Category Archives: Pandemic

satire, Humor, Pandemic

Corona Virus and the American Psyche.

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The idea of American ingenuity formed long ago when this country was in it’s infancy. It was forged by inventors like Alexander Graham Bell, Sarah Breedlove, George Washington Carver, Thomas Edison, Robert Fulton, Elisha Gray, Beulah Louise Henry, Nikolai Tesla, Heddy Lamar, Grace Hopper….et al…. Nowhere near an exhaustive list but a representative group. You get the picture. We’ve invented a lot of things.

Don’t know some of these people? In the words of my father, “Go look it up.” This is when we had these things called books and some of them were called encyclopedias. There is Google now but check on the source of the information.

We are a country of getting stuff done, now. If we don’t have a way to do it we invent a way. We don’t like to sit around waiting.
If there is a situation that requires waiting, we want to “fix” it.
You may have had a friend or a significant other tell you “I’m not asking you to fix it, I just want you to listen.” For the record , no one ever said that to me 😉 .

Listening is what is needed now folks. Please STHU (Shut The Hell Up*) and listen to the experts.

“But they didn’t know anything when this started.” Not about this virus. They knew a lot of about viruses but not the details of coronavirus. No one did because it was a virus that had not been seen before. It spread unchecked because no one knew anything about it.

Most of us in the general population know little about viruses other than platitudes. Feed a fever and starve a cold? If your nose is cold and wet then, wait , that’s for dogs. Lack of knowledge won’t stop people from pontificating and generating advice to be handed down from their tiny mountain top.

Personally, I believe the psyche of the average person on this planet is susceptible to the Dunning Kreuger effect**. Basically people thinking they’re smarter than they are. Yea and I thought I was the first to identify the phenomenon.

The following people are not experts: Me (shocked?), A friend who works in a Dr’s office, a friend who is in med school, Either you or a friend who reads historical fiction set in the 14th century (The plague, look it up), Someone who ate their Wheaties this morning or stayed in a particular hotel chain.

“Oh, it’s like the flu.” Or “it has a low death rate.”
Greater than 600,000 deaths is acceptable?

Doctors and scientists who specialize in virology are working to estimate the mortality rate of COVID-19. At present, it is thought to be substantially higher (possibly 10 times or more) than that of most strains of the flu***. Over a population of immune compromised people, the rate is much higher.

So if you don’t care about parents, grandparents or your diabetic uncle then don’t worry..

Keep /Start listening to the experts. The CDC is stocked with them.


* My Mom reads these.

** [https://youtu.be/y50i1bI2uN4]

***https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/coronavirus/coronavirus-disease-2019-vs-the-flu

Humor, Pandemic

Lock Down 2020(Dans Log)

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I am now journaling daily. It’s an attempt to document the screwed up times we are living in, i.e. lock down. I would also be lying if I said it was not a coping mechanism. What follows is an excerpt.

05/01/2020
I feel like my time in lock down has been forever and that time outside of my condo1 continues to march on as I languish within.
Will post lock down greet us with an inoculation for COVID-19?
If I choose to be reckless and venture out doors is my cell frozen at March 25, 2020, BC 2 or does it catch up to current time? Personally the way things are going I may want to skip straight to 2021. Actually, I think 2022 is the safer bet.

05/03/2020
Because I live in Boulder, a blip in the time space continuum would not be out of the question. Actually, we have had in influx of what appears to be normal people in Longmont and some bleed out into Boulder. The odds of the existence of a time and space discontinuity is now negligible.

Up to this point, everything I had originally written in this log is intact. The rest of this post is from scratch. I believe the former was amusing in an “old guy get off my lawn” way but not needed right now.

My outlook for the remainder of the month is one of hope.
I hope people will be more cautious if and when they do go outside.
I’ve been wearing a mask when ever I go out because there is a high probability I’ll run into someone who is convinced they are immune. As human beings, sometimes we can be “dumb, panicky dangerous animals” (Men In Black 1997).

I hope spraying a disinfectant around me is not considered by law an assault on those less than 6 feet (1.83 meters) away.

I hope everyone makes it to 2022 unscathed.

I hope more people see this as a time to unite 3 .
We’ve already proven that we know how divide and I’m not talking about Math.
Sadly, we are excellent at it. We need to work on a different skill. The skill of coming together.