That’s something I think we all hear on a pretty regular basis these days. “But I know someone who had Covid.” “But I know Covid is real because I couldn’t taste anything.” “But I know they wore masks during the Spanish flu.” At which point I usually walk away as I don’t want to argue.
I probably shouldn’t. What I should do, is explain that these arguments do not hold up to scrutiny. However, no one uses the word scrutiny anymore in conversation and I’m pretty sure if I did, people would get all squinty eyed at me.
So… In very typical justamom style, let me hide behind my blog while I layout unpopular facts and reasoning.
– But I know someone who had Covid. –
Do you? Yeah, you think you do. But do you? The person you know likely thinks they had Covid-19 too. Maybe they did. However, the entire pantheon of Western Medicine has been chucked out the window. Do you really know? Things that we used to rely on to know have been kicked to the curb. Doctor visits? Pointless. Symptoms? Totally irrelevant. The primary, if not sole, source of data is tests.
Once upon a time, if you were sick you saw a doctor and they used their knowledge and skill to diagnose the cause of your illness. Doctors knew that medical testing is only a supplement to confirm a diagnosis. Medical testing is not even close to 100% accurate. It was not used for diagnosis, only confirmation. In general, it worked as confirmation about 60% of the time. The other 40% of the time, when the test did not confirm a diagnosis, the knowledge and expertise of the doctor was then key to determining the next step. Which, was often simply to proceed with the original dianosis and subsequent treatment. No more. Doctors and symptom analysis have been replaced with drive through nose swabbing from faceless PPE ghosts.
– But I know Covid is real because I couldn’t taste anything –
We used to know that the doctor’s diagnosis was important. We relied upon them to consider all the symptoms and possibilities. Our doctors understood that the sheer volume of illnesses with the same symptoms is overwhelming. For example, from the app Symptomate:
Loss of taste : more than 680 possible causes
Fever higher than 100.4: more than 680 possible causes
Lung irritation: more than 680 possible causes
Covid toes: more than 680 possible causes
I could continue, but I think you get the point. Today, everything appears to have only one cause, Covid-19. Even the ND Department of Transportation has no data on crash fatalities for 2020. Are those Sars-Cov2 deaths as well? At home and abroad, we have ditched the centuries of medical knowledge at a break-neck speed. All of a sudden, we just know it’s Covid-19 and it couldn’t possibly be anything else.
– But I know they wore masks during the Spanish flu –
To begin with, yes, some places did ask that people wear masks- gauze masks. This was not a wide spread phenomenon. It was prominent in major cities of the west coast. The Red Cross of San Francisco even advertised that non-maskers were “dangerous slackers.” (2)
While there are no specific statistics on compliance rates, we do know that these masks were mostly made of bandage gauze- not even close to comparable to what we use today.
Unlike in 1918, we know (or at least we did know) a great deal more about health, illness, viral infections, the body, cloth and well… a lot of things. For example, 98 years ago people didn’t know that a virus is 10,000 times smaller than the pore space of a modern mask, but today we do. (3) We even know that 90% of virus sized particles go through masks instantly. (4) Even so, since they “wore masks” so should we. After all, the idea of asymptomatic carriers comes from the 1918 mask wearing crowd too.
This century old theory tells us that a healthy individual is thought to be unknowingly passing a virus. Today we’ve added to it; anyone who is specifically within 6 feet for a minimum of 15 minutes has been possibly infected. So not only are we masking up, “like 1918”, just in case, we are also asymptomatic, “like 1918”, just in case and getting drive through nose probes, just in case.
In the past, aka 11 months ago, if you weren’t sick, you did not go to the doctor. Why? We understood that the work of a doctor was to help sick people get well. If you weren’t sick, you left them to their business. It’s well known that doctors are busy, so we didn’t add to their load. Yet, the new, and false, idea that assymptomatic carriers spread Covid-19 rules our decision making processes, despite proof to the contrary. For example, the journal Respiratory Medicine published the study of an assymptomatic carrier, who tested positive but showed no symptoms of Covid-19. That individual and their 455 contacts were studied. These 455 people would be considered “susceptible encounters” or “cases” by the state of North Dakota. The monitoring of these 456 individuals showed no symptoms of SARS-Cov2, nor did any test positive for the virus. (1) An even better example is the study of 9,899,828 cases in Wuhan, China which found not a single instance of infection spread from an asymptomatic carrier. (9)
Regardless of the facts, we’re supposed to mask up and social distance anyway. Mostly, because some are so adamant they know that the rest of us are “just in case’-ing to keep people from glaring at us, yelling at us and hating us. As a dear friend said to me, she knows her mask does nothing. She wears it, because it makes people happy.
What I really wish people would know, is that multiple highly regarded experts site bacterial infection as the primary cause of death during influenza-like pandemics. (Covid-19 is an influenza-like illness.) To quote the Journal of Infectious Disease, Dr. Fauci and his colleague Dr. Moran stated, “the causes of death during the “1918 pandemic were “similar to those during other pandemics” and that “most fatalities had secondary pneumonias caused by common bacteria”” (5) In fact, if you go through the research and historical accounts, from all the big medical mags, The Lancet, JAMA, Nature, etc the vast majority of deaths during a viral pandemic are bacterial.
Why is this important? Three reasons:
1) Viruses go right through your mask, but the bacteria that comes out of your face on a regular basis? It doesn’t. Comparatively ginormus, bacteria is trapped in the warm, dark petri dish, aka mask, on your face.
2) The symptoms of a bacterial infection are almost identical to a viral infection. This is something we used to rely on doctors to determine for us.
3) Viral illness treatment is exactly what’s being passed out like candy, stay home, take care of yourself. Bacterial infection however often needs an antibiotic. So if you are one of those few who are truly ill, there’s a good chance that you are getting the wrong treatment. You or your loved ones could die because of it.
So please, I implore you, ask questions, stop wearing masks and stop getting tested without your doctor’s guidance. And maybe don’t get squinty eyed at people…
You might additionally note that, yes, a Covid-19 diagnosis is still a cash cow for states and health care organizations. To quote USA Today “if it’s COVID-19 pneumonia, then it’s $13,000, and if that COVID-19 pneumonia patient ends up on a ventilator, it goes up to $39,000.” (6) Further, masks are a booming industry that went from $57 billion in all of 2019 to over $74 billion in just the first 3 months of 2020. (7)(8)
(1) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32513410/
(2) https://www.history.com/news/1918-spanish-flu-mask-wearing-resistance
(3) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31289698/
(4) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20584862/
(5) https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/196/11/1717/886065
(7) https://www.maximizemarketresearch.com/market-report/global-surgical-mask-market/29828/
(8) https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/disposable-face-masks-market
(9) https://www.aier.org/article/asymptomatic-spread-revisited/
JUSTAMOM 