Regina’s Reflections

By Regina McNamara

IS THIS THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL??

Children in School??

September 11 will be etched in our memories for decades. But this September our state was filled with commemorative events, under sunny skies and a sight unseen for months and sorely missed…. Children walking to school, many with parents, some biking, all happy. Finally!

When life returns to normal, which it surely will and needs to soon, there will be many “postmortems”, examination of all that we, while carefully complying with advice of “experts “may have made a bad situation worse.

Examination of failures, like New York, successes like Hawaii (INCIDENCE 65 CASES per 100,000), West Virginia (66 cases per 100,000 people) citation: Johns Hopkins https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/us-map are instructive.

Hawaii began social distancing early, closed s schools, then slowly began reopening. By April they had flattened the curve. Like many states they had an uptick in spring but did not close any schools or businesses, simply reinforced existing processes.

West Virginia issued early stay at home orders and closed schools earlier. They are now rolling out all businesses and schools.

Neither these nor other well performing states and countries plan a second lockdown. Lockdowns, so common in many states, do not work and cause potential harm to the country.

Alex Berenson, an accomplished researcher and author has written two small but important books on Covid. His first was rejected by Amazon since the company’s policy was “no Covid books”. They held their ground until no other than Elon Musk (CEO of Tesla and SpaceX) cited Amazon for crushing free speech. The book was immediately published, selling over 125,000 in its first day. Berenson, sometimes referred to a “conspiracy theorist” has contrarian views on Covid management in this country. However, 90 % of his data is from published scientific journals and government sources. No conspiring evident.

As the infection spread there was a national media provoked demand for closing the country.

Amid this edict and the panic and damage that lay ahead, some common sense emerged. Dr. Redfield, director of CDC, a non-supporter of school closings, declared this an overreaction since research demonstrates that for a child, the chance of death from Covid is 1 per 1 million.

In spite of this wisdom, the US governors pressed for total lockdowns in March. This involved all businesses, schools, any gathering of humans indoors. By late March most states had locked down. Yet many became ill. WHY? Because they were infected BEFORE the lockdown. And were now being confined indoors, Increasing the spread to roommates, family members.

A combination of fear, public pressure and concern for front line workers led to obedience. By April many were calling for an end to lockdowns, to no avail. Fear was driving more people to ERs with respiratory illnesses, fevers and other symptoms. This exposed more health care workers to the virus. Fuel onto the fire. Infections soared, in spite of sunny media reports of the “success” of lockdowns.

Fear reigned in our country and several others. When data are shown to people, fear can lessen. Facts are important. Covid is a highly infectious and fast spreading virus, but not all infected people are symptomatic. CDC review of 1.3 million cases January 22 -May 30 in the US. found: Covid infected patients with underlying health conditions are hospitalized six times as often as healthy people and die 12 times as often. More recent data has declared their risk of healthy infected people surviving is 99.96, survival of those with underlying health conditions is 80.5 %.

The value of national lockdowns vs the tragic cost in lost school time, destroyed businesses and economic disaster will be debated and analyzed for years.

But viruses dislike sunshine and fresh air. Everyone GO OUTSIDE! Without masks please! And BRAVO for all the children and adults returning to school. Stay healthy and stay in school! ■