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Trapped in Fear
As I write this essay, I don’t even know if I’m going to post it. I only know my heart is aching and I can’t make the pain go away. It’s one thing to know that Americans are suffering due to their fear of Covid-19 and the propaganda that has been promoted throughout this country; it’s another to see a friend suffering from a fear that she is unwilling or unable to overcome.
I have known this woman for more than ten years. She is a Leftie. We learned a long time ago that there is no point in discussing politics. She is smart and sweet and is a down-to-earth person in so many ways. She developed a wonderful program to help children learn to read by bringing dogs into the learning process. And she’s been a good friend.
Since she’s a snowbird and currently living in Chicago, we’ve been practicing a physical movement series together through What’s App. Abiding by our original understanding, we haven’t discussed politics or Covid-19. But today, for me, something cracked open.
She is returning to Florida in a couple of weeks and asked me an odd question: was there a way to check on the internet at any given time whether emergency rooms and/or ICU beds were open at a hospital? I had to ask her to explain what she was asking, and then her query became clearer: if she had to be hospitalized with Covid-19, could she check which hospitals had space?
My brain felt as if it had been flooded by a dense fog. I then dipped into dangerous territory and asked her if she was getting news on the virus from any place other than MSNBC or CNN. She didn’t answer. I told her that nationally, the percentage of deaths was going down. She responded that wasn’t true. (I suspect she was thinking of the number of cases.) Then she said that North Dakota and Wisconsin, where she has family, were in bad shape, and I asked her what she meant. She said that five students had caught the virus and they were shutting down the school. I then buried myself when I asked if anyone had died. She flippantly answered that she didn’t think so. At that moment, I knew I had misstepped.
I quickly suggested that we not go there in the conversation. She agreed and we moved on to our practice. I had a difficult time concentrating, and although we were cordial when we finished, I felt the small crack that had emerged between us.
So, I’m stumbling under a swirl of emotions: disbelief, anger, sorrow. I know that part of my resistance to her state is my own frustration with dealing with the victimization of others. How can a person choose to be a victim? How can a person who is technologically adept not use her skills to get to the truth? How can a person who is naturally curious insist on wearing dark glasses rather than walking into the light?
I know. I know. People like her are everywhere. They choose suffering over information. They prefer living with the worst-case scenario rather than embracing possibility.
And there is nothing I can do to help—help her or anyone else.
Published in Healthcare
Agreed.
The only distinction I would make is that the south experienced a different pattern—slow rise, much lower max, slow decline. (The bug is weirdly latitude-sensitive.) So comparing what governors did or did not do is almost pointless because the bug did it’s thing regardless. Florida and Texas merely did less proportionately damage to their own economies than others while suffering a less horrific intensity of infection because of their location on the globe.
Despite incredibly bad media coverage, people everywhere are forming a clear picture of actual risk and the ineffectiveness of the various mandates. The fear & control faction is poised to win the narrative no matter what—either lock us down until the pandemic burns out of its accord and then absurdly take credit for defeating COVID or if the revolt succeeds and the mandates collapse, the fear & control types will then blame every subsequent case on the rebels.
I keep hearing of scares that hospitals are near their breaking point, but if they are, the odds say that there are going to be incidents where some hospitals will exceed their breaking point.
It hasn’t happened. Again and again, some hospital system’s CEO will hold a press conference and tell the public they aren’t about to go under. It happened in Houston about a month ago.
And here in Alaska, we had a minor scare as well, and again, a hospital CEO called a press conference and said it’s not true..
Call me extremely skeptical. I consider these scares as yet another example of hysteria.
I also question how long a person is kept in hospital, versus how long they need to be.
Trump had a turnaround of about four days. But his doctors wanted him to stay longer.
I completely agree, @alsparks. I’ve heard hospital spokesmen say that they limit the beds and space to make the most efficient use of their staff. They have plenty of space and beds to expand to if the need arises. This statement has been made over and over again; thanks for bringing it up.
In Alaska, we did go through a 2 month shutdown but no statewide repeat, but deaths are low and hospitalizations are steady.
The Nordic countries are doing well compared to their southern neighbors.
There’s speculation as to why, with one theory that we take more vitamin D supplements. With the lack of daylight during the winter, doctors have been prescribing it for years.
But who knows? Saying that the southern climes aren’t getting harder hit is true, but it applies to extreme northern climes too.
I have seen a recent pretty convincing study that finds that vitamin D is not really a factor. That surprised me given some other reports. The weird geography of COVID is discussed brilliantly in this video by the incomparable Ivor Cummins.
I highly recommend Kevin Roche’s Healthy-Skeptic as one-stop shopping for quality research on the issue.
The only way out is through.
. . . and yet everyone thinks they can rid the planet of it. Sigh.
We’re getting smacked with COVID here in Wisconsin, and there’s a lot of talk about reaching Hospital Capacity.
Our hospitals are 84% full. (Data here.)
However, how many of those 9,535 hospitalizations are due to COVID?
1,336. Which is very, very high. Three times our April peak.
Or 11.7% of hospital beds. That doesn’t sound all that frightening. You could double those 1,336 cases and still have hospital beds left over.
And what about ventilators, which were supposedly the most worrisome shortage?
The numbers sound frightening in an informational vacuum, and we’re frequently near the top of the nation in new cases.
But . . . I can’t say that our hospitals are being overwhelmed by COVID. They’re at 84% capacity, and sure, a surge of COVID cases could cripple individual hospitals. But only 11% of that 84% is COVID. If a news story said “Hospitals in Wisconsin are now at 75% capacity!” would that sound alarming? That’s about what they’d be without COVID.
Fear sells.
It does indeed. And it infuriates me. How long are those hospital stays? What is the turnover? How many people have died? Those are the numbers that matter. Thanks, Drew.
I’ll keep an open mind. I’ll want to see more before I’m convinced. In any case, Covid or no Covid, I’m taking vitamin D. I’m just not overdosing on it.
If they were at 10% capacity for a sustained period, people would lose jobs. Actually that has already happened hasn’t it?
It was when they banned elective procedures.
So what is the ideal used capacity for sustained employment?
I don’t have much confidence in my ability to convince the fearful that they shouldn’t be so fearful.
Unfortunately, as others have noted, those most fearful seek to impose their fear onto the rest of us.
Our church Sunday School class is dominated by fearful members. They are horrified that some of us attend the limited in-person worship services, and try to get the church to stop holding in-person worship services of any kind. They openly say that no one should leave his or her house until at least next summer, and probably later, except for the most dire of needs. One described her preparing for such a necessary excursion – full long sleeved and long pants outfit with gloves and face mask.
I normally stay quiet because they didn’t rationally think their way into the fear, so it’s unlikely I can get them to rationally think their way out of the fear. But, in yesterday’s class (all classes are by Zoom), they were stirring up fear and insisting that everybody needed to stay home for the next eight months or more, I finally spoke up with information about the harm that staying home and isolation is doing to people. That seemed to be new information to a disturbingly large number of the class members.
I wasn’t trying to dissuade them of their own fear. But, I wanted them to see that the measures they thought should be imposed on everyone to allay their own fear was causing harm to others. They had not heard of that. They were unaware of increases in suicides, of increases in domestic violence, of increases in drug and alcohol abuse, of increases in mental illness, of starvation in the third world because of disrupted food chains.
I may not be able to dissuade others of their fear, but I feel the need to help them see that the measures the fearful demand of others are harming others.
Brilliant, @fullsizetabby. You must have a lot of credibility with them for them to listen to you without shouting you down. I’m very glad for you and impressed that you have that kind of rapport. Thank you for not sitting back and allowing them to self-destruct without intervention. You may not have changed minds, but you educated them and planted some seeds.
I think I should start wearing a tinfoil hat and demand that everyone else wear one when speaking to me lest my thoughts be tapped by aliens via the conversation. I see no reason why the rest of you should not respect my sensibilities in this matter.
Yes! This is what is so often ignored – the price extracted from the “other side” of the equation. Statements about staying home and distant from everyone totally ignore the price that’s baked into those actions – the financial, emotional, mential, and physical devestation for many.
However right now the local health experts across America are urging people to get the flu vaccine, as a way to help their bodies from falling prey to COVID. This is possibly the worst advice they can offer.
But the 40% of the population who wants to do something, anything! to avoid getting COVID will go out and do just that.
Well that was 16 hours late
How can anyone know this?
I assume this is just “generic coronavirus.” Not specifically Xi’s magical coronavirus.
Emails work. Now you’ve got the “Post Of The Week” “stamp of approval” and showing in the sidebar. :-)
Did you email them? Aren’t you sweet! It’s pretty neat to see it there, too. Thanks @kedavis
I figured it would be good if they did it before the next one came up… :-)
This is the 2nd study that has been done inside the USA, the 1st having been done in 2017. Both came to the same conclusion: that a flu vaccine increases by 36%, per the 2020 study, or 37% per the 2017 US military study the chances of the innoculated person then going on to experience a corona virus. It might not be COVID itself, but since COVID is a corona virus, it is an indication that if you were already on the fence about getting a flu vaccine, it might be good to listen to your intuition this time around.
Loading the human body up with all the particular heavy metals & adjuvants that exist inside a flu vaccine is a risk many people are willing to take. Other people are not inclined to take the flu shot, but they do so because their job requires it.
In the 1990’s, as a nursing assistant, I was not allowed to take a flu shot after being injured in 1976 by the swine flu shot. That seems like a logical precaution. But that protection for people who already know their body does not handle a flu shot the way other people do has now been eliminated.
Since I have not had regular flu shots, I can say that a certain number of women I knew who always had them ended up being sick for 2 to 3 weeks after their injections. To me this seemed ridiculous. I ‘ve had the flu – maybe once each 8 or 9 years of my last 30 years. It rarely lasted more than a week. Why get a shot that makes you sicker with after effects than the infection itself would?
This year’s flu injection is designed to carry 3 or 4 separate flu virus components. They are these:
Vaccine I:
Cell- or recombinant-based Vaccine Variety of flu injection:
With 3 flu viruses: an A/Hawaii/70/2019 (H1N1)pdm09-like virus;
an A/Hong Kong/45/2019 (H3N2)-like virus; and
a B/Washington/02/2019 (B/Victoria lineage)-like virus.
#################
Vaccine II:
Egg-based Vaccines:
With 4 flu viruses: an A/Hawaii/70/2019 (H1N1)pdm09-like virus;
an A/Hong Kong/45/2019 (H3N2)-like virus;
a B/Washington/02/2019 (B/Victoria lineage)-like virus; and
a B/Phuket/3073/2013 (B/Yamagata lineage)-like virus.
From 2020 Youtube short vid on flu vax ingredients, it’s possible to find that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZRQFy-3cLs
Afluria quadrivalent – contains thimerosal, that is mercury
Fluad contains formaldehyde
Fluarix conatina flormaldehyde
I wonder if they wear masks while engaged in other intimate activities. Maybe they could get their meals intravenously so they don’t have to take their masks off.
Yes, or like I mentioned on page 1 when people were incredibly saying that even married couples who wanted children, had to use condoms, ALWAYS. Because AIDS can kill EVERYONE!!!
Well, it’s done–I’m pretty sure. I wrote to my friend who had returned to FL in great alarm about the virus. (Recall that I upset her telling her that in spite of illness in a school no one had died.) So I texted her last night to see if we were on for practice (since we were both in FL). She wrote back that she wanted to take a break; that if I wanted to discuss our conversation last week (which I had cut off so no further damage was done), we could do it another time. I texted back that I was fine with her decision; that I didn’t think we had anything to discuss, and if our beliefs were irreconcilable, we could take a break. She could let me know if she changes her mind.
I realize that’s unlikely to happen.
Thanks for taking the time to update us. I hope your friendship isn’t over forever. Hopefully, you’ll be able to repair things one day and enjoy time together again.
Thanks, @weeping. We just never know. The door is open.
Every time I relax, God gives me a reason to fear, and fear big.
That’s interesting, Bryan. I think when I relax, I’m better able to handle whatever comes up. When I steel myself with fear, I feel the wounds afterward.