presence of my wife, after the cousin had long been dead, she said, “I never heard that!” Made me wish I had told it earlier when it wouldn’t have been too late for her to hear it first-hand.
This year was our 50th wedding anniversary. We were looking at our wedding photos and I noticed again how in one posed photo of the bride and groom with their parents, he does his best to stand without his cane. He was able to do it, but it was awkward for him.
When my wife was a little girl and received a little red wagon for Christmas, he saw the possibilities and commandeered it to haul his tools around the farmyard, and she never got to use it much. Nowadays there would be no shortage of wheeled aides to help him with things like that.
On our living room wall is the oval-framed portrait of my father-in-law’s little sister, who did not survive the polio. There were several other siblings who never contracted it. All of them are gone now.
One possibility being investigated by medical researchers is that some people already have some immunity from previous bouts of colds caused by other coronaviruses. It has been several weeks since I last heard that possibility discussed on MedCram.
Exactly what I’m wondering. It must be what’s happening. It’s the only explanation. Or innate immunity. If only we knew for sure. And if we could know who those immune people are, it would change everything about the economic impact of the pandemic.
This is the first I’ve read of polio before my childhood. It’s a reminder that viruses are resilient and adaptable – and just lurk in our background looking for opportunities to survive. It reinforces my view that trying to absolutely squelch COVID through avoidance makes it a timing issue. It’s not going away.
As a rank amateur – it seems to me that immunities are among the great medical mysteries: who has them, how they operate, how they can be “acquired,” and so on. I’m one of those who does not get cold-type viruses, not even the killer germs kids bring home from school every fall and spring, nor the ones my husband brings home from work. Our son seems to have gotten mine – he didn’t miss a day from school after the chicken pox acquired 7 days after his first day at preschool. He was one of the Before kids in kindergarten – before the chicken pox vaccine. He does get belly based viruses, but he takes the swim in the local pond approach to eating local food in deployment. He says it takes 3 weeks but then he’s fine for the rest of that one.
My 66 year old brother and his 50 year old wife got it, he moderately severe, she quite light. Their 14 year old daughter did not get it and spent two weeks running the household while they lived in the basement.
There is a growing body of at least anecdotal evidence that Vitamin D just on its own plays a significant factor in resistance to COVID, or the severity of the bout if you do get it. I’ve been taking a high dosage of VitD for years because I work in an office and never see the sun. Maybe that had a part? Who knows?
First, my prayers for your friends and family. Second, we are to wear masks for the rest of our lives whether we like it or not. If we don’t wear masks to “prevent” flu (thousands of people die each year of the flu and with a vaccine-just not this year, they are assumed to have Rona) then this is all theater. When will the lawsuits start for people who died of flu when no one was wearing a mask?
I’m actually not surprised by it. Delighted, of course, but not surprised. If COVID were as actually contagious as the fearmongering has made it out to be, we would have seen far far greater numbers of cases, lockdowns or not.
And when you look at the cases, where have they dominated? In the elderly, and those with immune problems. Not exclusively in those populations, of course, but mostly there. The problem is that the media has lasered in on all of the exceptions, the more exceptional the better, and ignored the others.
Put simply, the people who were most likely to get it have gotten it – it’s like a wildfire burning through available fuel. As the fuel has diminished, so has the fire, and there are many things this fire is not nearly hot enough to burn.
Thelma tells how the hospital kept an iron lung in her room behind a curtain. Until her infection peaked and began to recede, they were worried she might need it. It was a close call.
Polio is still a menace in Africa, and still crops up in India, Pakistan, and elsewhere. Unlike Smallpox, we are likely never going to be free from polio. Polio exists in the wild, in primate populations (good luck inoculating millions of apes and monkeys!), so new strains cross over every few years. And the vaccine used to prevent polio is not the original Salk type, using dead viruses, but a different type that is more effective because it uses greatly weakened active viruses – but every so often it fails. In the last 20 years, I think there have been 4 small outbreaks directly traced (by genetics) back to these vaccine strains. And there have even been the rare cases in the US where a freshly inoculated infant gave polio to an adult who was never vaccinated.
We like to pat ourselves on the back for the eradication of Smallpox, but that was the one great exception (assuming it never breaks out of the labs where it is sill kept). There’s not another virus we have ever totally squelched.
Not one.
So it will be with COVID.
Thanks for this post, Skip. It’s a reminder of how such things have always been with us, and that perhaps disease is the normal condition of humanity.
My brother got it, neither his wife nor his 18 year old daughter got it. He experienced only minor sinus congestion but because they were visiting with his mother-in-law who was hospitalized, his wife told him to get tested. So that weekend he and my niece headed up to the mother-in-law’s house two hours away, and he stopped along the way to get tested. So two hours in the car together driving up north, and then two hours back to their house, my niece was readily exposed. But she never got it. (His case was a week of sinus congestion, that’s it.)
My wife’s sister got it this summer. She has had a very severe case, never hospitalized but at least one ER trip due to breathing issues. Spent about 8 weeks suffering with it. Only just now starting to feel normal. Neither her husband nor their 16 year old got it.
The variance in how this affects people is really strange. For some friends of ours, the whole family of six came down with it. Sounded like it was a “fever/bad cold” experience for them. A co-worker was diagnosed with it last week. She’s only very part-time and hadn’t been in the office for a few days (and is usually only in for a few hours when she is), so nobody at work is concerned. For her it’s mild. But she’s also convinced this is her second go-around with it, because she was knocked out for about a month in January and February with pneumonia-like symptoms (so were a few others from our church back in December and January). I haven’t heard if the rest of her family has it, though.
Just learned yesterday that one of my wife’s brothers has or had it. Heard that second-hand, so we haven’t checked in.
With Wisconsin cases spiking, I expect we’ll hear of more people we know who have it, though interestingly, in our county just over half of the 2058 cumulative cases are in the 18-24 age range — the local spike corresponds with the University resuming classes. (I can’t find data on current cases, but I suspect our 233 active cases are almost entirely in that age range.)
Yes they do, and that keeps the mistrust high.
The wife of an employee had it. First presented in late April as a bad sinus infection (to which she is prone) and she had been symptomatic for 4 weeks at that point. Her doc had her tested only to rule out COVID. Her husband (my employee) never had it.
Then the wife started feeling terrible again in July, and had to be hospitalized as her larynx swelled up so much she couldn’t breath. She coded and had to have an emergency trach tube put in. The rub? While by mid-May she had tested negative for COVID, in July she was positive again. Apparently for some people it really really lingers.
And docs still don’t know why.
Hope the worst of your ordeal is done. As we go through this period with the characteristics of a virus constantly in the discussion, it causes me to rethink some of the stories I heard about polio. I was born in 1938 so my childhood was spent before any polio vaccine was developed. Polio had been around for many years. My mother’s older brother had polio but I don’t know what year. As it was related to me, he had it all over his body and that was said to be a form from which sufferers frequently recovered completely and he did. I used to just accept that story but now I find myself doubting it. That same uncle of mine suffered Guillian-Barre Syndrome following a Swine Flu shot and he got over that as well but with some lasting effects.
There is yet much unknown about our current situation.
My wife and I and youngest had a brief “conditional” quarantine this past weekend. The church office where my wife works had two Friars come down with Covid symptoms and then positive tests. Though she usually telecommutes, there are a few things that must be handled in person. She was in the vicinity of one of those friars during that window, and had to be tested. Daughter, too. Meanwhile, I was traveling for work for a few days was therefore oblivious. For some reason (bureaucrats, I think), they didn’t get results in the couple days expected, so I came home to a quarantine situation. I could have stayed away, but I would have wanted to be with them anyways. Both tests were negative, fortunately, and we can go about our business, but the randomness and ineffectiveness of the quarantine regimes annoys the [expletive] out of me.
My poor grandmother worried herself almost to death because I was always at the swimming pool in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. I guess the certitude associated with that as the transmission source was just wrong. Not many people got polio as I remember but the result was very serious for those who did. Most Americans after 1960 don’t know much about it except taking the vaccine.