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Will We Ever Escape the Circle of Fear?
Apparently, we not only need to be aware of the effects of Covid-19 on our children; I’ve discovered that senior citizens are also trapped in a fear response, and I wonder if they will be able to free themselves from it.
I live in a 55+ community; during the past month residents who are 65+ years of age were able to get the Covid-19 vaccine, both doses. I received my shot earlier in another location. I was hopeful that this step would resolve the fears of many, but I know of three women who are still wearing masks, restricting their interactions with others, and staying home as much as possible.
One of these women is a friend. Yes, she does have co-morbidities. Recently another friend and I invited her to join us for a morning visit in a couple of weeks. She responded that if we met on the lanai, she would come, but if we met indoors, she would have to think about it. I have not talked to her myself, but I’m struggling with whether to ask her this question: “What would need to happen for you to feel you can return to a somewhat normal life?” My concern is that my question is (I believe) a fair and rational one; I anticipate, however, that she would not have a rational answer. I might be putting her on the spot, and I’m not even sure it would stimulate her thinking about how fear is dominating her decision-making process.
I was also at my manicurist (who is sane and practical) who also lives in this development, and she told me a story almost identical to my friend’s. She also told me about a woman who got the vaccine and won’t visit her grandchildren because she believes she carries the virus inside her and is afraid of infecting the children.
I’m not kidding.
* * * * *
From my own understanding, I realize that the vaccines don’t make me immune to the virus, but if I catch it, it will likely be a milder case. I also don’t know at this point how long the vaccine will be effective. Still, we are assessing when we will be going out, with whom, and how often. We only wear masks where they are required, and never outdoors. We’ve talked about taking small trips as soon as I’m fully recovered from my surgery, and I already have a trip to Baltimore on my calendar. So I’m looking at my neighbors and wondering what their thoughts are now about being vaccinated and how their lives will change. I may just do a little survey with them.
* * * * *
There are not only psychological but physiological factors that could affect our reaction to the pandemic and the follow-up period. I decided to investigate the role of the amygdala in our brain in our response to fear, and learned some intriguing facts. There are two systems that can determine our response to Covid-19: the amygdala and the pre-frontal lobes. Dr. Joseph LeDoux, a leading authority on neuroscience and fear, made the following observations:
‘The amygdala is not a fear centre,’ LeDoux said. ‘It’s a system in the brain that detects and responds to danger. But fear is our awareness that we’re in danger.’
But the fear is not the end of the process. The way we respond to the fear is determined by the pre-frontal lobes. The frontal lobes receive the fear message and try to deal with it rationally:
When the threat is mild or moderate, the frontal lobes override the amygdala, and you respond in the most rational, appropriate way. However, when the threat is strong, the amygdala acts quickly. It may overpower the frontal lobes, automatically triggering the fight-or-flight response.
The fight-or-flight response was appropriate for early humans because of threats of physical harm. Today, there are far fewer physical threats, but there are a lot of psychological threats caused by the pressures and stresses of modern life.
When stress makes you feel strong anger, aggression, or fear, the fight-or-flight response is activated. It often results in a sudden, illogical, and irrational overreaction to the situation.
There is no consensus over whether the amygdala responds in the same way if a person experiences a similar stimulus over and over again. For example, when a person is continually dealing with reminders of the virus, especially seeing others wearing masks or repeatedly having to don a mask, I wonder if the amygdala sees the mask as a danger and causes a reaction of fear. Or when a person sees Dr. Fauci, or someone from the CDC, or other “experts” on Covid-19, is it possible that people are continually being charged with fear, and therefore reluctant to “use their pre-frontal lobes” to consider whether they could respond differently?
As long as the government insists on mask-wearing; as long as businesses expect customers to wear masks when we enter the premises; as long as we repeatedly receive the mantra of wearing masks, social distancing, and hand-washing, will the average person be able to free himself from this overwhelming circle of fear?
Published in Healthcare
Well, would you in regular circumstances send patients infected with an extremely communicable disease to nursing homes full of elderly, compromised people? And at the time, people were already realizing that these were not regular circumstances. We were shutting down the economy. And Cumo didn’t just say nursing homes should accept COVID patients, he threatened to pull the licenses of any nursing home which didn’t accept them. So he made a bad decision and then doubled-down on it. Because…….Cuomo.
EB, I don’t think we’re disagreeing on anything. My point which you challenged me was that Cuomo did what you would expect to do when you have patients incapacitated but where hospitals are filled to capacity. You send the overflow to nursing homes. It was a horrendously wrong decision. Unless you’re saying Cuomo intentionally wanted people to die (which is unimaginable), I don’t know what you’re arguing over. We agree. It was an impulsive and wrong decision.
The point is that hospitals were NOT filled to capacity. Cuomo could have used the Navy hospital ship, the Javits Center, or the tent hospital in Central Park.
Since all of those were provided by Trump or other people Cuomo disliked, he sent virtually nobody to them.
Cuomo preferred people dying to using resources from people he didn’t like. That’s why he is a murderer.
Depraved indifference. Murder Two.
For whatever reason Cuomo did it, he did not do it to purposely kill people. If you have reached that level of cynicism, I think you should you need a reality check. This is on the order of those who claim Trump purposely had the Capital invaded.
@manny Nobody is saying he wanted to kill them. All anybody is saying is that he was full of hubris and egotistical “I know better than any of you and you can’t tell ME what to do.” And he didn’t want to accept help from anyone else, especially people who weren’t acceptable – like Republicans and Franklin Graham. And now he cannot admit that he made a mistake.
You’re not saying it. Most people on this post are not saying it, but I was responding to Headedwest who said, “Cuomo preferred people dying to using resources from people he didn’t like. That’s why he is a murderer.” He did too say it, and even Percival above is saying it.
I remember the left saying similar about George W. Bush when he sent troops into Iraq, people died, and essentially there were no weapons of mass destruction. It’s got to be a really high hurdle for a politician making a mistake for unintended consequences to be criminal.
Sending people infected with a contagious disease into an environment incapable of properly quarantining them when there are other vulnerable people present creates an extreme risk that those vulnerable people may die. Creating an extreme risk of death is the definition of depraved indifference.
I’m scratching my head and wondering what station in life one has had, or what reasonable success in life or intelligence a person has that he doesn’t know that disease is spread from the sick to the infirm, and not to put infected people living in the same environment as people with weakened systems.
In high school microbiology one learns about pathogens and their transmission. Though high schools may be deficient today, Andrew Cuomo was not a product of any substandard education. He graduated from St. Gerard Majella’s School in 1971 and Archbishop Molloy High School in 1975 per wikipedia.
Any deli owner knows about vectors of infection. Working in a 7-11 requires translatable training to this as well. And New York certainly has Infection Control officers who would know to isolate infected patients from infirm and weakened patients.
That Cuomo either did not know (which I cannot believe) or did not ask, or disbelieved his advisers or simply did not care to know, or knew and did not care, is at the very least the lowest form governance and the highest form of negligence anyone controlling a major government can reach. And that he did not take advantage of the Javits Center or the US hospital ship, both of which (or certainly at least the Javits Center) were modified to handle isolation patients, shows his contempt for the safety of his constituents.
One clarification: The hospital ships that went to LA and NYC were not there to accept COVID patients. They were to accept overflow of non-COVID patients, so that land-based hospitals wouldn’t be overwhelmed with both types of patients. If you remember the Diamond Princess, one of several cruise liners that had trouble finding a port where they could berth after the pandemic broke out, the ships were unable to prevent the spread of airborne particles of COVID. This problem would also occur on the hospital ships.
To take the point one step further, if it’s reasonable to decide that Trump should have known that some people would likely try to break into the Capitol building after his January 6th speech, then it’s just as reasonable to expect that COVID-infected people going to nursing homes would increase the likelihood of spreading the disease to uninfected seniors, especially with what was already known about COVID by that time. This may not lead to Cuomo being impeached, but a reasonable person could think he deserves it.
I hate to be defending Cuomo, the governor of my state, who I have long despised and I hope gets thrown out. But his decision to send Covid patients to nursing homes is not unprecedented. Patients with mildly contagious illnesses are routinely sent to nursing homes. The nursing homes I am aware of have segregated rooms and floors for different types of patients. Is Covid mildly contagious or not? Everyone here seems to be for doing away with masks and capacity rules and social distancing and yet you’re not when it works against a despised Democrat?
The thing is, it’s not reasonable to think Trump would have known about the consequences of that gathering.
At the outset of the virus, it was already known that it was highly contagious. When the patients were sent to the nursing homes, it was known then. As I understand the nature of viruses, the longer they are in the population, the less virulent they become. So by now, the virus is much less deadly. Even the variants, although quite contagious, are not as virulent (I believe).
The consequences occurring simultaneously two miles away from where he was speaking?
Correlation does not imply causation; at least it doesn’t for me. How about you?
I said Trump is not responsible for the riot.
And Cuomo ordered nursing homes to accept individuals under penalty of losing their licenses. So, there is a difference.
What’s highly contagious? We just had more hospitalizations here in NY over December and January than we had last spring. From what I have read, the rest of the country has also seen the same. We have learned how to identify and treat the disease much better but I have not seen anything that indicates we have developed a natural immunity. Hopefully vaccines are changing that.
As to how contagious, I believe I remember reading it’s about 3X more contagious than the flu. Is that “highly contagious “? I don’t know. It’s in the realm of argument however and I’m not an expert. Cuomo should not have sent them to nursing homes but I can see an honestly made but bad decision.
Read my response to Susan.
I read and saw walk-through videos that the Javits Center was specially modified with individual ventilation for each patient cubicle to provide for airborne infection protection. And I think I read that the hospital ship was cleared for accepting infected patients. Certainly there were options besides putting infected patients back into nursing homes. Also, I read that many nursing homes specifically petitioned Cuomo’s office to not take infected patients because they could not make adequate changes in staff and patient rooms to accommodate and separate infected patients from the uninfected.
The very first reports about covid, before is was even called covid, was that it was highly transmissible, and this was the very reason for the early scare, as well as thoughts that it might be a bio-weapon.
Arrogance is a terrible affliction. And, it doesn’t help when you’re chasing every skirt in the Statehouse.
This was the basis for all the lockdowns being mandated in the first place. (At least, that’s what I understood at the time.) So the question for me becomes: If he was locking down NYC because of the fear of how easily contagious the virus was, why would he think it was a good idea to send patients who tested positive for it back into the nursing homes?
Yes but I don’t know the timeline specifically. What are people trying to say, that Cuomo intentionally wanted these people dead? I find that hard to believe. Did he realize how bad a decision this would be? I don’t think he and his staff (and I assume medical advisers) did.
Now should he be impeached? I don’t think making a bad decision is impeachable but doctoring the numbers in a coverup is certainly impeachable. He should be impeached for that. The irony is he may get forced out for sexual harassment, which I think he deserves. Two impeachable offenses here in my opinion but not the bad decision.
It wasn’t. Back to my original comment (on page 2 somewhere I think) that started this off topic discussion. Let’s not make hasty impulsive decisions like Cuomo.
i don’t know the timeline for all that. If you believe Cuomo knowingly sent people to their death, then we have a fundamental disagreement. I do not believe that.
Manny, I just don’t think he thought about it and just did it without thinking about the ramifications. And that was careless, irresponsible and foolish. There are rumors too that he had pressure from hospital execs to get them out. I am not saying he wanted to kill people. But their lives were not a top priority. He’s a political animal.
This is the timing:
Cuomo realized the need for a “containing area” of New Rochelle (March 10),
the state had banned all gatherings of more than 500 people (March 12),
Cuomo ordered all nonessential workers to stay home, barred gatherings of any size and instructed anyone out in public to stay at least 6 feet from other people (March 20),
ordering covid patients returned to nursing homes (March 25),
readiness of both the Javits Center and the USNS Comfort (March 30),
when both Javits Center and USNS Comfort were transformed to able to take covid patients (April 7),
and when Cuomo lifted his mandate of covid patients being returned to nursing homes (May 10 – more than a month later).
Depraved indifference doesn’t mean you want them to die. You just don’t care if they do.