Black Heresy

[degringolade]

 

Expressionism / John Brack/ Collins St. 5p.m.

Sitting down in the Monday AM.  Coffee has been consumed and the happy lamp is doing it’s magic.  Now this is going to be a tough two week stretch.  I have two full five day weeks planned.  I am getting used to my artificially shortened workweeks and am learning to appreciate them.

Sigh.

The next mini-vacations are the Christmas and New Year three days.  Now, I usually just go in and work on those for the simple fact that no one is around.  Doctors come in grudgingly and go home as soon as they can.  Nurses magically vanish at random times.  The good part is that everyone brings cookies.

I think that the medical profession will not come out of the advent of Rona without quite a bit of shame.  The game isn’t up and there are a bunch of questions that will need some answering and more and more it appears to your humble correspondent that the answers won’t portray the medical community and its fellow travellers, the pharmaceutical industry and the diagnostic firms in a positive light.

What the past eight months have taught us is that we might not be as smart as we think we are.  Yes the Rona exists.  Yes, the Rona will kill people.  But the reaction to these two simple facts have been cack-handed at best. 

I remember the “Boy in the Bubble”.  I remember how everyone cheered for the efforts to keep them alive, but in the process setting up a system that just delayed the end of the process.  We are in that state now, and truth be told, that is a dead end street.  

My point here is that medicine in the US only looks at things from an individual standpoint.  Even at the highest levels we only use the individual as a touchstone and our methods and beliefs focus on saving the individual, even at the expense of the overall polity.

Even if one believes the total number of deaths from Rona (and even these need to be audited and verified), the deaths are old people.  Pure and simple.  Old people and “bubble people”.  The death rate from Rona in the younger populations just don’t seem to be a thing, roughly comparable with the flu or other childhood illnesses.  

Mostly, the Rona appears to hit those who have cheated death.  It takes out people who were in the queue to die anyway and kicks aside the crutches that have allowed us to live while being very sick.

John Hopkins Student Journal was forced to retract this article.  Now, I I haven’t deep-dived to verify all the source data at CDC, but on my initial workthrough things seemed to match up.

https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2020/11/a-closer-look-at-u-s-deaths-due-to-covid-19

Apparently the faculty forced the newsletter to pull back the article.  Now, where I come from, what would happen would be a formal letter to the newsletter challenging the piece, but apparently faculty now, as was faculty then, do not challenge the model, then simply act to end opposition.

I will spend more time with this tonight.  There is probably something there to criticise, but the first drill down the data looks pretty solid.   But to show my state of mind, I did go in and download the entire article as a PDF. In today's world, dissenting opinions seem to get "lost".