Could This Be You?

So, you're at the grocery store on Saturday morning, in the check-out line, and perusing the gossipy mags and debating a chocolate bar, and the air you exhale is quietly raining down on a little boy standing in line a foot in front of you. But you're fine, so what's the worry? Where's the story?

He goes to school on Monday and learns some and plays some, and, by the afternoon, is coughing a bit. The windows are closed to keep out the rain, and the HEPA is turned off because it's too damn loud. So every exhale adds a virus to the air that all the other kids and teachers breath in. He's unwittingly hotboxing the classroom. 

Like a third of all cases, you never felt sick. Why should you have to wear a mask when you're clearly well?? 

The boy was fine until he wasn't, but it was just a couple weeks of endurable hell. No biggie.

But another classmate he didn't really know, who tried to keep her mask on despite being the only one, had a mild case. It was kind to her, it seems. But it was doing a sneaky, underhanded number on her system. Then, the following month, she got strep. She went from a bit of a fever, to burning up, to we can't save her in just a few hours. Her parents had CR boxes in the house and had been able to avoid getting sick from their daughter's original illness, but they were no match for the hospital emergency department full of people coughing, and retching and babies crying and mothers wailing as their own wee one grew listless in their arms. And the ER doctor working with them, right in their face, had a bit of a sniffle.

Now her mom, while grieving her only child, has to care for her dad with Long Covid, feed him, bathe him, and help him get back and forth to the bathroom every day for the rest of their lives. 

So that's why people say things that sound so mean and awful and alarmist like, 

"Chances are, if you got Covid and were in public, you've killed someone. 

That's why no one want to acknowledge reality. 

You can repent by fixing the future. Here's how:

"We did NOT kill cholera in the developed world by asking people to boil their water. We did it by building more hygienic infrastructure. We can do the same for Covid--and all respiratory infections. We just need to scale ventilation, filtration, and UVS. 

Because in the end,

"Personal responsibility" is a fiction when it comes to this virus because--very simply--you don't have personal air. 

The same is true for all airborne pathogens and many Hospital Acquired Infections (HAIs), so the benefits of improving indoor air quality go far beyond just SARS2: 

"It actually IS simple to end the pandemic aspect of SARS2. First, scale hygienic infrastructure:
1. Make indoor air nearly as ventilated as outdoor air.
2. Publicly measure that ventilation.
3. Inactivate/trap remaining airborne pathogens through UVC and HEPA filtration.

"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function" - Professor Allen Bartlett

And you're going to continue killing people by continuing to spread it (and other pathogens). 

And no, vax-and-relaxers, while you likely reduced your risk of death temporarily, you did not absolve yourselves. Despite the availability of vaccines, there were nearly as many excess deaths as in the first year, prior to the vaccine era.

Many of the justifications we've come up with are precisely designed to make people not care: 'just people who were going to die anyway, high risk, didn't take care of themselves' and so on. 

The math of it all and links to studies are in the original thread. I'm tired of proving it all with scientific evidence. It has no effect. 

But there at things we can do, each of us, all of us, while those in power work on cleaning our air:

#1 - Wear a mask in public places. Clean air measures won't be in place for a while*. If you feel weird because you're the only one, think of yourself as a trendsetter! You can't know if you're carrying an asymptomatic case. That's been true for the past three years. That hasn't changed. 

#2 - We need to work on the collective guilt and grief that's just below the surface, It's showing up already in random outbursts of anger. From being immersed for over thirty years in genocides, wars and conflicts, historical and current, I am very afraid we will kill each other before the virus or climate change has a proper chance to do us in. More on that another day.

#3 - We need to acknowledge, openly and quickly, that this virus causes serious cognitive decline. We know that from the studies, but we don't know know that in our day to day lives. Many people with some decline, have no idea. Others start looking at them funny when they don't understand simple instructions, but they just brush it off. They feel fine. And they're driving cars, and piloting airplanes, operating heavy equipment, and operating on your kid, and making all sorts of unwise, unreasonable decisions about policies that will kill people or allow them to be killed because it kinda feels good to hurt others when we're all so broken (see #2). 

*When I resigned as trustee in May, my school board was just at the point of voting on a motion to have a pilot project to monitor the air in three schools next fall which will produce a report in the winter of 2024, that will provide information that they might think about acting on, maybe, if they're super quick, for the following year, like, winter 2025. Meanwhile teachers turn off the HEPA units, which is scads of dollars down the drain, and VPs tell off teachers if they sneak in a quiet Corsi-Rosenthal box, which violates their insurance policy, or if they open the windows, which provokes parents to complain of the cold and hassle the VPs, and the children and teachers and EAs get sicker and sicker from some mysterious bad bug going around.