Category: COVID-19

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And So it Goes

Speaker 1
You.

Speaker 1
Hello, aloha and mahalo. It is Monday, September 11, day of remembrance for all of us.

Speaker 1
My name is Thomas Farley, F-A-R-L-E-Y-I have a friend who is is dying and he has been dying for many years, but it is certainly the end of the line.

Speaker 1
It will be the end of the line very soon for him, it seems, unless there’s some miraculous intervention from beyond science.

Speaker 1
I and he’s a good man. He doesn’t deserve to die, die poorly like this. I would not trade places with him. I envy him, though, in a way, with the enormous amount of resources that he’s been able to get to apply to his condition. He has a physical disease.

Speaker 1
He has a number of things wrong with them, but they are in the end, all physical.

Speaker 1
He’s had good insurance with Kaiser and I’m sure some of his own money. Similarly, I’ve had good insurance plans and money and I’m actually paid out of pocket for nearly all of my mental health treatment because compared with physical diseases, you cannot get seen by a doctor routinely enough to do any good in mental health. For a psychiatrist. Well, he has Kaiser. I think under Kaiser, probably you wouldn’t be able to see a doctor psychiatrist more than once every couple of months.

Speaker 1
Instead, you’re kicked down to therapists and technicians. So I’ve always paid out of pocket for regular psychiatric treatment.

Speaker 1
So that’s one big difference between mental health and physical health. Another is that routinely, for years now, most of the major insurance companies have provided a 24 hours nurse talk line so that you can talk to a nurse at any time of day except that. And I’ve talked to these nurses on these health lines before. They say they’ve never, ever had a psych nurse assigned to one of these 24 hours help lines. They could have a psych nurse, a telephone line in addition to the physical, the regular RNS.

Speaker 1
They could have that. These groups, Intermountain, Southwest, Kaiser, multibillion dollar corporations, they could pay for a 24 hours psych nurse telephone line so he wouldn’t wind up at the emergency room or some other place victim of suicide. But they don’t because mental health does not exist for these people. They talk about these institutions, talk about the rising rate of suicide, and isn’t that awful? But they won’t fund for it.

Speaker 1
They will not fund for it. They will instead give out some pity, some false pity and give some money to other groups, other agencies that are working on the problem, but they themselves don’t participate. And in the last few years, we’ve all seen how they want to really focus. They really want to throw everybody into two categories that of depression or anxiety. And if you’re not in that category, then good luck to you.

Speaker 1
I don’t want to dwell on my particular problem, although I’ll just say that it’s severe insomnia and nightmares and yeah, you hear about research, say, into PTSD and related, but it’s not really in my opinion. And I’ve been almost become a professional consultant on this subject since I so much want to get better. And I’ve tried everything. So I’ve become sort of an expert on what’s current, and I’ve done everything, including electroshock, or ECT as it’s politely called. Electroconvulsive therapy didn’t work for me, paid for all that out of pocket.

Speaker 1
Physical diseases, especially the physical diseases that happen to a lot of people, that Big Pharma has a market for. Those seem hopeful. As far as research getting spent, I know there’s some incurable, seemingly incurable problems like autism, and so there’s just major diseases, although autism goes to great deal of mental health fields, so it’s inherently not going to see the amount of research or funding to begin with. My friend has got all of these resources now available to him as far as end of life treatments and hospice, just like my parents had hospice and people willing to help stepping in. And there’s nothing for end of life, for mental health problems.

Speaker 1
My condition is not livable, and all I get in a response as far as end of life is that it can’t be that bad.

Speaker 1
And I sometimes say, yeah, you’re right, it’s not that bad. It’s a hell of a lot worse. You live with this, you live with this. But it’s a mental health problem that they can’t capture with a microscope or a thermometer going up or down, or blood pressure they can measure or blood they can sample. They just have to take the word of the patient, and our word doesn’t mean a damn thing.

Speaker 1
And I feel for people with mental health problems that are not as articulate or verbal as I am, that can’t express themselves or they express the hell they’re going through. They really have. That just I can’t imagine the misery funding needs to be addressed for my friend. There’s all sorts of patient advocates available for him. He’s actually had genetic engineering things done for him at Stanford Hospital.

Speaker 1
There’s been housing available for family and relatives nearby, just on and on and on. And I am glad that he’s had that care. It’s extended his life for many, many years. It’s just there is no equivalent in mental health for this. And it just devalue you.

Speaker 1
It devalues a person over and over and over again. You’re not worth it. And if you want something done, you got to pay for it yourself, because we can’t see it, so we don’t think it’s a problem. I’ll give you a simple example of how much I often have needed a patient advocate to deal with people just on the phone, for example. One of the things that really induces my nightmares is being a mean person and having to argue endlessly.

Speaker 1
And if anybody’s dealt with any customer support, any healthcare organization over the last many years, you’ll know that it is impossible sometimes to get across what you’re trying to say to a person that keeps falling back on a script will not transfer you to a supervisor about the websites and email addresses that they hand out that don’t work, telephone numbers they never call to make sure that they actually work. It just goes on and on. Well, that all forces me to get service, forces me to be a mean person with these people. And I don’t want to be a mean person. It’s toxic.

Speaker 1
It’s toxic to everybody, but especially in my condition. And I can’t tell them that that just engendering more and more nightmares. And it would be great if I had a patient advocate that would be able to speak for me and would be able to sit for hours and hours on a phone trying to get something arranged and it’s just not possible, not even with paying for it out of pocket. These people don’t exist. And it is very frustrating every step of the way you’re told that your condition doesn’t mean anything and it is indescribable as I try to make myself, as I try to make other people comfortable with me.

Speaker 1
You can’t mention, for example, that you have violent nightmares anymore. They’ll call the cops on you.

Speaker 1
People today are so scared by corporate media that they associate mental health with violence when in fact the mental health are far more likely to be victims of crimes than actually committing the crime. But corporate media doesn’t want to hear that. And it is the more and more I try to make other people comfortable around me, the less credibility I have, the more well spoken I am, the less people think there’s anything wrong. If I keep up appearances, then just what’s the problem? And I’ll try to say, well, how many times do you have to watch your mother or your best friend get chainsawed to death?

Speaker 1
Well, it’s not real. No, it actually feels real. And shock after shock and this has been going on since 1988 with me and it just breaks you down. I probably have less than 4 hours of sleep every night and tell you this is how these professionals, they just want a measurement. How many hours of sleep are you getting?

Speaker 1
And their limited thinking is insane. Well, four or 5 hours, it doesn’t matter. It’s the quality of sleep. It’s all broken up. I’m pacing around at 233 30 in the morning, waking up every other half hour.

Speaker 1
It’s the quality of sleep. But they can’t measure that. They have to rely on your word. And your word doesn’t count. Your word doesn’t mean a damn thing.

Speaker 1
Well, we’re sorry for you, but there’s no at this point I’ve tried literally everything, including, like I said, ECT. And that program when it first came out, using the Apple Watch, which is a dedicated Apple Watch and a dedicated iPhone that goes with it called nightwear. I’ve written a multi part review on YouTube about it that also failed.

Speaker 1
But in the end in the end, my friend has a ton of services he’s going to have measured, respectful, end of life experience, I guess you would call it. But no, I’m going to have to take care of things myself. And it’s tragic, but it’s consistent with the disregard that mental health gets in this country. I’m not sure it’s that much better anywhere else, and I don’t have any suggestions other than fund, but it’s all about money, and so I just don’t especially Intermountain. They’re an incredibly toxic group, incredibly damaging to mental health people.

Speaker 1
And you can read on my website, Thomasfarleyblot.com, what they did to me, how they treated me. I think a real fundamental problem in healthcare is how the line personnel, or the people responding to their Twitter and social accounts have no idea what duty of care means. We are patients first and then customers. This is not a typical industry where you have a customer. No, we’re patients first.

Speaker 1
When you extend the duty of care, if you have to explain what duty of care means to somebody picking up the phone, they need some real training or they need some days in the hospital tending to patients. Once you accept the duty of care, again, it’s just not my dad was a brilliant physician, brilliant doctor, and his colleagues were all well mannered, neat, professional, all of them caring. And they accepted the responsibility for a patient once they took them on. And once a system takes them on, like Inner Mountain or Kaiser or what have you, that duty of care is extended. That umbrella applies to everybody under their name.

Speaker 1
Well, that’s enough for now. I wish I could give you some hope, but there really isn’t any. Not at least for people with my condition. And I think that they would actually prefer a lot of us just to die off so they don’t have to deal with them. I think that’s what’s going on with a lot of the homeless, with mental health problems.

Speaker 1
It’s just get these people off the books and we can go back to treating people for just anxiety and depression and everybody else is on their own.

Speaker 1
But if you know more about the subject, let me know. But there’s no dignity in this, not for people with mental health.

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Repost of Nightmare Review Part Four

I continue to be sad over how little these posts have been viewed. Hence, the repost. I’m fairly confident that if I paid to advertise then their reach would be extended. I’m willing to think about that because this is a life or death matter but there is no certainty that it would help. And although these are fairly negative posts, any sponsored or promoted ad is generally met with skepticism. I wish you peace.

It’s not working for me. But you should try it in case it helps you. $7,000 but if it is life or death, well . . .

NightWare Review – Part One (internal link)

NightWare Review – Part Two (internal link)

NightWare Review – Part Three (internal link)

NightWare Review – Part Five – Final (internal link)

Unedited transcript:

0:00:02.090]
Hi, this is Thomas Farley. I hope you are well, or at least getting better. My nightmares are definitely back fullblown. They never really went away. I continued to wake up scared, extremely stressful dreams just not with the imagery of the past.

[00:00:24.140]
But again, the nightmares have always come back no matter what medicine is applied. So it’s very hard to tell day to day, week to week. Sometimes. Are they away permanently or are they coming back? And obviously I would wake up very scared.

[00:00:43.040]
There has been some horrible imagery, but not violent. But I’d look at the device and my heart rate is normal. And so it’s obviously not activating on events that are incredibly murderously devastating to me, especially still not able to activate it doesn’t do one of these so called interventions within the first 30 minutes of going to sleep. And that continues to be a big problem. And the company, as I’ve said in times past, refused to modify anything without FDA approval.

[00:01:23.110]
Or at least they say that they can’t do anything about their program unless they get FDA approval. I did try to attempt suicide about ten days ago. You can read it on my blog. I don’t know what went wrong. I’m still trying to figure out my place in this world.

[00:01:40.330]
Of course, if you are suicidal, if you’ve been going through this for decades, you just have to try this NightWare program. You don’t have any choice. Get the money and try it. As for me, I don’t know my place in the world anymore, so I’m just wandering around again with my interest in hobbies and just miserable sleep. The suppression of the nightmares.

[00:02:07.730]
If anything did happen, I certainly didn’t do anything to improve my sleep. You would think that with the suppression or elimination for a while that my sleep would improve. It’s gotten worse and I doubt I’m getting more than 6 hours of sleep, but total doesn’t matter. It’s the quality of sleep. It’s horrible.

[00:02:28.050]
It’s fractured, it’s just beat up. It’s filled with these bad dreams. So again, I don’t know. The psychiatrist recommends. I’ve asked for a sleep physiologist to talk to.

[00:02:42.660]
Next step. She again talks about medicine, but I want to get off this medicine treadmill. They just put you on one after another, and whenever they fail, it’s increased dosage or decreased dosage or in combination with other medicines. It goes on and on and on, and we have to get somebody honest about saying maybe this is terminal, it’s chronic. It’s over.

[00:03:07.130]
That’s it. But nobody’s saying that I included that really on my own. I don’t know what I’m doing anymore other than just complaining, and that makes me sick. So I don’t know what to tell you. I really don’t.

[00:03:24.470]
If you’ve got something worth hanging in for, definitely do that.

[00:03:30.050]
No, I can’t manage your life. I don’t know you’ll. All I can do is feel sorry for you. And I’m really hopeful that things get better for you and I don’t know it’s definitely not working? That’s the bottom line.

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These Are the People I Deal With

I don’t expect anyone to read this except for search. And I don’t expect anyone to sympathize with my complaints, either, because this is the way the world is arranged. I’ve was raised to be a nice person but there are too many mean people to overcome. This is not something I can win. And, given my constant nightmares since 1988, not something I can cope with.

 

[00:00:03.650]
This weekend at a community picnic, I was introduced to an old cowboy who asked me what I did for work. I told him that I work part time online, at which point the conversation quickly drifted south because of him. He told me that the greatest computer was between our two ears, the human brain. And I said, I agree with that.

[00:00:39.770]
He then went on with a whole series of statements and questions that were aggressively going after. I think I think when I start talking about computers and what I do online, it’s so far out of reach of most people that they think that I’m trying to be smarter than them, or somehow they feel inferior. I think that’s a great deal of it. They have an inferiority complex to anybody that’s working with computers. They act as if I’m trying to prove that I’m smarter than them, when in fact, I usually don’t start the conversation at all because I’m so far out of reach with what I’m doing, with what most other people do that it’s not even worth bothering to talk about.

[00:01:31.860]
Like all of the work that I’m doing with AI and Chat right now. And it’s very discouraging because I had a friend say to me recently that it was possibly economic, because not everybody can afford a computer or the resources that I have, and that’s not really the case at all. I should probably stop at this point and refresh everyone’s memory that early on, before the Internet went commercial, back in about 94, 95, with the advent of Mosaic. Mosaic was the first graphical based Internet browser that you could see images with that became relatable to people. Images provided a boost to advertising, but librarians had been on computerizing, their catalog, card catalogs, for years before.

[00:02:42.790]
And so when personal computers came out, they started populating libraries with them. Especially, really around 84, when IBM came out with its own personal computer for the masses. There was this Charlie Chaplin advertising campaign that was hugely successful. But years before, Apple had been trying really, really hard to place computers in the school to get these lucrative contracts, and they did a good job. They started about 1980 with the Apple II.

[00:03:18.270]
So by the end of the 80s, computers were basically in every library and school. And so everyone’s had an opportunity since then to use computers in one way or another. Night school classes, adult education classes since really the late 80s, early ninety s. And I’ve actually been on computers since 1978. Over 40 years.

[00:03:46.230]
Everybody’s had a chance. But an idiot like this that I was talking to, he doesn’t want to go to the library. I’m sure he hasn’t been to the library in decades. He probably can’t remember when he checked out a library book last. I have many computers.

[00:04:02.350]
I think I have two desktops, two laptops, two tablets. I also have a library card from Pahrump. A library card from Goldfield and a library card from Tonopah. And I am in those libraries, actively. I’m checking out books.

[00:04:22.130]
All of those libraries have a computer. I think it’s just laziness on most people’s part and not having an interest. It’s easier to put down somebody for what they do than to ask about it or just say simply nothing at all. These are the people that drive me crazy. There’s so much amazing stuff going on and I don’t mind if they’re not interested, but it’s the librarians that I’m infuriated with.

[00:04:53.090]
They’re the gatekeepers in education and they don’t want to know about Chat or AI. So it’s not really economic. It is a deliberate decision on many people’s part not to engage, not to learn, to let the things go by. And people that are actually interested, that are burning to create, that are trying new things, that are experimenting with new things, those are people that are something to be put down on because I think it might remind them of how little they want to know, how content they are with their own little world. And that’s fine as long as you don’t go out and bully people or put people down.

[00:05:38.570]
This is the way I can make some money. I can make this money part time. I’m doing a good service and yet I have people people commenting who don’t even know the basics of writing and business writing.

[00:05:55.970]
Self-sustaining freelance writers are maybe four or 5% of the population. That’s it. Everybody else is doing a second 3rd, 4th job to enable their hobby or their passion the and as far as nonfiction writing goes, nobody understands that. As far as business SEO, there’s nobody that I know, haven’t known for a couple of decades that has any idea of what I’m doing. But if they ask, if I try to explain, it’s just an immediate putting down of what I do.

[00:06:40.750]
It’s just this prejudice against the unknown, which is really the root cause. If you don’t know something, if somebody knows something you don’t, you don’t want to hear it. Instead of asking questions about it or letting it go, they want to put it down because they’re bullies. That’s all they can do. They’re trolls.

[00:06:59.990]
And maybe it reminds them of the fact that they’re dead to the world, that they have no interest in inquiry.

[00:07:10.170]
Anyway, I just wanted to put down what I have to deal with almost every day in my effort to be creative. I really have to keep it hidden. Can’t discuss it because it’s like we’re going back to the Dark Ages. One idiot, in fact, who’s in charge of something historical, he was talking about computer literacy, computer literacy in such a way that I asked him this:

[00:07:43.400]
You’re not holding out computer illiteracy as a point of pride, are you? And this guy’s a former engineer and he thought about it and said, that’s a good question, actually. I am. This is a living, breathing, talking luddite. He doesn’t want to learn.

[00:08:02.380]
He wants to put down people for learning. We’re going to go back 300 years into the Dark Ages when people were prosecuted and killed for trying to learn things, for trying to advance science. We’re going to try to discredit them. Or Mao’s Cultural Revolution, in which anybody with higher learning or higher ambition was killed. That’s what we’re going to get.

[00:08:29.090]
We’re going to go back to the Dark Ages and then we’re going to take 300 years to come back again. At the end of the Dark Ages, they had to reinvent all the math that the Greeks had done, what, 1500 or  2000 years before, because people were criticized and killed for trying to learn new things. And now we have people writing about chat and AI who don’t actually use it, haven’t experimented with it, but don’t want to learn. They just want to put it down. So it’s frustrating, but that’s the world we live in.

 

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WWG1WGA – Where We Go One We Go All

Corporate media may label QAnon as a conspiracy driven movement but certain facts are irrefutable.

The military-industrial complex existed before we were born and is now an integral part of the American economy.

The alliance between Big Pharma and the government cemented during COVID will grow stronger.

Intelligence community spying through social media companies was established by Snowden and these ties will only get stronger.

The tacit agreement among corporate media companies to thwart Trump’s reelection began on his first day in office and continued for four years, with bogus stories like Russian involvement being endlessly pursued to nowhere and many vital stories censored.

That alliance between Big Media companies continued even with the President out of office. His blacklisting from Twitter, for example, was maintained at the same time the Taliban’s account remained open, eventually used to communicate orders among their fighters for the fall of Kabul.

None of this is in dispute or controversy. The real question is why corporate media is working so hard among themselves and with the Biden administration to silence these people. But we all know why, aside from their obvious hate of Donald Trump.

Independent groups challenging authority, dishonesty, and manipulation will always be feared by those in power who hate the United States. The US government crushed people’s lives and the American economy during Covid simply as a way to assert more power over people, to introduce them to a new level of control.

And most of those directives were contradictory nonsense not backed up by science or consistency, and declared by idiots like Fauci. Yeah, conspiracies. Conspiracies rooted in finding out the truth and pushing back the government’s desire to stomp our individual liberties into the ground. That sound too dramatic? Not dramatic enough.

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A. E. Housman Noting the Difference

Everybody thinks they are smarter than they are. You, me, everybody. Everybody thinks they are smarter than they are.

Politicians also think they are smarter than they are.

The difference between us and them is that they constantly seek to control our lives with their overestimated intelligence.

The continuing botched evacuation in Kabul shows how little intelligence politicians posses.

This isn’t about Democrats or Republicans. Maybe Trump could have pulled this off, who know?

But what is known is that all of these politicians with all of their advanced degrees couldn’t think out this problem.

Yet they want you to believe that what they say on climate change, Covid, education, or monetary policy is is the right point of view. The smart point of view.

Maybe not.

Our politicians learned nothing from Vietnam or the Russian experience in Afghanistan. The same mistakes over and over. Just like we might make. But we don’t try to control a politician’s life.

It’s all about power and domination over people not in power. (internal link) We want to be left alone to live our life by our own lights.

But most politicians don’t want to leave you alone. You have to agree with them. They are smarter than you and they want to prove it.

Yet they are just as smart or stupid as we are.

The Laws of God, The Laws of Man

by A. E. Housman (1859-1936) (internal link)

The laws of God, the laws of man,
He may keep that will and can;
Not I: let God and man decree
Laws for themselves and not for me;
And if my ways are not as theirs
Let them mind their own affairs.
Their deeds I judge and much condemn,
Yet when did I make laws for them?
Please yourselves, say I, and they
Need only look the other way.
But no, they will not; they must still
Wrest their neighbor to their will,
And make me dance as they desire
With jail and gallows and hell-fire.
And how am I to face the odds
Of man’s bedevilment and God’s?
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.
They will be master, right or wrong;
Though both are foolish, both are strong.
And since, my soul, we cannot fly
To Saturn nor to Mercury,
Keep we must, if keep we can,
These foreign laws of God and man.

[emphasis added,.ed]

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COVID-19 and Some Numbers – A Writer’s Perspective

March 29, 2020

This now looks much grimmer than before. Everything about this virus has been bungled since the beginning and that continues to the present minute. Since the Chinese first arrested and then made doctors disappear who initially reported it, to the lack of supplies that face us today, every group and organization has been and is now making up plans and projections as they go along.

This complete lack of preparedness and and an inability to successfully go forward goes hand in hand with a novel situation but that is the reason for my lack of faith. We don’t know what we have, we don’t have the supplies or people to deal with it, we don’t know what people should do or what to tell them. The Chinese are saying their numbers are leveling off yet these are the people that lied to the world from the beginning. Just to save them embarrassment.

This reminds me of the Vietnam War in which the military command made up numbers to make it seem we were winning. Although no one is yet claiming we are winning yet, I suspect the facts on how badly we are losing are being kept hidden. To keep governments from being embarrassed, to avoid panicking us. Above all, to keep information away from us because we are deemed too stupid to judge for ourselves. Revealing these numbers would only reveal how incompetent government is in dealing with this crisis.

We need to leave this crisis to the doctors and get these politicians off the airwaves. Let these presidents and governors and mayors sit in the back, doing their paperwork, while real people of medicine handle things. As long as politicians are speaking, we are truly doomed.

March 27, 2020

The military is taking action on what I wrote about a sad, bureaucratic problem yesterday. They are asking retired soldiers in health care fields to come back to fight COVID-19:

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2020/03/25/army-asks-retired-soldiers-health-care-fields-come-back-covid-19-fight.html

March 26, 2020

How serious are we? I was at a clinic today for my badly wrenched back. Seeing the full protocols in place for the virus, I asked if retired nurses and physicians were being called in to help. My doctor said no. “They’re not licensed anymore.” With that kind of crisis management thinking, we are in trouble. It should be all hands on deck and instead we are selectively picking the deck crew.

March 24, 2020

This is a Time to be Concerned, This is Not a Time for Worry

March 23, 2020

The preventative measures being taken against COVID-19 are like insurance. The problem with insurance is that you’ll never know its worth if a disaster doesn’t happen.

Our economy and way of life is being totally destroyed by the measures we are taking against COVID-19. The insurance policy we have taken out is based on the possibility that tens of thousands of people will die.

Yet, why didn’t we wreck our economy to keep alive the 30,000 people who died of seasonal flu in the last flu season? Why didn’t we go into a recession and throw millions out of work to prevent the deaths of the 61,000 who died in the 2017/2018 flu season?

Those are real numbers, not possibilities, not theoretical targets. Those poor people actually died in the midst of one of the greatest stock market rallies in history, when unemployment dropped below 4%. Where was the panic and upset and destruction and empty shelves back then?

If, God, forbid, we do lose 60,000 people from this virus, we will only match the death toll from 2017/2018. Somehow, we continued back then. Why can’t we continue now?

The NYT says as of today, 458 people in America have died of this virus. (external link) That is tragic and appalling and I pray it doesn’t get worse. I know, though, that the economy will get worse and it will takes years to pay for this insurance policy we have taken out. And I think it is also time to remember those tens of thousands of people who died in past years without the consideration we are giving folks today.

March 23, 2020

Interesting writing from an apparently authoritative if undisciplined writer. The source is variously attributed. I hope everyone understands my anger over the death of accurate research and the need to cite correctly. Wikipedia, for example, is a great resource but it is not a primary authority, at best it may lead to primary authorities. True reporting for publication uses a combination of internet resources, original interviews with subject matter experts, and references to authoritative hardcopy books and magazines. Anything less is not journalism.

This article describes quite well how devastating this virus is and why. It does not describe how the theoretical possibility of tens of thousands of dead is somehow more concerning than the 30,000 people in America who actually died in the last flu season. Or the 60,000 that died in the season before that.

It’s Not “Just The Flu”

Tuesday, March 17, 2020 5:05 a.m. by Tom King (blog owner, not writer?)

Some insight from Kat Storti for those who continue to say…”It’s just the flu”.

“Feeling confused as to why Coronavirus is a bigger deal than Seasonal flu? Here it is in a nutshell. I hope this helps. Feel free to share this to others who don’t understand…

It has to do with RNA sequencing…. I.e. genetics.

Seasonal flu is an “all human virus”. The DNA/RNA chains that make up the virus are recognized by the human immune system. This means that your body has some immunity to it before it comes around each year… you get immunity two ways…through exposure to a virus, or by getting a flu shot.

Novel viruses, come from animals…. the WHO tracks novel viruses in animals, (sometimes for years watching for mutations). Usually these viruses only transfer from animal to animal (pigs in the case of H1N1) (birds in the case of the Spanish flu). But once, one of these animal viruses mutates, and starts to transfer from animals to humans… then it’s a problem, Why? Because we have no natural or acquired immunity.. the RNA sequencing of the genes inside the virus isn’t human, and the human immune system doesn’t recognize it so, we can’t fight it off.

Now…. sometimes, the mutation only allows transfer from animal to human, for years it’s only transmission is from an infected animal to a human before it finally mutates so that it can now transfer human to human… once that happens..we have a new contagion phase. And depending on the fashion of this new mutation, thats what decides how contagious, or how deadly it’s gonna be..

H1N1 was deadly….but it did not mutate in a way that was as deadly as the Spanish flu. It’s RNA was slower to mutate and it attacked its host differently, too.

Fast forward.

Now, here comes this Coronavirus… it existed in animals only, for nobody knows how long…but one day, at an animal market, in Wuhan China, in December 2019, it mutated and made the jump from animal to people. At first, only animals could give it to a person… But here is the scary part…. in just TWO WEEKS it mutated again and gained the ability to jump from human to human. Scientists call this quick ability, “slippery”

This Coronavirus, not being in any form a “human” virus (whereas we would all have some natural or acquired immunity). Took off like a rocket. And this was because, Humans have no known immunity…doctors have no known medicines for it.

And it just so happens that this particular mutated animal virus, changed itself in such a way the way that it causes great damage to human lungs..

That’s why Coronavirus is different from seasonal flu, or H1N1 or any other type of influenza…. this one is slippery AF. And it’s a lung eater…And, it’s already mutated AGAIN, so that we now have two strains to deal with, strain s, and strain L….which makes it twice as hard to develop a vaccine.

We really have no tools in our shed, with this. History has shown that fast and immediate closings of public places has helped in the past pandemics. Philadelphia and Baltimore were reluctant to close events in 1918 and they were the hardest hit in the US during the Spanish Flu.

Factoid: Henry VIII stayed in his room and allowed no one near him, till the Black Plague passed…(honestly…I understand him so much better now). Just like us, he had no tools in his shed, except social isolation…

And let me end by saying….right now it’s hitting older folks harder… but this genome is so slippery…if it mutates again (and it will). Who is to say, what it will do next.

Be smart folks… acting like you’re unafraid is so not sexy right now.

#flattenthecurve . Stay home folks… and share this to those that just are not catching on. 🤓”-Kat Storti

March 21, 2020

Clickbait stories are raging across the internet as media companies profit off of this terrible human tragedy. Despite what this graphic says, the linked article from Accuweather does not say what COVID-19 dislikes.

Blame Trump, blame China, blame incompetent bureaucrats, but blame the media, too. I’ve done local newspaper reporting and my editors would have never approved this crap. On the national stage, media groups advance their political viewpoints to the loss of us all. With reservations, I used to think the Christian Science Monitor was pretty fair and the Wall Street Journal often pens good columns. Still . . .

 

“Weather and its potential impact on how COVID-19 behaves have remained a consistent focus since the outbreak erupted and experts are divided over what impact, if any, warmer weather will have on the spread of the outbreak.”

https://www.accuweather.com/en/health-wellness/whats-the-latest-on-coronavirus/

Hunter Thompson circulated among and covered the national media very well. As he put it, ““So much for Objective Journalism. Don’t bother to look for it here–not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.”

March 20, 2020

CNN showing their editorial depth and wisdom by interviewing medical authority and logistics expert Sean Penn in what they call a global town hall. The sometime actor and activist celebrity calls on the American military to take over the fight against COVID-19. This is what CNN represents to the world as good journalism.

 

March 16, 2020

The death toll stands at 68 in the U.S. according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or CDC.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/cases-in-us.html?CDC_AA_refVal=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cdc.gov%2Fcoronavirus%2F2019-ncov%2Fcases-in-us.html

Frustratingly, CBSNews.com on the same day was reporting a total of 88 deaths, without citing a source:

https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/coronavirus-updates-cases-fears-deaths-us-latest-2020-03-16/

This inexcusably sloppy reporting leads credence to the thought that America’s mainstream media is exaggerating this crisis for ratings,  hiding behind the cover of informing and helping us. It’s the same way with weather or fire disasters, tragedy doubles or triples their numbers.

As noted below at the bottom of this post, the CDC states that the 2017-2018 flu season claimed over 61,000 lives. The COVID-19 virus is said to be much, much deadlier than the seasonal flu. Yet, where was the panic back then for the simple, seasonal flu?

This graphic offers perspective. Double click for the full image.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/history-of-pandemics-deadliest/

March 12, 2020

41 deaths according to NBC as of today.

March 11, 2020

Update: NBC is reporting today that 29 people have died of COVID-19 in the U.S. That’s seven more since I originally wrote this post. This total still doesn’t seem a reason to panic.

One person said that the panic is being driven by how rapidly it can kill someone. That’s certainly well put. I think, though, that we should be bothered by this only if the numbers of death indicate something to worry about to begin with.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/coronavirus

This is an interesting post today from The Week:

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told lawmakers during a House Oversight Committee hearing Wednesday that COVID-19 — the disease caused by the novel coronavirus — is probably about 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu.

President Trump has often compared COVID-19 to the flu, which affects tens of thousands of Americans each year, in an effort to calm people down, but Fauci clearly wasn’t trying to downplay the seriousness of the virus’ spread. Fauci is a member of the White House’s coronavirus task force.

At the same time, he did clarify that 10 times figure actually brings the new coronavirus’ fatality rate lower than official estimates, which hover around 3 percent. The flu has a mortality rate of about 0.1 percent, so, when considering the likelihood that there are many asymptomatic or very mild cases that have gone undiagnosed, Fauci places the new coronavirus’ lethality rate at somewhere around 1 percent. While that’s a good deal lower than the current data suggests, it still would lead to significant numbers of fatalities, and makes the flu comparisons seem pretty questionable. Tim O’Donnell

https://theweek.com/speedreads/901470/coronavirus-10-times-more-lethal-than-seasonal-flu-trumps-task-force-immunologist-says

As you’ll read below, the seasonal flu is quite the killer by itself.

How Many People Have Died of COVID-19 in the United States?

March 9, 2020

The Coronavirus (CoV) or COVID-19 in the States, has come to America and people are panic buying and staying home. The stock market is collapsing. People are flying less and even the casinos here in Las Vegas are worried about fewer tourists.

In 2018, there were 36,560 deaths by vehicle accidents in the United States. In America so far, the New York Times says 22 people have died from COVID-19.

The CDC estimates that 34,200 people died in the 2018-2019 flu season. The 2017-2018 flu season was hard, perhaps claiming 61,099. It may be that COVID-19 has been here for a while, passing as an unidentified flu strain.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html

Why all the panic? There is a thing called mass hysteria, an epidemic of the mind. The press may be contributing to it with their need for ratings and a 24 hour news cycle to feed. I wonder.

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