COVID Chronicles: People Watching Is Eye-Opening
We continue our COVID Chronicles series. In this episode, Vince goes on a road and bike trip, engaging in some leisurely and hilarious people-watching on the way.
Every once in a while, I’ll take a road trip to some place (thanks to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, within my own state) where I can walk (hurray for exercise) and somewhat more importantly, watch people.
This weekend past, was no different. It was an opportunity for me to get in a good full morning of a bike trail in the great outdoors. Those great wide-open spaces, where you know… viruses are ever-present in such mass quantities, that one almost needs a machete to chop one’s way through.
The Parsons Mentality
Yes, once again, I’m speaking about the utter stupidity of people wearing cloth and other types of masks anywhere and absolutely everywhere, all because some bald putz and his lap-dog of a secretary of health (both Democrats, by the way), said that these things must be worn everywhere, but totally neglected to educate the public on why or how they should actually be used.
So, sitting here doing a bit of people-watching, I’ve seen the gamut of Parsons-style mentality. People queuing up to order at a window blocked off so only a 2 x 2 foot opening remains, donning a useless mask or (G-d forbid worse for the wearer) one of those bandanas or TV-ordered neck things that one pulls up over the nose, bending down and sticking their heads right up to the little opening. People walking on the trails, no one else near them, with a mask on. Family members, walking around the little down in the center of the park, all with masks on, with absolutely no strangers around them for well over 25 feet, let alone six.
People-Watching
My favorite was a bike rider who was on the opposite side of a particularly very wide and open section of the trail. She had her mask (it was clearly one of those stretchy TV things) down around her neck… until she got within about 20 feet of me (remember I was biking in the opposite direction). Suddenly, without breaking her rhythm, she pulled her mask up while she passed me, and promptly pulled it BACK DOWN after she passed me. To answer your question, yes – I stopped, turned around and saw her do just that.
Yep, this and much much more, including the doofus who, sitting with someone presumably her husband who was doing the same thing – pulled the cheap home-made cloth mask down to take a bite of food, and immediately put the mask back in place.
People Are Sheep
Yep, people are sheep.
Now, at this time of the year, we’re certainly past (or should be) the initial hysteria over the pandemic. The mask issue should be well-settled by now. We should already know the concentration of virus particles needed to colonize and infect someone. We should have already established that in open-air public places such as state parks, amphitheaters, and walking trails, the likelihood of SARS-CoV-2 virus concentrating in quantities high enough to infect, is incredibly minuscule.
Also, we should have established to the public that while N95 respirators (they are not technically considered “masks”) have a good potential to filter out a decent quantity of virus (not 100%), standard surgical (also known as “procedure”) masks offer little protection because they’re not designed to filter out micron-sized particles, and “cloth masks” which include everything from home-made designs, to other products sold in stores, offer nearly no protection against inhaling micron-sized particles.
Yet, the people have been duped by mass hysteria over a virus that science may reckon in years to come, caused infection in high numbers due to haphazard mitigation guidance, unlike the last pandemic, the H1N1 influenza pandemic in 2009. The difference why the world was worse than the US was, is largely due to the quick thinking and proper action by Tom Frieden, who was then the CDC Director.
The Difference
The problem this time, is that we have a different CDC Director. Robert Redfield, MD, has to rank as perhaps the most inept and incompetent director in living memory… and history will show, likely one of the biggest mistakes Trump made in his time in office.
It can’t be understated that if there is only one man to blame for how the SARS-CoV-2 response has played out in the US, that man is Robert Redfield. While there will always been little blue-colored sheep who want to blame Donald Trump for anything and everything including the sun setting a little sooner every day, and red-colored sheep who want to blame Democrats for creating a “fake pandemic”, people who actually have some measure of intelligence may just understand a few facts which demonstrate who’s really at fault here.
Command and Control – Or the Lack of It
First of all, the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (the CDC) has generally been tasked as one of the very few organizations in the world (along with the World Health Organization and the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases) with the vast resources to not only research infectious diseases, but also to command, control and coordinate research and response efforts into infectious diseases.
In other words, in the US, the CDC has the capability to take primary control of every single aspect of the SARS-CoV-2 response in the country, including testing, tracking, and treatment, as well as ongoing, real-time research into the causative agents and disease symptoms, for purposes of enhancing the knowledge base for medical providers who are monitoring and treating the infected public, as well as formulating responses that help limit the spread of disease. The CDC, when left to its experts in various fields of medicine and medical research, tends to do this rather well.
It’s when the experts are hampered by individuals with ulterior motives, that the whole system can break down. And that’s exactly what happened.
Into the Future
So, for the foreseeable future (I suppose depending on the outcome in November which will be here before we know it), people with actual intelligence will be able to stand back and enjoy the show of little sheep, scared to death by the evils of extreme conservative or extreme liberal politics, wearing their little masks, all the time believing they’re perfectly safe.
