Ok, Enough already!....Enough! Enough of the news updates with their assigned theme music. Enough of the "Special Reports"cutting into our regularly scheduled programming. Enough of all the "officials" advising and warning us via phone messages and email. Enough of all the masks, rubber gloves, antibacterial wipes, hand sanitizers and lack thereof. Enough of the empty shelves and online price gouging. Enough of the absurdity of the latest media fueled panic over the latest virus. Over and over we are repeatedly bombarded by useless propaganda involving the public health at large being at some type of imminent risk and we buy it hook, line and sinker that are all attached to the end of a fishing pole of over reaction every... single... time. Well, if anything, this latest round of fatal fear roulette has taken our minds off the Zika virus for now.... and therein lies the problem. As we are constantly in an annual fashion under the barrage of "super" virus disinformation, we tend to forget. We forget, my fellow Observers, that we have been led by our runny noses down this winding dogma laced road before.
Year after year it seems we are made to suffer the diffusion of some new germ rearing it's ugly head threatening to kill us all being ever present in every news broadcast, newspaper, radio show and magazine as they assault us with "vital" information we all need to know. All the while boosting their ratings and circulation along the way. Before COVID-19 we had Zika. Before Zika we had Ebola. Before Ebola we had Swine Flu. Before Swine Flu we had Bird Flu. Before Bird Flu we had MERS, E-coli, West Nile, SARS, HIV, Mad Cow's Disease and on and on and on and on. As a result of our forgetfulness we again fall victim to meaningless rhetoric and eventually trepidation. Point in case. Although the majority of the population who will fall prey to this virus will experience symptoms not unlike a bad cold... fever, dry cough and fatigue for the most part, the consternation of contracting it has triggered behavior that unfortunately resembles mass hysteria.
In my own little town of Woodbury, where so far only as few cases of the virus have been confirmed statewide, our entire regional school system that my daughter attends had been closed in an effort to sanitize all the buildings according to CDC protocol and now are closed until further notice. All of this is being done because one student... one student in one of the four schools came in contact with one of the few people who actually has the virus. I found myself in another example of this overcautious nonsense one morning last week as I volunteered at our local food bank. Before sorting and stocking our current donation of food goods, I was made to wear rubber gloves and instructed to wipe all products, beside produce, down with sanitizing wipes before putting the products on the shelves. Even further into the abandonment of realistic undertakings, while I and another volunteer were busy disinfecting our Ronzoni linguine boxes and dented cans of Campbell's Chunky soup, I overheard the director of community services discussing with another official the procedures they intended to implement over the next few weeks to keep people that utilize the assistance from waiting "shoulder to shoulder" for their turn. Some of the more poignant suggestions included making patrons wear masks and gloves along with putting together a general "one size fits all" food order to be handed out indiscriminately.
All of these steps are being taken, according to our town emergency management team, and I quote, "out of an abundance of caution". More like an abundance of stupidity. Far be it for me to point out that all these efforts are pointless. They have absolutely no basis of logical thought due to an extremely logical reason. The virus is already here. No matter what is employed from here on out there is no way to stop it from spreading. You can slow the progression in an attempt to buy time for the slim chance that a vaccine can be made (and we all know the chances of that... Remember H1N1?) and maybe reduce the number of people who contract it, but there is little hope of arresting it. All of this will just prolong the inevitable and what's worse, is that most of us know that but just don't want to admit it.
Now, let's look at this rationally for a second and honestly ask ourselves a few questions. Going back to that one student that came into contact with a known carrier. How many people did the carrier come in contact with? How many other students did that one student interact with? How many other children from all the schools rode the same bus? What about the student's family? How many stores did they stop at? How many public places did they visit? How many days did they go to work as usual before the carrier was identified and they eventually realized they had been exposed? As far as the school closings, what happens when another student or faculty member comes in contact with another identified carrier or tests positive for the virus themselves? Are we going to keep shutting down the schools and town buildings and hope this will just go away? We also have to ask, How long has it actually been here? First cases of the virus were discovered as early as last December and it has been suggested that cases may have developed even earlier. It was then documented officially in early January. As no initial travel bans were imposed until late January and extensive ones just within the last two weeks, how many products and people who were exposed allowed to enter our country? How many of us have already had it and were not aware of it? When you take all those factors into account we should be able to comprehend that all of our precautions become an exercise in futility. All because of a virus that well over 95% of us will walk away from as the CDC has determined the fatality rate to be somewhere between 1% & 5% for the small percentage who are at risk. To put it in a more understandable perspective, the mortality percentage rate is higher in certain strains of influenza. I don't mean to sound unfeeling in regards to the people who are at risk of complications due to this virus, so please don't misunderstand. There is risk to some with any illness, but in this particular case we have determined who exactly is in the high risk group and have been readily informed. We have implemented precautions for these individuals in the past without all of the nonsense we are dealing with now and we seem to have done just fine. Fact to ponder while we are all sitting home practicing social distancing. In 2003 SARS, another coronavirus that shares 80% of it's genome with COVID-19, had an overall mortality rate of 9.6% and we did nothing that even remotely parallels the actions we are taking at present.
On another front, my loyal reader, you can tote all you want about justifying terrorizing the populace due to the fact that no one has been vaccinated for this virus. Well, I hate to be the one to break it to everybody, that's because there isn't a vaccine. Unfortunately that's the way it works, folks. There never used to be a flu shot either... or mumps or chicken pox or measles. And even if there was, what about the newest millennial trend of choosing not to inoculate our children? Hows that going to play out for us in the long run? I seem to recall a little while ago when H1N1 hit that no one was vaccinated for that either. As a matter of fact the CDC was pretty much completely dumbfounded because they produced a vaccine that wasn't at all effective against the strain we were facing that year. So much for the great medical research saviors and their brilliant insight. The hard truth is that at best, if a vaccine is developed, it will most probably be kin to the flu vaccine and have limited effectiveness. In any case, the fact remains that we are creating needless lunacy over a situation we had no control over to begin with.
And while we are on the subject of lunacy.... What exactly is our recent fascination with toilet paper? Where did this come from? For some reason as the distress over the virus grows it seems that people have now taken to stampeding into Costco, BJ's along with their local Shoprites and Piggly-Wigglys in often vain attempts to amass as much Charmin and Angel Soft that they can get their soon to be defecated hands on. I've actually seen current videos of people pushing each other out of the way to fill up their carts with today's version of white gold on a roll. It's gotten to the point that most stores are setting quantity limits on certain purchases even though manufacturing and commodity experts have stated that there is no actual shortage of any kind. Not to mention that this virus does not cause any abdominal or gastric affliction. So much for approaching this dilemma with any type of sensibility. "Don't worry Martha, I've loaded up the Suburban with Quilted Northern. Everything is going to be fine now! Just make sure you've got Jr. outside with the shotgun while we're unloading."
Experts claim we are doing it out of a need for cleanliness and this type of buying can also make some people more at ease because they feel they are being proactive. A measure of control when a lot of things are out of control. Or maybe someone saw a custodian restocking an office building's supply closet and wondered what he knew that they didn't. I'm more of a mind to place the cause on the shoulders of our leaders who can't seem to come up with any type of a unified strategy on how to deal with the crisis at hand and people are confused by the conflicting information. Our current administration has told us to "Go home and have a nice dinner." while their political rivals at the state and local level are acting like the feds just rang the dinner bell after chumming the waters at a shark feeding frenzy. Confusion can be a prelude to panic resulting in erratic behavior. Our governing bodies know this full well and should be ashamed that they are engaging in political posturing while their constituents are being made to endure the consequences of their actions.
The trouble with panic is more often than not, its engagement is is usually worse than the crisis itself. We have a self destructing way of sounding the alarm over something that little to nothing can be done about. From Cabbage Patch Dolls and Tickle Me Elmos to Clorox and hand sanitizers we will trample each other over for something that, in the scheme of things, is of absolutely no use. Fear of our mortality plays a small part. Fear of something or someone getting the better of us appears to be paramount. We let our emotions run with abandon when we feel threatened and allow them to guide us away from intelligent judgement. We panic out of fear for our individual safety and then try to validate the action by claiming we are concerned for others. As far as COVID-19 is concerned, I say let it come and do what it will. I'm more concerned about what our fear will cost us. I sadly have no doubt, that could take more lives than the illness. Strictly an Observation. If you'll excuse me, Stop & Shop is having a BOGO on Marcal 20 packs.
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