By Scott Turner, Corvallis
I am legitimately curious if the people out there who filled up the letters section last week advocating for mandated social distancing and masking up have had a moment of doubt. Doesn’t this kind of, sort of just maybe seem like a no show? Like maybe we’ve all been stood up by this here virus? I mean yeah, the news reports keep telling us that cases are exploding and on the rise and this or that many cases now diagnosed in this or that area but seriously, if you just sit quietly and reflect on your own thoughts is there some doubt in there anywhere? Where are the numbers in your own life and sphere of acquaintances? Could the official story maybe, just maybe not be completely accurate (Gee, that would be a first)? Now I know that there are a few of you out there that know someone who has died or come close, but I know of no one and nobody I know knows of anyone.
Just this week the CDC released a study saying the actual rate of infection in this country was 6 to 24 times the number of confirmed cases. Given that per covidtracking.com we now have roughly 4.1 million confirmed cases in the United States and 137,655 deaths, that would mean the CDC now believes there have been somewhere between 24.6 million and 98.4 million cases in this country. That would make the death rate for those who actually contract the virus to be between .0056 and .0014 which would mean that regardless of age, those that are infected by the coronavirus have a survival rate of between 99.44% and 99.86% which are a range of outcomes similar to the death rates for a serious or mild flu season. Remember we’re talking here about percentages that relate to all ages and we know that those deaths are dramatically slanted in those over the age of 80 plus, virtually everyone dying of the coronavirus has multiple co-morbidities. But my whole point here is that you have to know these numbers to know that something isn’t quite right with the fire-hose of fear coming from mainstream media.
Let’s take a moment to look at that death number of 137,655 and compare that to some other killers amongst us. 650,000 deaths per year from cardiovascular disease, cancer deaths have increased 60% since … What do you think 1900? No, since 1990. 34 million people, that’s one in 10 people, have diabetes. Now 4 million of these are type 1 diabetes which is just bad luck in the genetic lottery but 30 million of these people have type 2 diabetes which can be managed, mitigated or even cured with diet. Type 2 diabetes will cost the United States $300 billion this year. And this is something that with proper nutrition could be helped (as could cardio vascular disease and cancer as well)! I asked you earlier too sit quietly and contemplate if this whole thing feels right, well as long as you’re sitting there I would have you turn your attention to steps the government could mandate to affect these major perennial killers. You don’t have to be a crunchy health food store granola type to realize that diet plays a major role in our health, answer me why in the hell, as long as the government is so insistent in mandating (and a good majority of the letter authors from last week are supporting), doesn’t the government mandate clearing the grocery store shelves of all of the high fructose corn syrup and highly processed food and residual chemicals that are so abundant in the standard American diet. If we’re talking mandates here why now, why this? Why this no-show coronavirus? Why not the obvious offenders? Where are all the letters to the editor demanding the government ban glyphosate, bisphenol A, deep fried foods and soft drinks.
Come on! This just doesn’t pass the sniff test. We are allowing government mandates to turn us all into a disease vector, according to these mandates each and every one of us is contaminated and dangerous, we are all vectors of disease just waiting to infect our neighbors. In the cure is a soggy gross face diaper. How dehumanizing! You know this sounds ominously familiar, the watermelon environmentalists (green on the outside, red on the inside) have always pushed the narrative that humans are the disease and need to be eradicated but I will back away slowly from that one! Listen, living life takes risks, every time you step out your door (and god forbid you get into your car and go rocketing down the east side highway) you roll the mortality dice. All I’m asking here is to just be self reflective and see if this feels in your bones if this is the right thing to do.
Well, as long as I’m going at it here, I am gonna say one thing about the technical aspects of wearing a mask. Imagine it’s January and it’s negative 10 degrees outside and you step outside and you exhale heartily. What do you see? A big cloud of vapor drifting upwards into the surrounding air. Now imagine that same day, that same place, you put on one of these masks that are so ubiquitous, exhale heartily and what do you see? What you will see is that same vapor escaping all around the edges. And if not on the first exhale after a couple of dozen of exhales as the mask becomes saturated with the humidity and no longer as effective a filter, you will see the majority of that vapor escaping around the edge of the mask. Just think about that little picture in your mind for a moment. This is BS what is going on, and I think we all know it but fear and politics has led us into group-think and dampened our innate intuition.
I heard of a classroom experiment the other day where a teacher met with all but one of his students and asked them to agree together that 2 + 2 = 5. Later that day as the class was assembled in the classroom the teacher wrote on the board 2 + 2 = 5 and much to the dismay of the one outlier he looked around at everybody agreeing with what he knew wasn’t true. Well for one, this is just terrible and mean, but it illustrates an important point. Courage is the foundation of all virtues. Now more than ever we need courageous individuals to stand up and say ‘No, O’Brien*, 2 + 2 does not equal 5, 2 + 2 equals 4!’
*George Orwell’s “1984”