I had someone this week tell me that, "Well, they were only originally predicting 200,000 deaths and that even without the self-quarantines and other 'extreme' measures, some are saying the death numbers would have been about the same either way." The theory being that we were all exposed before the flu manifested itself in China. My friend further speculated that the shut down did nothing to minimize the spread of this flu. According to the latest conspiracy theory, most of us were exposed in October and November of 2019. And my friend further argued that there is one study that shows the main exposure & sickness happens in households when families stay inside for longer periods of time. In other words, if you stay home you are more likely to get sick.
At this point I take a deep breath before refusing to bow before hindsight looking for something to bitch about. Let me take this argument point by point.
- The 200,000 deaths number is appalling anyway you look at it. And that number was suggested before doctors discovered that this particular virus made you contagious up to two weeks BEFORE you even knew you had it. So you're running around like individual CoVid-19 Marys infecting everyone you know and quite a few folks you don't know. After this was known estimates jumped into the millions of deaths without some kind of drastic measures being taken. After the travel ban and self-quarantines were initiated, the rate of infection slowed dramatically.
- The argument that we all had the flu in October and November is a purely agenda-based conspiracy theory passed around by people with cabin fever. That the flu was loose in the US that early is really wild speculation. A lot of folks had flu last fall and not coincidentally after taking this year's flu vaccine. We were warned it might make us sick and it did. A friend told me that after this year's flu shots in Texas prisons, a lot of the inmates had mild to moderate cases of the flu. My wife and I both had flu-like symptoms after we took the flu shot before flying to Texas. Sometimes the vaccine gives you a mild to moderate case of flu depending on how strong the flu virus it's designed to fight. There's even been some anecdotal evidence that this year's vaccine helped protect some people from a mild exposure to CoVid-19. Thinking that we should have done nothing to address such a very virulent virus strain is taking risks with a lot of lives and I believe is irresponsible to suggest..
- If you think because you are young and healthy and not in the virus's kill zone, that you're hurting no one but yourself if you catch it, you are truly delusional. It's like the anti-vaccine folks who say, if your kid has taken the vaccines, why should you worry if my kid catches it? What they don't take into account is that every time an epidemic goes through the human population, it mutates and becomes something a little different. Does anyone want to play revolving vaccines with smallpox, diptheria, measles, mumps or rubella? Do we really want to expose pregnant women to the measles outbreak among the unvaccinated rich Democrats, conspiracy theorists and illegal aliens? My baby brother Craig died because we gave Mom the measles while she was pregnant with him. I don't want to see the annual death tolls from infectious deceptively named "childhood" diseases.
- Finally, the snowflakes, conspiracy theorists and habitual whingers have complained that this whole thing is a big plot to do everything from converting the USA into a socialist state, a Nazi state with President Trump as dictator, or a communist state ruled by China. And this vast conspiracy was concocted all to prevent them from cruising the bars, having sex on the beaches and attending concerts, raves and mass protests where you get laid afterward. Conspiracy theorists are so much fun to jerk around. They will believe anything that makes them the victims of the evil forces that they firmly believe rule the world. Sorry guys. neither the gray aliens, the Illuminati, the Freemasons, Big Pharma nor the Reptiloids from Dimension 9 are out to cramp your hard partying style. The truth is that even the politicians that are trying to be in control aren't really in control. Nobody is in control unless you're a Christian claiming Romans 8:28.
Well, excuse me if you've been inconvenienced by precautions that have been taken (mostly voluntarily) to stop the spread of this stuff. I'm 66 years old. I've got crippling arthritis thanks to a life of doing good things that happened to have battered my joints. I take handfuls of pills to control my blood sugar and my blood pressure. I do exercises that hurt like all git-out!
Even then, despite the nearly constant pain and difficulty getting around because I'm living on a fixed income, I find that I am singularly uninterested in being killed off by suffocation by the coronavirus because some snowflake passed it around because he felt unhappy about taking precautions around people who were old and therefore of no value to him!!!!! And I find young people who live outside the CoVid-19 kill zone to be incredibly self-centered when they whine about not being allowed to risk everyone's life by spreading this stuff to tens of millions of their fellow human beings.
I was hoping to meet Jesus in the air when he comes and miss out on the whole death business. So I'd rather not be killed by a virus I got from some self-centered snowflake who wasn't worried about passing around a disease that kills older people like me thank you very much.
The fact that it's not 200,000 dead or worse with a virus infinitely more contagious than our regular garden-variety flu, tells me what we've done is working. Why can't America ever do something right with the conspiracy crowd? Always looking for someone to blame. It was America's fault the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor. The Jihadis wouldn't have attacked the world trade center if we hadn't been richer than they are and hadn't been helped by President Bush. And on and on and on.
I think when we get opened back up and the economy recovers, we should take a victory lap. We know now that the virus came from the lab in Wuhan and that our previous administration pumped a lot of money into research into bat flu at that very lab which already was notoriously inept at security. We know China bought up tons of personal protective gear early on leaving other countries having to do emergency manufacturing while their people were dropping like flies. Italy didn't worry about taking measures to protect themselves and look where that got them. If we'd been hit like countries that ignored it, we'd have done 200K and probably better. I thank God it was Trump making those decisions and not some conspiracy theorist or (worse) Hillary Clinton.
Buck up, Buttercup! We're saving you from yourselves.
© 2020 by Tom King
