I'm going to take a different tack this time and ask a stupid question: What if we are not doing so bad? I know everyone is screaming and pointing about how horrible and uncaring everyone else is. And I know there have been a lot of -- how shall we say it? -- sub-optimal decisions and actions. But let's draw a big picture comparison.
Hindsight grips us and tells us we should have done things better or faster, we should have been more stringent or more thoughtful. There will be lessons from this. I hope we learn them. Personally, the lesson I see is that we need a better way of doing risk assessment when our standard environment of safety breaks down. But that is just what it is: hindsight.
In the 1918-20 .675% of the U.S. population was killed by the Spanish flu. Rounding up, that's 7 people out of every thousand. So far .129% of the U.S. population has been killed. Rounding up because it's not over yet, let's call that one-and-a-half people out of every thousand. Put another way, at Spanish Flu mortality levels we would be looking at over 2 million dead instead of what is likely to be less than 400 thousand -- 1.6 million lives. You can consider that a benefit bestowed by science and technology -- better health care, better hygiene, better communication, greatly enhanced scientific capability.
I am loath to even dip a toe in politics, but to the various factions that are trying to rip asunder our world social and economic order in the name of justice and/or freedom: you better be damned well certain your new world could do the same or better.
I have become strangely optimistic about things. Lost in the shuffle have been tremendous achievements that are going to pay off for years to come. Bio-medical stuff like solving protein folding and more targeted cancer treatments. New battery and microchip technology. New nuclear power plant design approvals. Peter Theil believes Covid is going to mark a new era. I have mentioned before that I would not be surprised if all this leads to a second Roaring Twenties. Given the pessimistic nature of our culture at this moment, I hope we don't use any newfound blessings as a reason to hate ourselves more. That aside, I am indeed optimistic. I almost wish I was young again so I could fully experience looking at such a bright future. Almost.
One last thing -- and this is very important: For most people, if you get a positive Covid test the thing to do is just ride it out. If you know you are "high-risk" or start to get serious symptoms to the point where you are considering treatment, read this: Current Covid Treatment Advice. It will step you through what to ask for from your doctors.
But everyone should read that article all the way through. If there is anything to be angry about in all this it is not the little political policy and behavioral differences that everyone screams about. It is the fact that our bureaucratic regulatory environment could not adapt to an extreme event.
"If everyone in the world took just the fluvoxamine for 14 days after they learned they were COVID positive, our hospitals and ICUs would be nearly empty today. If everyone took doxazosin or metformin, we could cut the hospitalization rate in half. The problem is that double-blind outpatient RCTs take too much time to execute during a pandemic and doctors are trained only to accept RCT trial data and to ignore anything else. This has caused a great deal of unnecessary suffering and death. The fluvoxamine trial results were made public on October 6, but the mainstream media ignored it since it was a small trial (N=152)."
The Pfizer vaccine was created in a weekend. A life-saving treatment has been available for 3 months. But people continue to die and businesses fail and lives ruined, all because we can't seem to see beyond our overhead. If you want to get mad about something, get mad about that.
