Happy New Year... Kind Of
Happy New Year and all, but why is it that I had to manually check the CDC website to discover that as of December 22, a total of 242 children age four and under had died from COVID — since the beginning of 2020! — whereas a total of 347 children the same age died from the regular flu in just one recent season (2019-2020)? Shouldn’t this figure be prominently displayed in every frantic media report about the alleged risk to children not yet eligible for vaccination? You know — that COVID is less of a mortality threat to them than than the flu was two years ago?
Maybe it would be worth emphasizing that unless you were locking down and quadruple-masking your four-year-olds in 2019 to prevent them from getting the flu, taking such extreme measures to safeguard them today makes no sense? I know parents can be overly-sensitive about protecting their offspring, but the numbers — coming straight from the horse’s mouth at the CDC — speak for themselves.
Shouldn’t this information also be relayed to the legions of online activists currently issuing demands that society single-mindedly order itself around preventing their young children from contracting the virus?
While I’m posing plaintive questions on this New Year’s Eve, do medical doctors affiliated with Johns Hopkins University and the FDA have any responsibility to refrain from rattling off the most dire possible speculative pronouncements in public? And if their pronouncements don’t come to fruition… then what? We all just move on to the next thing, and hope the Twitter screenshot brigades forget about it? (I set myself a reminder to revisit this matter on March 1, 2022.)
Glancing out my window this afternoon, I’m seeing a “surge” of people walking their dogs alone in the park, fully masked. How joyful.
Will 2022 be less ridiculous? Possibly. Even probably. But I can guarantee you there’ll be more than enough ridiculousness lingering out there within certain segments of society that somebody will have to cover it. Major universities are already declaring new “shelter in place” orders, for pete’s sake!
I don’t even particularly want to write about this stuff all the time, as it can indeed be wearying — or “exhausting” in the contemporary jargon. But I also don’t want to live in a “Permanent Emergency,” and that takes priority.
Happy New Year, though! 😀
Why not ring in the New Year by following me on Callin, YouTube, and Rokfin? Each link has been fully sanitized!
Sometimes it feels like the great question of our time is "Is all the lunacy by design or occurring naturally?" Intellectually, I'd go with naturally. Human beings, when operating in large groups, can adopt a lot of very silly behaviors. But every once in a while—late at night, usually—a few of the old "conspiracy theory" neurons start firing in my brain and I wonder, "What if...?"
I don't know. But as a natural pessimist, I highly doubt that 2022 will be less crazy. It will be more. But as you said, Happy New Year! Here's to "hope."
Received a note from my child’s preschool, a preschool that specializes in a near totally outdoor learning environment, that kids need to wear masks in this setting due to the omicron surge. Masks have always been a desired thing at the preschool but our kid just doesn’t want to ear em, and frankly we don’t even make the slightest attempts to force it. But this time I shot off a reply shaming them for moving forward with such an absurdity, given the actual science on the topic and the damage it’s doing to our wee ones. I also don’t want to be talking about this. As a reasonable person I find it ridiculous that we’re engaged in something so completely incongruous with reasoning. But it’s time to stop being silent. Let’s face it, and we all know this is true - “they” are constantly loud about their fears. Their neurotic tendencies are the driving force of all of this nonsense. If the reasonable aren’t willing to say, “no” even when it may seem useless (as my wife believes my email to have been), then they win. So don’t stop clapping back. Silence is acquiescence.
I’m in Ireland right now and even here, where they all actually believe COVID can be held at arms length (one day…), they don’t mask their kids under 12. And again, the hype about “the cases” is much more prevalent here then the states; it’s like America in summer of 2020. Plays there’s not a lot of alternative news stories here because these people still believe that the BBC is telling them the truth - can you believe that? As you can imagine, the people that watch the news four and five times a day have no actual knowledge of COVID the disease. For example, when I mentioned that COVID victims are primarily very old, obese or severely immune compromised, the person in this household that watches the news 4 and 5 times a day told me that wasn’t true. It’s frightening to think that’s the more you watch televised media, the LESS you understand the dangers. But you will know the number of cases, and the change, between the noon broadcast and the 8 pm broadcast.
So be vocal. They don’t know. But understand that you being vocal my not move the needle. But it still needs to happen.