AIDS

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COVID-19 and YOU


In late June, my wife and I took a long trip which started in a Boston suburb and took us to the National Parks in Montana and Wyoming. Ohio was pretty much shut down which made it tough for us to find a place to get breakfast but was not unexpected. Our next stop was in Wisconsin, Eau Claire, where we found the degree to which people were taking this virus seriously was far less than what we believed proper. The hotel employees followed a strict face mask plus social distancing manner of business. But outside of the hotel, we saw many people who simply were not wearing any mask. And by the time we reached North Dakota, no one was wearing a mask and this continued into Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. A waitress in a restaurant told us she believed it was just media hype and not real. Another person told me he thought is was just a Democrat ploy. I do hope the people in these states have changed their attitudes but I have my doubts.

One of the more ridiculous things certain people are saying is that requiring people to wear a mask somehow infringes on their rights. I have no idea what right they believe is being undermined but they could not be more wrong.

The last reality check is that of a vaccine. People are thinking that either Johnson & Johnson or another company is going to come up with a vaccine. Dr. Faucci addressed this very issue quite well in the early goings. He said that if this vaccine is to be an effective one, it is almost a guarantee that the first one out of the box will be a failure. The general public needs to come to terms with the idea that medicine is a very inexact science and that a lot of guess-work goes on. Additionally, this virus has already mutated once that scientists know of. This means if the researchers are developing a vaccine with the original strain, will it be fully effective on the mutated strain. No one knows but everyone hopes it will. But here is one last reality check for everyone. Both AIDS and Ebola are viruses that have been around for at least 40 years and neither has a vaccine. Ebola, by the way, is a cousin to the COVID-19 virus. We need to think in terms of partially effective vaccines with many efforts over a period of years before researches find the right one.

And testing for this disease needs to be fully explained. If, for example, you get tested and the results come back negative is not a guarantee that one day later you might become a carrier because of contact with an asymptomatic person. The test is only good for that moment in time. The virus does not sit around and think, “well, that guy just got tested so we cannot infect him for 72 hours.” The CDC has made it extremely clear from the very beginning that the best measures a person can take is to observe social distancing and always wear a mask when in public. There is more that we do not know about this disease than what we do know.

And now we have people who are saying that all children should be allowed to go to school in person because they are not carriers. Again, another falsehood being propagated by I do not know who. Children are fast becoming carriers and, worse, are contracting this deadly disease.

That said, the question become, what will the school year look like. As someone who has worked in the public school systems for over 11 years now, I can tell you that school districts have been given the nearly impossible task of coming up with a plan to open up the schools. In the school district in which I work, and without knowing classroom dimensions, and knowing class sizes range from 20 to 26 students, I cannot imagine more than 9 students in any one classroom if proper social distancing is to be maintained. If you were to walk around any school, you would find that the size of classrooms vary which is yet another problem.

In kindergarten and the 1st grade, a good part of the child’s learning is socializing, reading and knowing their numbers and time. Now imagine you have a group of 5, 6 and 7-year-olds and you are giving them recess. Your instruction to them is that they must maintain a 6-foot distance between them and other children. Will this work? Highly unlikely. Children of this age have a natural desire to play in a manner that brings them into contact with others. And if you do maintain that 6-foot distancing, how much real socializing can these young people actually experience?

The unfortunate reality here is that schools must remove recess from a child’s day if they are to properly protect each child. The concept of socialization will need to be re-imagined and put in practice.

Another issue is that of teachers. Many are expressing fear about re-entering the classroom. This fear is well-founded. It is impossible to know who is a carrier.

Parents are going to have to come to terms with the idea that schools systems are very likely to remain closed for the month of September for two reasons. First is that they will not have a plan plus a teacher’s consensus by the first of September. And second, the disease is likely to flare up in the early fall and quite possibly to levels far greater than those we saw in the springtime.

The bottom line is very simple. This is a health issue alone but one of enormous import and consequences. It is every individual’s responsibility to act as if they are carriers and everyone around them is a carrier. That means, wear a face mask, social distance, and wash your hands frequently. To do otherwise is the risk the health of those people who are doing their best to avoid the disease. The only rights being violated are those of people who find themselves around people who refuse to follow these simple steps because they feel violated. They need to get over that falsehood for everyone’s sake.

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We are Forever Changed — COVID-19 Just Started It All


The reason it is called “COVID-19” is that the 19 refers to the year in which is was discovered and that would be 2019. I believe it was in November. The Chinese discovered it. And everyone wants to lay blame of some sort at their feet but the Chinese scientists were at that time grappling with what they had discovered. People need to remember that just because science discovers something does not mean they immediately and fully understand exactly what they have discovered. To the contrary, most scientific discovered take decades to fully explain and sometime longer, much longer.

No one knew this would become the pandemic is has. No one knew and most still grapple with what the immediate and long term effects of this disease are and will be. The best immunologists and epidemiologists are working very hard to get the arms around this virus but to get it right they need time. It is almost a shame that Dr. Fauci informed us that it would take at least 18 months to get a vaccine for this disease. He has told us that such would be the case if everything went right and we got it on the first try. He has also said that it is unlikely those things will happen. But no one seems to be hearing what he is saying. I am not in the medical field but I remember from the one microbiology course I took in college that the professor told how a virus is the most difficult of all maladies to remedy because of the way it exists.

Let’s take AIDS as an example of the above difficulties. We first new of AIDS is the early 1980s. It is a virus. Problematic to it is that it mutates hence the finest minds have yet to create a vaccine 40 years later! What does this have to do with COVID-19? Two things, first, COVID-19 is a virus that the Chinese believe has already mutated as they are having new outbreaks of this disease. Second, the best way to prevent the spread is through personal protection. My personal experience in traveling from Boston to Montana, Wyoming and Idaho is that people in these states are not taking this virus seriously and are not wearing masks. That will change.

I fear we will suffer with this disease for the next 2 years which will cause states to close down again, hospitals to become overwhelmed and more people dying. This may well be one of our new realities for some time to come. I hope I am wrong.

COVID-19 has already forever changed the way businesses will run. Those business who had never done work from home have been forced into it and have discovered it to be a very effective way to do business. Businesses have been forced to change the way they do business or die. And I read this morning where it is expected that 1/4 of all small business will not reopen. I expect business schools will be changing their curriculum to accommodate the new business models that will inevitably come out of this pandemic.

Additionally, the way we look at response to health crises has already changed and will change more. We simply were not prepared for this pandemic in large part because our belief systems had not allowed for such an occurrence.

We have a new phrase in our language, “social distancing.” Will this be temporary or long-lasting, possibly a new standard?

Amid the Pandemic and new ways of doing business came the policeman who murdered a black man by asphyxiation. First it forced police forces around the country to reconsider apprehension techniques. Then another black man was killed just because three white men thought he was a wanted man when in truth he was just out for a jog, something he had done regularly for a long time and finally there was the policeman who shot and killed a black man in the back because he was resisting arrest.

I knew America was still ways to racist for my liking, but to the extent it has suddenly reared its ugly head was surprising. These events caused demonstrations against racism across America. When it was discovered in the black community that some of them were taking advantage of the situation to cause property damage and looting, black leaders took it upon themselves to call out these thugs and remind both them and America that the protests are to be peaceful. In a number of demonstrations it was police mishandling of the protests that cause them to turn violent. But maybe, just maybe, out this will come a more widespread intolerance for all forms of racism. We can only hope.

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Why Is Birth Control Still a Hot Topic?


Four of the hottest topics in the history of America have all involved individual rights, slavery, rights of blacks, right of women to vote, and birth control.  Three of those are no longer hot topics but all can find their roots in the early to mid-19th Century.  Why then have we been unable to make the basic tenants of birth control something that is widely accepted so that any discussion of it has a baseline of accepted principles?  The only reason is because there are those who want it to be a part of morality.

Our country realized when it repealed the 21st Amendment, alcohol prohibition, that it could not legislate morality as was done with this amendment.  We clearly recognized that at least where drinking was concerned, whatever morals were attached to it were an entirely personal thing that governments have no business legislating.

In the early 20th Century a woman named Margaret Sanger, of poor Irish Catholic parents from Corning New York, moved to the lower east side of New York City where she set up a woman’s clinic.  As a trained nurse, and one who had aspired to be a physician, she found that the health of poor women was poorly attended to, and worse, there was no forum for the woman to be educated relative to her own body.  Such discussions were considered taboo at the time.  She had found the urban poor to suffer from an extremely high infant mortality rate.  But it was at that time she also found that many of these women desired to find a way to forestall unwanted pregnancies.  And it was on this point in particular that Sanger lead the charge.  He efforts were both criticized and condemned by early 20th century society.  When she tried to inform a larger number of women by sending sex education materials through the mail, she was prosecuted and found guilty of distributing pornography.  That was in 1917 and at the time she received a large amount of her support from the suffragettes.  But when, in 1920, women got the vote, the suffrage movement ceased and with it Sanger’s best support.  And worse for her, she had earlier allied herself with the Socialist movement in the U.S. and alienated even more people because of that.

Sanger died in 1966 failing to see what would certainly have been her greatest victory, the 1973 US Supreme Court decision on Roe vs. Wade.  The SJC decided that it was an issue of privacy and that abortion was the moral decision of a woman in conjunction with her doctor.  That should have made the issue resolved and given the American public a starting place to move on from.  Unfortunately that has not been the case.

Sanger’s inspiration was the idea of giving women the information necessary about her body to make educated decisions with regard to it.  Key to the discussion was always the word “education.”  And it is on this point which America is failing.  Our high teen birth rate, high abortion rate, and high undesired birth rate.

I find abortion to be absolutely abhorrent.  But my solution is not to ban abortion, but to better educate those who have abortions and unwanted pregnancies, teens in particular.  My challenge to the anti-abortion crowd, who euphemistically call themselves “Pro-life,” is to come up with a solution that reduces a woman’s need and/or desire to get an abortion.  It is troubling that these anti-abortion people also seem to be anti-sex education where adolescents and teens are concerned.  Their magical thinking allows that all the sex education they need they can find at home.  Ideally that would be true, but the real world tells an entirely different story.  It is not coincidental that the highest teen birth rates happens to the poorest educated.  It is also not coincidental that unwanted pregnancies happen most frequently not just to teens, but to the poor who do not have access to good medical support.

I was astonished that within the US Congress there is a movement to cease public funding of Planned Parenthood.  While the organization certainly advises women with regard to abortion, its services do not stop there.  They also deal with all aspects of women’s health and education, such as cervical cancer screening, breast cancer screening, STDs and so forth.  How can anyone in their right mind think that public funding for such a group is a bad thing?

America first has to come to terms with the fact that it needs to educate their children with what is happening to their bodies as they enter puberty.  And that education needs to continue, in the public forum, for as long as they are in school.  It is far less expensive, in all respects, to educate our children with regard to sex than it is to have them pregnant when they have not yet stopped being children.  To do this Americans must stop thinking of sex, where education is concerned, as being private, taboo, or too embarrassing.  And also because sexually transmitted diseases, to include AIDS, gonorrhea, syphilis, etc. put us all at risk.

To anti-abortionists I say, support those things that help women from getting pregnant in the first place.  Make it a given that all young girls and women will have equal and unobstructed access to birth control methods.  Make a part of that education the actual costs, both financial and psychological, of bringing a child into the world.  Make a world where abortion is only a last resort, not a convenience, or measure of desperation.  There is no substitute for a well-educated and well-informed public.