Kindred,
Have you seen the 2011 movie Contagion and wondered if the screen writer was looking into a crystal ball?
Then wondered why our real life 2019 pandemic turned out to be more like a Twilight Zone movie and seemed more unrealistic than the fictional movie, Contagion?
Oh, the deaths and sicknesses are very real, now at over one million dead* in the United States and over 6 million dead around the world (confirmed dead, but actual numbers worldwide are actually 2 to 4 times the number reported), but the people's reactions to these tragic outcomes seems unreal.
Before the pandemic, can you imagine people not wanting to take the cure for a disease in a pandemic that can kill you;
And not only not taking life saving cures or measures offered for free, but wanting to kill anyone suggesting that they should protect and inoculate themselves and family against deadly disease and stop the spread of the contagion?
Some of these people actually think they have the right to cough their COVID breath on their families and neighbors, endanger public safety and do the work of terrorists to spread deadly disease.
Imagine wanting to kill people that care about what happens to you and your family and not only that wanting to kill providers of care and are the experts in medical care if they dare tell you what you need to do to protect yourselves and family.
Does that make any sense to you?
Or wanting to kill the innovators that create the cures and vaccines for disease because you don't like her or him or the different way the Lord created that person.
Does that make any sense to you?
Okay I get we are inconvenienced by having to wear a mask indoors, but will it kill you to do so? Some people look better with masks on.
It's a drag to have to deal in lockdowns, especially when some people do not like who they are locked down with; it can drive you crazy. But isn't crazy, better than dead or killing a loved one?
If someone told me in 2018 that our response to a deadly pandemic would be this, I would think I was being punked and it was an April Fool's joke, not at all funny.
If we had a chance to do it all over again, I am not sure we have learned any lessons.
Now, with the death toll at over one million people, all we can talk about is how our economy experienced a brief setback and what a drag it was to be cooped up at home, like we couldn't think of anything imaginative to do.
I am not downplaying the seriousness of isolation and mental health, because I understand isolation, mental abuses and the toll it takes upon health.
But seriously, are we prepared to stop this thing in its tracks and save lives?
*The Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918 killed over 670,000 people. https://www.healthline.com/health/r-naught-reproduction-number#prevention
It has an inflection spread rate, R- naught of between 1.4 and 2.8, roughly the same spread as the common flu.
https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20201218/covid-19-is-far-more-lethal-damaging-than-flu-data-shows
COVID-19, thus far, killed over one million people in the U.S. alone. It has an inflection spread rate, R-naught of a median of 5.7, double earlier estimates of between 2 and 3.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8375609/
