The W.H.O. walked back an earlier assertion that asymptomatic transmission is “very rare.” Turns out that people who have COVID-19 but are asymptomatic can spread the virus after all. So all those people who felt just fine and didn’t bother with masks or physical distancing might have been making other people sick all this time. Great. And the medical establishment wonders why people don’t listen to them and fall prey to conspiracy theories.
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Has the Shutdown Been Worth It? It’s not a yes-or-no question. At what point did we stop being able to engage in complex thinking? It seems that every conversation about the pandemic (and health, and politics ,and economics, and, and, and) gets boiled down to an either-or choice. You either agree that COVID-19 is a serious health threat, or you don’t. You either see the need for the government to limit people’s movements to slow the spread of COVID-19, or you don’t. You either agree that paying the economic price of shutting down the economy is necessary, or you don’t. But when people are asked to think about all these things at the same time and how they’re interrelated, that when people’s brains seem to go tilt and we get stuck.
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Governor Ige is getting crap for not saying when tourism in Hawaii will open back up. He doesn’t deserve this. The vast majority of visitors to Hawaii will arrive in airplanes and at this moment there are no agreed-upon health standards for air travel to counter the spread of coronavirus or COVID-19. So I agree with the governor. We shouldn’t be restoring air travel. I can’t help but think if we had a well-functioning federal government managing our country’s response to CORONAVIRUS-19 things would be going more smoothly. Sure, we still might not know when visitors can fly to Hawaii. But we also wouldn’t be paralyzed by uncertainty and doubt.
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Woke up this morning to the news that there was a riot in Minneapolis last night…again. And in LA, Denver, Chicago, NYC, and Louisville. Seven people got shot in Louisville. Seven.
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We’re about two months in to the restrictions put in place in response to the pandemic. People have been pretty much been told to stay home. If you have to go out then wear a mask. Businesses have closed down. School years have ended early. Sports seasons have been disrupted and delayed. The arguments have started for opening things back up. Some feel that the economic pain is worse than the potential of spreading COVID-19. They point to indicators that say we’re going into recession. Remember 2008? This will be worse. It already is. Some argue that we should let people get infected and build “herd immunity.” They point to Sweden as the poster child for this approach. But Sweden’s own state epidemiologist Dr. Anders Tegnell is on the record as saying their approach won’t work everywhere and they’re counting on the people who are at greatest risk (older folks
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Type 2 Musings is a collection of thought-provoking original and curated content about all things related to health, healthcare, and diabetes. My aim is to help readers make sense of health and healthcare, whether or not they’re living with a chronic illness.
