Pandemic of Foolishness

By Bob Travica

How do you feel about the way your political and public health leaders are treating you in this COVID-19 pandemic? To be honest, I often feel like a kid being put through toilet training. Stay at home, don't wear a mask, wash your hands, self-isolate, keep a distance, put a mask on, drink bleach, take hydroxychloroquine, don't get tested if you aren't sick, don’t take hydroxychloroquine, get tested, get to work, work from home, the situation is under control, we're in the midst of the pandemic!…

As he's grown a beard and a few silver hairs, the Canadian Prime minister resembles a musketeer from Alexander Duma's stories and he commands via government-paid ads: "Go home and stay at home!" After healing the nation with chlorine bleach and other ingenious medicaments, the American President shouts: "Reopen business, reopen schools, come to my rallies, goddammit!" As he put all his intellect in explaining COVID as "little flu", the Brazilian President eventually caught that "little flu" and said he felt fine because he was taking hydroxychloroquine. This is after his thought-leader, the American President, stopped taking this malaria drug.

The British Prime Minister also thought of COVID as just another flu and then he spent days in the intensive care. Undeterred, he recently kicked kids back in school and allowed the soccer and rugby seasons to continue, of course, with players respecting physical distance. If all this is no sufficient insult to your intelligence, consider the Tanzanian President who "proved" that COVID tests are not to be trusted; he said that he smuggled fake samples in a testing lab, and "the lab came back with positive COVID test results for papaya, a quail, and a goat"!

The medical authorities were not shy of making blunders and blinding us along the way.  The World Health Organization (WHO) toyed with the virus name from the very start of the outbreak in China. Instead of calling it "SARS Coronavirus 2" which it is, the knowledge gatekeepers decided to omit the "SARS" part. Their reasoning: Folks can get scared, so let's keep them in blessed ignorance. With a stroke of the pen, the WHO leaders confused billions of people! It's like saying, that thing growing on your cheek is just a mole, while it's actually melanoma. But a medical lobby in Sweden took this blunder for truth. The chief epidemiologist told his folks they were specially built unlike the rest of humanity, so their body was going to beat the virus on its own. The folks cheered: Hey, we rock and we won't be locked down! It turned out the special folks were getting sick and dying just like the rest of us. Sweden tops the world on the death rate, sharing the ring with Belgium, the UK, Italy, and Spain. 

We were never told really, why it's necessary to wash hands so often. If we work from home and venture out only for essential shopping, why should we wash hands all the time? Does the virus creep under the door, fly in through open windows, parachute down the chimney? Maybe the "washing hands" order is a handy filler when not much else is being done? The authorities feel well as they kinda do something along leadership lines, and we feel well too for kinda doing something for self-protection.  

"Masks aren't necessary except in the vicinity of sick persons. Masks give a false sense of safety. Masks don't really protect yourself. Masks can do more harm than good when handled improperly… Masks are useful, necessary, everybody should wear them... The reason why we didn’t advice masks earlier is that we wanted to save the limited supply of these for health workers…"

For months, we've been subdued to this confusing saga. In fact, it's been so much of the masks-rambling that a bystander could conclude that this is the most important issue in the whole pandemic. Couldn't the health authorities just take a quick look at countries where this pandemic started and conclude in no time that wearing masks is mandatory over there? Hey, those guys got it after battling SARS years ago! Why such arrogance and mindlessness even on part of the WHO? We the folks ain't that stupid. Well, if we don’t figure it out from the TV coverage of what's going on in China and those parts, we're certainly familiar with cowboys in Western movies and their inevitable bandanas. A cowboy would put a bandana over his nose and mouth while corralling the cattle. That had to do something with breathing, didn't it? 

And who in the state of sanity would not want to protect health workers, the life-saviors? But face coverings didn't need to be taken away from them. Hey, we could make them! Whoa, what a novel concept for health experts! Instead of convincing us firsthand that we didn’t need masks, they should have taught us how to make them. Science finds that a decent home-made covering is comparable in effectiveness to the mass-sold surgical type of mask. Both filter our breath. If everybody filters their breath, everybody is protected.

"Get tested, as everybody can do it now!" No doubt that advisors up the power ladder can. But then a former White House official discovers that there's no test for his child and so we, the folks, get dumbfounded. And scared. It's not really little flu, our leaders turned rambling about things-pandemic into business as usual, and by "everybody can get tested" they primarily refer to themselves. They don't even bother to make it clear what the testing is for. For the infection? For antibodies? For the current antibodies or for the long-term ones? In official stats, they lump together all these different tests for different purposes. And we feel safer watching a growing number of tests.

When I'm given a break from toilet training, I feel like papaya from the alleged Tanzanian lab.