The COVID19 pandemic saturated the news for a good eighteen months or better. Lately we don’t hear much about it anymore. If topics jawed about by the usual talking heads are to be gauged, everyone is over the whole pandemic thing. Few places still require masks and few people still voluntarily wear them. This, of course, ignores the fact that, with some six-and-a-half million people dead as a result of COVID infection, and ten times that many who got it and lived, there are a good deal of people who had their lives changed dramatically and permanently as a result of the pandemic. But now that the virus is endemic in a seemingly less pathogenic variant, it is a topic that has taken leave of the rapidly shifting zeitgeist of our modern times. Now is the time for postmortems by commentators and historians. That’s what I’m about to do here (as a commentator, not a historian).
SARS-CoV-2
COVID19: Hysteria or Crisis?
The death toll in the U.S. as a result of COVID is equal to the U.S. death toll of WW1 and WW2 combined, but in half the time. This is not even mentioning the people who got sick but survived and are now dealing with long term complications and financial stress as a direct result of being sick with COVID19. Was (and is) our reaction to the COVID19 pandemic hysteria? Or was/is it a reaction commensurate with a real crisis?
The Science of COVID
Discover the science behind the Coronavirus (aka COVID-19 aka SARS-CoV-2) in these videos.
COVID Vaccine: What does it do? Does it do anything? Let’s find out.
I made a video going over some of the basic biochemistry of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and how the Pfizer/BioNTech BNT162b2 RNA vaccine is supposed to work.
Resources and References:
Is the Flu as Bad as COVID?
It seems the idea that COVID is only as bad as the Flu is becoming popular again. Is this true? Let us look at some numbers.
Simple Answers for Contentious Issues
The news these days often cover issues that, for some reason or another, leave people either angry and hateful toward one another, or furrowing their brows in a vain attempt to understand the situation. Here I will give some simple answers to these thorny issues.
Anthropomorphized Intangibles
Imagine a terrorist group infiltrated your country. For my hypothetical, I am going to use the U.S. since that is where I live, but this thought experiment could apply anywhere. Imagine it is known by everyone – you, your friends and family, your government – that this terrorist group exists, but nobody knows who is in it. This terrorist group is very secretive and good at keeping theirs and everyone else’s identities a secret.
Coronavirus aka COVID-19 aka SARS-CoV-2
If you have not yet heard of “the” Coronavirus you must not be paying attention. However, knowing about it does not necessarily mean you are informed about it. There seems to be a lot of misinformation regarding this disease. Perhaps here I can make things a little more clear.