Army Bob: Some of us are still refusing to ‘mask up’

by Robert M. Traxler

The COVID-19 blues, what is it? Well it is a combination of cabin fever, stir craziness and old-fashioned boredom.

Our walking group has been a lifesaver. We all need socialization, to interact with others, to be herd creatures every now and then. We keep “distancing with social interaction,” how’s that for political correctness? And some of us mask up, even with distancing and being outside.

To repeat myself, we need to all keep a journal, a record of what we are doing, thinking, feeling. In a hundred and one years or less it will prove valuable to your descendants. Think how great it would be to have a record of your family members’ actions during the Spanish Flu pandemic, January 1918 to December 1920.

Folks would think studying the spread of the pandemic in 1919 and mitigation efforts, those that worked and those that didn’t, wouldn’t be helpful. Our monumental arrogance leads us to believe we cannot learn from the past; after all, our science is better and we are better and smarter than the folks in 1919.

Science in 2020 is absolute and unquestionable, right? Not so fast. The science told us the COVID-19 virus was not airborne, it was less of a threat than the common flu, we were told to stay home if showing symptoms, if someone is sweating, coughing and ill, simply do not touch them, the virus was only transmittable from those displaying symptoms and not spreadable by community spread.

Science told us the COVID-19 virus was limited to a few in The Peoples Republic of China and not a threat, a travel ban to and from China was racist, xenophobic and ignorant. Do I blame the folks who studied the early virus? No, they did the best they could do with the data they had at the time; science is never “settled,” it must be tested, questioned and validated.

How many times have we heard the “model tells us” death rates much higher than we see in reality, the spread, greater or less than predicted in the modeled scenario? Death rates as a percent are thankfully diving fast.

Lessons from the 1968 Hong Kong Flu with, according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), 100,000 Americans dead, 155,000 as a percent of the population today. Remember it? Study it? Learn from it? We should, how many of us alive then remember it?  A virus that arguably started in China and moved to Hong Kong, at the time a part of the British Commonwealth, and then around the world.

Do we study the Asian Flu of 1957? One million dead worldwide? 116,000 in the United States, which would be more than 230,000 today. The Swine Flu is still with us with some 200,000 cases per year in the United States. It started in China as well. A common thread of most all of the epidemics starting in China is they are airborne.

Did political correctness cloud the science? Was there a movement to downplay the seriousness of the COVID-19 virus by the left, and right? Perhaps.

One positive result of this current pandemic is the use of protective masks; they help in keeping people safe and stopping the spread of an airborne virus, even the common flu. Will we adopt the practice most in the world use, of masking up to protect ourselves and others after the 2020 pandemic? Sadly not a chance in hell.

An argument for masking up can be made that in Wuhan China a city larger, by 3 million and more densely populated than New York, had 4,642 deaths and New York 16,599 to date. Everyone in Wuhan used basic cotton masks. OK, I know the Peoples Republic of China is infamous for controlling the media and the numbers may be much greater, but it is still an eye opener.

Even after the CDC and our state government asked us to mask, up I have friends that refuse to use a mask, interesting that they are on the left and right of the political aisle. We Americans are nothing if not pig headed.

Stay safe my friends.