CORONAVIRUS UPDATE

            Wow, what a week.  This fast-moving pandemic is yielding new information by the day.  Here are highlights from what I've seen:

 1.  Op-ed in Wall Street Journal, Holman W. Jenkins Jr.:  "Half facetiously, we need infection camps where millenials can go and get exposed and frolic for two weeks and then come back and go to work.  You may think all we are doing is about protecting them and you from getting the virus.  No.  Our 'flatten the curve' strategy is premised on all of us being exposed to the infection; some of us will die.  We are crushing our economy simply to meter out how quickly these consequences fall on our exhausted health-care workers."

 2.  Op-ed from Dr. Michael Segal, a neurologist and neuroscientist:  " Emergency responders who are entering quarantine after exposure could be allowed to volunteer for deliberate infection, provided they are at low risk of complications.  For people in their 20s and early 30s without a known risk factor, most will have a mild illness or no symptoms at all.  Some will need medical care, but few will die.  After about three weeks of quarantine, antibody testing could show that these volunteers have built immunity and testing for coronavirus RNA could demonstrate that they are no longer infectious.  Anyone so certified could return to duty, free of further restrictions."

 3.  Dr. Eran Bendavid and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professors at Stanford:  "Fear of Covid-19 is based on its high estimated case fatality rate--2% to 4% of people with confirmed Covid-19 have died, according to the World Health Organization and others.  So if 100 million Americans ultimately get the disease, two million to four million could die.  We believe that estimate is deeply flawed.  The true fatality rate is the portion of those infected who die, not the deaths from identified positive cases."  Their data indicates the number should be more like .06--levels of magnitude less.  The reason is all sorts of flaws in testing.

 4.  In 2009-10, H1N1 swine flu sickened 57 million Americans, hospitalized 257,000 and killed 11,690 but we didn't shut down the country.  We don't need to this time either.

 5.  Herd immunity:  Wuhan's precipitous decline in outbreaks was not due to quarantining; it was due to nature's response mechanism known as herd immunity, which is the ability of a population to adapt to a new situation.

 6.  Some of the medical staff at our local hospital thinks the reason our entire county and two cities still don't have a single case of coronavirus is because it came through here in January.  They had a dramatic spike in respiratory illnesses and lost several patients, but we weren't testing then and the tests now don't reveal if you had it and recovered.  Medical chatter indicates some other pockets around the country went through the same thing.

 7.  Testing is inaccurate.  Many people are asymptomatic so don't get tested; of those who do, tests can be false positive or false negative.  Hospital medical staffs are getting protocol changes literally in half-day increments.  There is much we don't know.

 8.  Dr. Carole Lieberman, author and psychologist, coined the term COVICIDE:  suicide from fear and desperation due to coronavirus.  She says "isolation has psychological and physical consequences that can be more deadly than coronavirus itself."

 9.  Virginia governor Ralph Northam and Virginia's cabinet-level officials believe shopping at Wal-Mart is far safer than shopping at farmers' markets; they've kept the supermarkets open but closed the famers' markets.  I don't have words for this idiocy. 

 10.  Notice graphs of hurting people?  Ain't government workers.  Here again, edict protects the government employee and private business takes it on the chin to pay for their largesse.  It's despicable.  Maybe we ought to trim government employees by an equivalent number who lose their jobs in the private sector.  That would be kind of like telling the politicians that before they send our men and women into harm's way, these decision makers should go there first.  Why would you tell someone else to do something you're not willing to do? 

 11.  All networks vie for the most sensational headlines.  That's a media bias everyone must recognize; beware.  I was a journalist once, and I know the adrenaline rush over "the scoop."

 12.  Live healthy.  Take care of the vulnerable.  Listen to the weirdos--they often have answers.  Herbalists say a tincture of mullein will pull fluid out of lungs faster than anything.  Hang in there.

 What's the most dramatic thing you've done in response to coronavirus?