Day 3777

I have a feeling that three years from now we'll look back at our current situation as the most colossal overreaction in human history. How did we get here? When British scientist Neil Ferguson published his widely cited Imperial College report predicting that 2.2 million Americans and more than half a million British citizens would die if life as we know it did not shut down for at least 18 months, it caught the attention of politicians around the world. Nobody wanted this kind of devastation on their watch. Even our own president did an about face and radically changed his tune. The country shut down. Ferguson predicted that the demand for ICU beds would be 30 times greater than the available supply and the entire hospital system would collapse. Overnight, convention centers were turned into field hospitals and all the other hospitals stopped doing everything from chemotherapy to brain surgery. The entire hospital system was turned upside down and mobilized to treat the coming surge of coronavirus patients.

A strange thing happened though. After tens of thousands of restaurants, bars, and small businesses shut their doors; after the world economy ground to a screeching halt, Neil Ferguson quietly retracted his predictions. Nevermind, he essentially said. He now feels that the hospital system is well equipped to handle the peak of the epidemic and that British deaths will be closer to 20,000 than the half million he originally predicted. Ferguson never apologized for his wildly inaccurate prediction, but he did say that “We’ll be paying for this year for decades to come.” At least he got that right.

I'm a university brat. I grew up around scientists. I think I learned around the dinner table at a very early age that scientists are not magicians. They are frequently wrong. The scientific method is based on trial and error. You experiment. You learn from your mistakes and eventually you might come up with a solution. Sometimes what you learn is that you started with a false premise.

Do people who are counting on a vaccine to fix this mess realize that the best scientists in the world have never managed to come up with a vaccine for an existing coronavirus? They were never able to come up with an effective vaccine for SARS. To this day there is not a vaccine for the common cold.

There have been some amazing success stories over the years. Polio has been eliminated. Measles has almost been eliminated as well. It took a massive effort to vaccinate the entire world before the polio vaccine was really effective though. Nobody shut down the world while this was happening either. A lot has changed since then. We didn't have a choice about taking the polio vaccine. We all ate the sugar cube. Do you think you could convince everybody to take an unproven vaccine these days? There would be a revolt. We forget that the whole reason for taking vaccines is to speed up the process of building herd immunity. It is not a magic bullet. If everybody doesn't take the vaccine, it doesn't work. It might not work anyway. Most seasonal flu vaccines are only about 50% effective.

We are getting close to the point where the cure is worse than the disease. I think the Chinese knew this all along. With a population of over four billion people, the Chinese government has always been more worried about social unrest than disease. The virus start peaking in China during Lunar New Year Celebrations. Chinese New Year is a huge cultural event that often involves traveling to visit relatives. Rather than forcibly curtailing these activities and risk massive social unrest, the Chinese government let hundreds of thousands of Wuhan residents travel freely around the world for at least a week before mentioning anything about the virus to the rest of us. Do you think this had anything to do with the mess we are facing now? I thought so.

We will never fix this unless we we rediscover honesty. Nobody is honest about anything these days. The Chinese were never honest about the virus in the first place. Our own politicians aren't honest either. Everyone is trying to use the pandemic to score political points. The media is far from honest. You have your truth and I have mine. We all listen to news that supports what we already think. Sadly, nobody believes the news media anyway. We just believe what our friends say on Facebook. It's all a giant clusterfuck. Personally, I don't think what we are doing now is going to work. Maybe three years from now some of you might agree with me.

Chance is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 2385

Janet asked me whether I'd ever heard of GoPro cameras the other day and of course I answered "Oh sure, I've had one for years." When I said this, I realized that I hadn't actually used the camera in years either. Today, I found the thing gathering dust in a drawer and fired it up to see if it still worked. Since I tend to be an early adopter, this was one of the first GoPro's ever made. There was no WiFi, it had a cryptic menu, and I'd lost the software for it a long time ago. Getting this ancient thing going again was a natural weekend project.

You may wonder why I bought the GoPro in the first place, since I don't snowboard, water ski, or ride bicycles down mountains. I think my original intent was to mount the camera on one of the dogs and film them while they were running around at the dog park. The dog camera never happened. There were a few ugly dog fights at the park we usually went to and we quit taking our dogs to public dog parks. Then both dogs got cancer and our lives changed dramatically. GoPro cameras are still a cool concept though. If they had been invented thirty years ago, I would have used them a lot.

Do you ever think about all the repetitive things you do everyday? Every time I brush my teeth, make the bed, clean out the lint trap in the dryer, tie my shoes, check to make sure I have my keys before I leave the house, and turn off the computer each night, some kind of muscle memory kicks in and I realize that I have done these things exactly the same way thousands and thousands of times. Weekend chores are repetitive by nature and I sometimes think that I go through entire days repeating actions I have done for so long that I don't even think about them. I don't decide to brush my teeth or make the bed each day. It just happens.

Cleaning up Dot's poop is rapidly becoming one more of those automatic muscle memory things I do everyday without even thinking. I've gotten so much better at dealing with the mess since her incontinence started. Now, there are poop bags, enzyme cleaners, and disposable pads pre-positoned everywhere. I've learned to recognized the breathing changes and telltale motion in her tail that indicates an accident is about to happen. I don't have to do nearly as much laundry as I did in the beginning, because I've learned what to expect. It's kind of amazing how adaptable people can be when it is necessary. This is why I continue to faithfully do the shoulder strengthening exercises my physical therapist recommended several years ago. I understand how easy it would be to get lazy and just adapt to using one arm instead.

I don't want to get lazy. That's why I'm going to the gym tomorrow, even though I'd probably rather just read a book. I don't want to get sick either. I saw something on TV today that said the third leading case of death in the United States is medical mistakes. I'm sure this is true. Questionable medical procedures killed my Mom. I had a close call myself when I was given two medications that should have never been taken together. How was I to know. You trust that your doctor knows what they are prescribing. We live in a world where we don't trust our politicians, have lost faith in our drinking water, and worry that our doctor is going to replace the wrong knee. I'm not sure there is a solution for this, but it does explain why some people smoke a lot of weed.

Shiner is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day