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What is a variant, anyway?

When covid-19 emerged as a cause of sickness and death, It was studied and found to be an RNA virus that was mainly transmitted by breathing air containing the virus.

All viruses replicate by hijacking a cell’s natural ability to replicate RNA and DNA. The virus invades the cell and sets up shop, replicating itself inside of the cell. The viruses created in this way damage and kill the host cell. Many of these damaged host cells are parts of the lungs of the human who has been infected with covid-19.  When the human coughs, talks, sings, breathes, or sneezes, these virus particles go out into the air for another human to inhale. The process begins again.

Here is the danger.  When the virus fools the cell into making more viruses, some of the replicas have errors in the RNA and viral structure. For the sake of discussion, let’s say that the replication accuracy is 99.9%. This means that only one virus in one thousand has an error.

Let’s look a little deeper, though. Let’s say the virus replicates into one billion viruses. This means that one million (1/1000 x 1,000,000,000) faulty replicas are produced. These are expelled into the air just like the accurately replicated viruses.

Along comes a vulnerable human and inhales the faulty viruses along with the accurate viruses. What happens if the faulty virus happens to be more invasive than the original? It is going to cause infection more rapidly and with fewer virus particles required to create an infection.  This newly infected person then starts the process all over and before you know it the more infectious version takes over and we have a “variant” causing the infection.

What if?

Inquiring minds may be thinking, “Well, couldn’t this happen again to produce an even more contagious covid-19 variant? The answer, unfortunately, is yes.

In a sense each person infected by covid-19 acts like a culture medium for creating a new and possibly more infectious variant of the virus with which he or she was infected.

Miracles

Here is the shocker. Because of years of research into messenger RNA and its potential in vaccine creation, pharmaceutical companies were able to use the newly determined RNA structure of the covid-19 virus to plug into their pre-existing research models and come up with vaccines in a year. This was almost miraculous. Humanity was very fortunate that the vaccine proved about 90% effective against covid-19. Think about the fact that we still don’t have vaccines for the common cold or one that always works for influenza.

Perspective

In our past the world had a disease known as polio (short for poliomyelitis). Its most famous victim was President Franklin Roosevelt. This awful virus would attack the nervous system and render victims unable to move or to breathe. That’s why the “iron lung” was invented to assist infected people with their breathing.

After seven years of research and experimentation, Jonas Salk developed the first vaccine against polio. There was nearly universal acceptance by a grateful world to the extent that polio has been largely eradicated.

Smallpox was another viral scourge. It was a horrible disease that if it did not kill you, often left terrible scarring of the skin. Edward Jenner discovered that a mild disease called cow pox rendered people immune from catching small pox. This was in the late 18th century. Vaccination against small pox became the norm in all societies of the world to the extent that small pox has been eradicated from our planet (except for samples kept by geniuses at military bioweapons facilities). Today most people do not even get a small pox vaccination.

Lies and damned lies

The sad thing in today’s world is that demagogues and their supportive media have used their persuasive powers to politicize vaccination and public health measures. Leading by example they refuse to wear masks, socially distance or endorse universal vaccination.

One of the reasons that people decline the vaccine is that the media has been allowed to say whatever it wants with no balanced reporting needed. This started in President Reagan’s time with the abolition of the “fairness doctrine”. Under this rule a controversial opinion had to allow for the opposing view to be heard. After it was abolished, the Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity types emerged and could say whatever they wanted to their audiences whether based on truth or not.

So now we have “I have my rights” types who feel it is their right to breathe out viral particles for others to inhale if they choose to do so. It is their right to get infected and infect others. So, each one of these anti-vaxxers becomes another potential incubator for the next awful variant of the virus.

The government can’t make me

In 1940 the USA instituted the military draft. This allowed men between the ages of 21 to 45 to be forced into military service. Later the age was lowered to 18. During the 1960s the draft was presented by the government as necessary to preserve American democracy against the threats of communism. I’m pretty sure no enemy Vietnamese ever approached America’s shores but that was the rationale.

Today, the very survival of the human race is at stake and the government has no way to compel vaccination. Instead we offer lottery prizes as an inducement for getting a vaccination that people in other parts of the world would do anything to have access to.

What, big pharma share?

Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical companies got the politicians to agree that the process for making the mRNA vaccines would remain patent protected and only available to the rest of the world by way of the big pharma companies holding those patents. Instead, this should be America’s chance to stand out in the world, not with more military bases, but with the best vaccines on the planet, freely offered to every human on earth.

The virus does not respect boundaries between countries. As long as any humans are being infected with covid-19, we are all at risk. Sharing the vaccine throughout the world would be America’s chance to shine. We help the world and as a side benefit, we rid the world of this viral pandemic.

Existential crossroads

We have laws that can compel young men to go kill and be killed. (Right now they are not being used, but can be) It’s time to make universal vaccination, in America, compulsory. This could be done using carrot and stick techniques such as tax benefits and penalties. If someone wants to be an anti-vaxxer and endanger others, then a full time, compulsory N-95 mask may be a partial answer. If that doesn’t do it, then some sort of quarantine arrangement could be made so that other humans are not subject to the threat of infection from selfish individuals.

If drastic actions are not taken and soon, covid-19 may become a permanent part of what it means to be human in the future. Hopefully we won’t run out of Greek letters to name the worsening variants as they present with more and more virulent forms of this disease.

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Covid-19 Epidemic: How Did We Get Here? Where Are We Going?

America is great again, just like I promised.
I hope the workers at my golf course are not sick
today. It’s been two days since I played golf.

Quo vadis ? “Where are you going?” is the meaning of this Latin phase. Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero, commonly known as Quo Vadis, is a historical novel written in 1896 by Henryk Sienkiewicz, in Polish. It takes place during the time of the notorious Emperor Nero. It seems appropriate to acknowledge the leader who was famous for “fiddling while Rome burned”.

To get to the historical roots of our terrible American experience with the covid-19 epidemic, you need to go back to Ronald Reagan in 1981 when he said, “Government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem” Listen here.
What about the fire fighters, the police, the military, the post office? Do we really want for-profit corporations running those government agencies? The truth is that quite often government is the solution to a given problem. However a significant portion of our citizenry has been brain-washed into believing this mantra. As a result, they oppose government involvement in our country’s problems, no matter how dire the situation.

When “Fair & Balanced” was true

In 1987 the F.C.C. (Federal Communications Commission) commissioners, all appointed by Reagan or Nixon, voted to abolish the fairness in broadcasting doctrine. That rule said that any broadcasting of a point of view on a subject had to allow an opposing point of view on the same subject. After the fairness rule no longer applied, extreme right-wing shows like Rush Limbaugh and Fox “Fair and Balanced” News were allowed to spew out bizarre extremist views on pretty much any subject. The public, having been accustomed to “It’s on TV, so it must be true”, believed what it was viewing and hearing on their television sets and later, their computers and smart phones. When these sources along with America’s president said the virus is a hoax, what was their basis to believe otherwise?

Made in USA

Made in USA

Our public educational system has produced a citizenry with a science background such that one-third of them believe the earth and humanity were created from nothing, around one thousand years ago. They did not choose to believe this way, but got that way due to a failure of our public educational system. Given this background, it is not so surprising that uninformed people follow their leaders examples and ignore mask-wearing and social distancing.

Math and Forest Fires

At this point, it is not so useful to blame Trump and other right wing leaders because it is too late for that. Most likely our country will continue to have a geometric increase in covid-19 cases for the foreseeable future. Our main hope will come with a change of administrations. Then, the country can start acting like it’s in the war that it is. This is the war against covid-19.

The mathematics of fighting this virus is simple. The virus spreads mainly by air transmission among socially exposed people. It usually lasts about a month from first exposure to recovery. So, if we could have no exposure to those potentially spreading the virus, for a month, the pandemic would dwindle in size. Compare this to extinguishing a forest fire to the point where there are a few embers left instead of massive firestorms spreading across mountain ranges.

Whack A Mole

Yes, but didn’t we all ready shut down? We did, but not for long enough and not in a uniform way. Given fifty states, there were fifty versions of “shutting down”. This is like playing the Whack-A-Mole game, but with a very contagious viral disease instead of a cute, little , fuzzy creature popping up from different holes in an arcade game. New York City got its act together and finally suppressed its severe outbreak. Meanwhile, down south, Florida sat back and watched while its governor felt Florida didn’t have the same risk and did very little preventively. Then it “reopened” prematurely. Now we see the awful results, as Florida is setting world class infection records.

So, what’s the answer?

What is the answer? There must be a complete nationwide lock down for a month. This means all fifty states and no exceptions. To say we could have stopped an enormous forest fire by properly extinguishing an earlier camp fire is not helpful. The point is that there is now an enormous forest fire to put out. In the same way, pointing out Trump and his minions’ failures to appreciate the terrible significance  of the pandemic coming our way, could have averted what has happened, is not helpful at this point. There is an enormous amount of covid-19 in the United States, now, and it needs to be extinguished.  All cases of covid-19 must be tested for and identified and any contacts tracked. Everyone with potential exposure must be tested and, if positive, isolated.  No one will like this, but if something like this is not done, covid-19 will continue to plague our nation, indefinitely.

Until our country is enlightened enough to join the rest of the civilized world and offer universal medical care, we will need to institute it, at least during the covid-19 pandemic. If not, the uninsured will have a negative incentive to seek medical care; namely, going broke in our expensive, fee-for-service medical system. We have all ready legislated a similar action with a sort of universal basic income consisting of $1200 for each person and a $600 per week income supplement on top of unemployment insurance. This would have been almost unthinkable in our capitalist system prior to the pandemic.

The proper wearing of face masks will need to represent a patriotic and caring attitude rather than a political statement. Social distancing of at least six feet or more will become the norm. Those breaking this norm will be seen as the threats to our country’s health which they truly are.

American Exceptionalism

Other countries have dealt with their pandemics in exemplary ways. We can too but it will take short term sacrifices to achieve long term gains. One of the things these successful countries have is a sense of national identity. Our citizens have developed on the other end of the spectrum with a sense of individual identity (American exceptionalism) but to the detriment of our society’s well being.
That’s why we hear, “I have freedom of choice, so you can’t make me wear a mask.” Perhaps, if this person were alone on a deserted island, this would be fine. Instead, he is sharing the same space and the same air with thousands of neighboring citizens. The health of the nation must take precedence over such a wrong concept of “individual liberty”.

Where do we turn?

In a real way we are on our own as far as obtaining truthful information about the pandemic. We are being misled by our government and even its medical minions. Reportedly Dr. Fauci and Mr. Trump have been on non-speaking terms for at least two months. We’ve seen similar clashes numerous times before during this awful administration. Almost anyone can name at least five people who lost Trump’s favor and were summarily fired. Is Doctor Fauci next? Who will replace him? Mike Pence, the guy who opposed needle exchange during the deadly AIDS epidemic, on moral grounds, while people were dying?

The real truth is that our country is in big trouble. The thousands of new cases that we hear about daily are passing on the virus to at least twice as many people; who are, in turn, giving it to twice-again as many people.

The next months are going to be very difficult. We have let the campfire turn into an enormous firestorm of historic proportions. This type of forest fire requires full national resources in order to get it under control and to extinguish it. This type of overwhelming and effective response that will be needed to fight this pandemic is not going to come until we get a new administration in place in January.

Hopefully our new leader will heed John Kennedy’s statement, “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”  If only the current administration had followed this precept. Then, maybe we’d be joining those fortunate countries that successfully “flattened the curve” and are safely sending their children back to school in the fall.

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Covid-19 Pandemic – What’s Ahead?

We are all passengers on Spaceship Earth

Space ship Earth

Before 1990, smoking was allowed on commercial airline flights in the USA. This was accomplished by having a special “smoking section” set aside in the cabin of the plane. This section was in an area of the plane completely open to the rest of the plane. Everyone on board would breathe the same smoke contaminated air.

Looking back this seems ridiculous. But, how different is it from today’s situation with regard to covid-19 in America? Each of the USA’s fifty states sets its own standards of response to the covid-19 pandemic. Aren’t we all free to pass from one state to another and aren’t we all breathing the same air? Yet, one state may close down all non-essential businesses and issue “stay at home” orders while its neighboring, laissez-faire state may just say, “be careful out there”.   Each state in the country, nonsensically, has its own separate medical licensing exams and requirements for medical doctors. Aren’t the human body and its diseases the same whether you live in Hawaii or in Maine? Maybe the idea of each state coming up with its own home-made, pandemic solution comes from some “states rights” political ideas. Whatever the causes, it’s the wrong solution.

What worked so far

The most successful countries in dealing with the pandemic are those with a coherent national plan. Whether or not we like the Chinese system of government, it did react fast to its covid-19 outbreak and did what medical scientists said. Shut everything down and isolate the sick and their contacts. In short order, they had things under relative control and averted what could have been an historically catastrophic and record-setting loss of lives. The truth is that every person in every state is a human being. Everyone’s body is capable of being attacked by the corona virus. The virus does not care if you live in a high rise facing Central Park or have a cabin in the remote woods of Montana. It makes no sense for each state to invent its own wheel in order to fight the corona virus pandemic. This is especially true since it’s nearly impossible to wall off each state from the other 49 states as countries have done with border controls and flight regulations

Two paths

The two main paths, that this pandemic can take, will depend upon if we find an effective vaccine or we do not. There are nearly two hundred, covid-19 vaccines in development as of June 2020 with the potential of reaching a stage where they can be tested in increasingly large clinical trials on previously, non-infected people. If any of these vaccines get beyond that stage and prove successful, then the daunting task of creating billions of doses will need to be faced.
Then, we will face hurdles such as who gets vaccinated first? Which country? Which social class? Then there are the anti-vaxxers who will refuse a vaccine and those with religious or other objections. This vaccine, if it ever comes about, will be miraculous if it reaches its first recipients by the end of 2021. This means we are stuck with the pandemic, in the best case scenario, for at least another 18 months. In the worst case scenario a vaccine does not appear and covid-19 is our reality for the foreseeable future.

All this begs the question, “How can society function for the next 18 months or more in this pandemic?” The insanity of politicizing a pandemic is with us. The president of the USA has most of his focus on winning re-election in 5 months. This focus drives his insistence on getting the economy going immediately. It also drives his showing up at ill-advised, mass rallies where his followers imitate him and do not wear masks or “socially distance” themselves from one another.

His like-minded state governors exposed their populations to the most lax regulations for their states while urging their citizens to get back to work ahead of other more cautious states. Now we are seeing the huge increases in the height of the first wave of covid-19 infections, afflicting those unfortunate states. This was easily predicted by any knowledgeable epidemiologist.

It’s war. Act like it.

In America we are accustomed to thinking in terms of war, since we have been in continuous wars since the Korean conflict of 1950. If one combines the dead Americans from the Korean War, the Viet Nam War, two Iraq Wars and the Afghanistan War, he gets the figure of 104,000 deceased. To date, in June 2020 we have 125,000 dead Americans from the corona virus pandemic.

This pandemic needs a national response as though we were at war, because we are. Only the enemy is not a foreign army. It is an invisible virus that acts worse than the worst terrorist imaginable. It does not respect age, sex, social class or political beliefs.

One cannot address the pandemic issue without dealing with the “elephant in the room”, Donald Trump. He has been not only useless in dealing with this disaster; he is like a fireman pouring gasoline on the fire he is meant to be fighting. Refusing to lead his believers by setting an example and not wearing a face mask in public is beyond the pale. The idea that he has belittled the importance of the pandemic from the first day he was made aware of it is incredible. Pushing people to go back to work, while they still should be staying at home, borders on criminal.

Hopefully the general election will put a new president in charge in January. This new president should do what we did in World War II, and start the equivalent of a Manhattan Project. Only this time, instead of nuclear scientists, we need a respected team of doctors and scientists recruited from our great teaching institutions: Harvard, Stanford, Yale, MIT, Oxford, Cambridge and so on. They need to form a “brain trust” to formulate the country’s and the world’s future response to covid-19. Right now we have fifty individual governors with their own advisors and their own political biases, each “inventing the wheel” of his or her own state’s coronavirus response. This team of leading experts needs to be picked without regard to political affiliations or nationality.

Once the team formulates the best plan that it can think of, it presents this as the plan for each and every state in the country to follow. In the past, when we were in world wars, we did not ask each state if or how it would like to respond. We behaved like we were all Americans fighting a common enemy. We acted in unison.

Next

No doubt, the face mask will be with us when we are outside of our homes for a long time. This will be mandated. Social distancing will be a part of everyday life. Hundreds of thousands of people crowded into Times Square to watch the New Year’s ball drop is no more.

Work environments will be permanently changed. Remotely working from home may become the rule rather than the exception, where possible. When working in an office is necessary, barriers will be set up similar to what we are starting to see in check out lines in supermarkets.

Testing for past and present covid-19 infection will be extremely common to separate the possibly infected from those not yet infected. This will allow separation for at least two weeks to prevent spread. This will become mandatory

The medical system will change. We cannot afford to have people not seeking medical care because they have no money or they fear becoming financially impoverished by our present medical system. Then, undetected and untreated, they go on to infect others and perpetuate the pandemic.

Economy

Will the economic system also evolve? What is to become of 40 million US citizens shut out from their jobs and incomes when it comes time for them to buy food and pay for housing? FDR saw the potential for an uprising when the Great Depression created millions of jobless people. So, he got the New Deal passed. People were put to work on all kinds of projects from building dams to making national parks. Will we do the same with a “Green New Deal”. The country’s infrastructure has deteriorated badly. Maybe this will be the catalyst that gets repair and innovation underway.

What will happen to our monetary system now that the central banks are printing fiat currency in astronomical amounts? Here is what six trillion dollars looks like when written numerically, $6,000,000,000,000.00. That is our debt in America. Who will repay it and when?

Future

There are no true fortune tellers in the world. We can predict with certainty that the world as we have known it it will be changing and changing fast. Be ready for it.

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Our New Future – Corona Virus Pandemic of 2020

Uncertainty

One thing that has become clear during the covid-19 pandemic is that there is a lot unknown about the covid-19 virus and its infection of humans. This makes predicting the future of the pandemic very imprecise. Here’s some of what we know so far. The covid-19 seems to be a virus which previously only affected animals such as bats or pangolins. One hypothesis is that the virus went from bats to pangolins to humans.  Because the virus is completely new to humans there is no previous, specific immunity to it, so it is extremely contagious. A recent example of this contagiousness was seen when 16 girlfriends went to a Florida pub in June 2020 and all sixteen ended up testing positive for the corona virus afterwards.

Contagion

Spread in a completely vulnerable population is expressed as R0. (R naught). If one person typically spreads a disease to two other people the R0 is said to be two. The swine flu pandemic of 1918 had about a value of R0=2.

50 million people are estimated to have died worldwide in that pandemic. The R0 for the covid-19 pandemic is estimated at 5.7, an even larger contagion number. This means that an infected person typically spreads the virus to about 5 or 6 other people. Then each of these victims may spread the virus to five or six other people. In math, this would be about a fifth power function. That is to say, 1→5→25→125→625→3125→15625→ and so on. This is why those graphs on TV, showing the spread, look flat on the left side and then shoot up to the sky on the right as time progresses.

The population of the USA in early 2020 was about 331 million people. It’s easy to imagine that at this geometric rate of spread, it would not take long to infect the entire population. However, there are many factors which change this calculation. Some people may have some sort of genetic resistance to covid-19 infection. They would be at the other end of the spectrum from those who are extremely vulnerable to the disease. Some people have such excellent immune systems that they may never even experience detectable signs or symptoms. Insufficient testing prevents accurate statistics. Did that old person, who died at home, die from flu, bacterial pneumonia, heart failure or covid-19? Was that scratchy throat, the teenager experienced, strep throat, a cold, or coronavirus?  Of course, if no one comes into contact with anyone else then the spread would stop. That is to say, it would stop until everyone gets back to “business as usual” and then the infections will resume.

One thing we do know is that a person without symptoms can still be transmitting the virus. They may be in the incubation stage of what will become a significant illness, or they may be infected but never show any symptoms. This makes the situation worse since no one can be sure, in the supermarket, if that asymptomatic person choosing a tomato or an ear of corn, from the same stack as you are, is spreading covid-19 or is perfectly healthy.

Experts and Leaders

A major problem in America is there are so many sources of information that one cannot be certain which to listen to or to rely upon. Does the fact that you are a Republican and believe Fox News’ political reporting also mean you should believe their pandemic opinions? Does looking at an opinion poll on Facebook mean that the majority of Facebook users is correct when it concerns coronavirus.?

VP Pence with a crowd. All without masks. June 2020.

How about our national leaders? Humans as a whole are gregarious. We like to behave as we see others around us behave. If we see our President refusing to wear a face mask doesn’t that mean that we don’t need one also? If we see the Vice-President, who has been named the Covid-19 Czar, maskless, in front of a closely packed crowd of unmasked Republican campaign people in Arlington, doesn’t that suggest how we should behave?

Then there are our national medical leaders:

The U.S Surgeon General is Jerome Adams, M.D.
In October 2014, Adams was appointed by then Governor Mike Pence to be the Indiana State Health Commissioner. In February 2020, Adams was appointed to the task force for dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. Adams initially downplayed the risk from COVID-19 by comparing it to the flu. He also implored people not to buy or use face masks in public because he said they were not effective in preventing the general public from catching the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. Adams later retracted this recommendation because he said there was new information about the asymptomatic spread of the virus.

Alex Azar is Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Azar was previously a big-pharma lobbyist and also served as president of Lilly, USA, during which time he was responsible for the company’s entire operations in the United States. Prices for drugs rose substantially under Azar’s leadership, including the tripling of the cost of the company’s top-selling insulin drug.
Azar informed associates that he had alerted Trump on January 18, 2020, regarding the potential danger from COVID-19, but that the president thought he was being “alarmist” as Azar struggled to get Trump’s attention to focus on the issue. Despite Azar’s warnings, four days later, Trump announced about covid-19, “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China.” Azar was responsible for appointing Robert Redfield, M.D. as head of the CDC in Atlanta

Robert Redfield is head of the Communicable Diseases Center in Atlanta.
In 1992, the Defense Department investigated Dr. Redfield after he was accused of misrepresenting the effects of an experimental HIV vaccine, the study of which he had overseen. On the basis of this data, in 1992, the U.S. Senate gave a $20 million appropriation for a private company, MicroGeneSys, to develop a therapeutic HIV vaccine based on the protein gp160, which went into clinical trials.
Randy Shilts, author of And The Band Played On, wrote that the idea of a therapeutic vaccine was a radical idea that came to Redfield while reading his children a book about Louis Pasteur. He then discussed this idea with Jonas Salk who was in support. At the time, a U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel, Redfield was the army’s leading AIDS researcher, and a proponent of the vaccine. Many researchers, however, were skeptical of the data, and were unable to reproduce Redfield’s analysis. US Air Force scientist Major Craig Hendrix, MD (now at Johns Hopkins) said that Redfield committed scientific misconduct by selecting data that were favorable to the vaccine.
Redfield continued studies of the gp160 vaccine; the results of the 27-author phase II clinical trial were published in the Journal of Infectious Disease in 2000, concluding that the vaccine was ineffective, with Deborah L. Birx (now on the coronavirus task force of Pence) as lead author.
The 1993 investigation did say that Redfield had an “inappropriate” close relationship with the non-governmental group “Americans for a Sound AIDS/HIV Policy” (ASAP), which promoted the gp160 vaccine. The group was founded by evangelical Christians that worked to contain the HIV/AIDS outbreak by advocating for abstinence before marriage, rather than passing out condoms — a view Redfield says he’s since changed.
In the 2000s, Redfield was a prominent advocate for the “ABCs of AIDS” doctrine which promoted abstinence primarily and condoms only a last resort.

Anthony Fauci is the head of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Dr. Fauci will be 80 years old in 2021.  In late January, 2020, Fauci described the coronavirus as “very low risk”, and in March, that “there is no reason to be walking around in a mask” and that only those with underlying conditions have reason not to go on a cruise.
In an interview in June 2020, Fauci said that his initial statement about not needing masks was to prevent a run on the mask supply in the USA which would leave health care workers unprotected. As of June 20, 2020, according to Dr Fauci, there has been no communications between himself and President Trump for over two weeks.(Death count at this time was 120,000 Americans)

So, these are the main actors we are presented with in our media. Have you ever wondered who owns the media? The answer, across the board, is billionaires and their corporations. Why does that matter? The bias in reporting will always be in favor of profits and economic expansion. That is why we see such a push to get people back to work again while the virus is spreading faster than ever in almost half the states in the USA. Do we ever ask ourselves why the USA (motto, “We’re number one”) has had the worst coronavirus experience in the world to date?  Only Brazil, with its right wing extremist leader, is coming up as a close second in this grim competition)

Putting it Together

2020 is the year the history of the world took a sharp turn in the road. Covid-19 appeared and it is here to stay. It does not respect status, sex, age, political party or any of those demographics that we may deem important. It infects any vulnerable human being. We have seen everyone from royalty, to heads of state to impoverished, homeless people become victims.
This means that societies will be making permanent adaptations in almost every aspect of societal functioning. Masks may become a permanent part of going outside of one’s home, just like putting on shoes, a dress or a pair of pants has been to date. Plexiglas or other barriers at places of business interactions, like the grocery store, will be the norm. Hand washing stations and alcohol gel dispensers will become omnipresent.
One might ask, “What about the vaccine?”  Until now there has never been a successful vaccine for any of the other varieties of the corona virus.
Is it possible that a vaccine will happen? Yes, just like it’s possible to win the lottery. Even if a vaccine is developed, what’s to stop the virus from mutating as does the influenza virus so that last year’s vaccine becomes this year’s placebo shot?
How about chloroquine? (proven worse than placebo)
Then what about Decadron? (This steroid has been around for decades and is well known to combat inflammation. It is also known to suppress the immune response. Sometimes the immune response inflammation can be worse than the infection and steroids can be helpful. They do not fight the actual virus however)

We are going to need to transition to behaviors that benefit ourselves and our societies. Wearing a mask must not be a political statement. Avoiding crowds does not mean you do not like people.  Look to responsible sources of medical information, not politicians and their sycophant appointees.  Reputable medical doctors are a great start. Admittedly they don’t have all the answers. They do not have any hidden agenda. Universally they all strive for healthy patients.

This is a new disease.
Do we get any immunity to future infections if we recover from covid-19? (not known)
If so, how long does it last? (not known)
Are there long term consequences of having been infected? (not known)
If a vaccine is invented, what percent of the population will receive it? .(not known; Think anti-vaxxers and and affordability)
Is it possible covid-19 will become like AIDS, where there is no vaccine but anti-virus medicines may keep the disease suppressed? (not known)

Lessons Learned so Far

Today’s coronavirus pandemic has provided important takeaways. An epidemic beginning anywhere in the world has the same significance to America as an epidemic starting here in the USA.  We are in a jet age when a traveler from an infected area in any country can be anywhere else in the world within a day and often they are. With global warming and human encroachment upon previous-wilderness areas, there will be more zoonotic infections (getting a disease from a non-human animal). Societies need to be prepared in terms of personal protective equipment (PPE). Our government has invested obscene amounts of our nation’s wealth into thousands of nuclear weapons in preparation for the insanity of a doomsday war but we do not have enough masks and respirators to care for a future pandemic with overwhelming numbers of infected patients. This must change.

Conclusion

NOT YET. SOMEDAY?

What does the future hold? Most importantly, we must adapt to the fact that covid-19 is our new reality. It is not temporary. Do not believe the ”talking heads” who say everything will be fine by summer or fall or perhaps winter (fill in whatever time you choose and it still won’t be correct) . All that talk about “flattening the curve” was to avoid overwhelming our unprepared medical system. Its an epidemiologist’s version of “kicking the can down the road”. The covid-19 infections will still be happening but they will be spread out over time into the future instead of millions of cases happening at the same time. When there are so many unknowns it is not possible to come up with a precise prediction of the future world, but whatever it is, it is going to include the covid-19 virus. We need to be realistic and make plans accordingly.

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