The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, Thanksgiving, and probably New Year's Day, Valentine's Day, and St. Patrick's Day Coming Up Too

This evening (11/12/2020) Governor Inslee and his wife, Trudi, urged Washingtonians to hunker down in their homes, avoid interactions with people outside of the immediate family, and cancel Thanksgiving gatherings in person. Many other restrictions remain on Washingtonians at this time of writing (this is a small sample):

• Doctors and dentists are threatened with a gross misdemeanor charge if they perform elective treatments in unapproved ways - but who decides what is appropriate?
• No hiking with non-family members. No food service at outdoor recreation sites.
• Only immediate family members are allowed to attend funerals, and they must maintain six feet of social distancing (Why? They don't at home.)
• Did you know there are bowling restrictions? You must bowl in a mask, no more than two bowlers per lane, and no spectators are allowed.

There are hundreds of restrictions in force. More than I would have guessed when I started writing this article. The restrictions fall under the 1984 doublespeak term of "reopening guidelines".

WHY ARE WE LOCKING DOWN FURTHER?

Governor Inslee gave two reasons for cancelling holiday gatherings:

1. Cases have doubled in recent weeks.
2. We mustn't allow hospitals to fill up.

And he is promising more restrictions in the coming week. Let's look at the King County Daily COVID-19 Dashboard:

Skip down to the two charts at the bottom: hospitalizations and deaths. New hospitalizations are running (11/12/2020) at about 12 per day on a 7 day running average and deaths at 1 to 2 on a 7 day running average. Hospitalizations have doubled recently from 6 on a 7 day running average. Deaths have ticked up to 3 per day in the very latest day.

Now, let's check out Key Indicators of COVID-19 Activity in King County:

Again, skip to the bottom of the page to Percent of Hospital Beds Serving COVID-19 Patients. This percent is currently at 3.4%. It had been at 2.0% or lower since June.

Consider: what is happening now? The weather is getting colder. The annual respiratory illness season has started. Are 12 hospitalizations, 3 deaths, and 3.4% beds occupied a desperate emergency? These levels will certainly rise through the winter - as they do every winter. Will King County reach 15 deaths per day - the peak of the epidemic last April? It seems doubtful for several reasons: the most vulnerable were already carried off, many people are recovered or otherwise resistant to the virus, the hospitalized patients are younger than the affected population last spring with better odds of recovery, and doctors know better how to treat the disease (like: not being too quick to put a person on a ventilator).

THE GREAT BARRINGTON DECLARATION

In the English-speaking world, the most robust debate about the proper response to COVID-19 and its relative level of risk is going on in the UK. Professor Sunetra Gupta of Oxford has led the charge against lockdowns and exaggerated fear of COVID-19. Her specialty is the study of infectious diseases from an evolutionary point of view as an active system between the infectious pathogen and the host species. She gathered with like-minded colleagues in Great Barrington, Massachusetts recently to suggest a way to cope with the pandemic in a measured way. I could write on this topic all night, but I'll just hit the highlights of what I've learned from Professor Gupta and recommend three of her recent videos that deal with COVID-19 myths:

• Humans cope with 200+ infectious respiratory illnesses that circulate seasonally. Four of them are coronaviruses related to COVID-19. We don't have a vaccine for any of them. Instead, herd immunity builds up in a population and protects the vulnerable.
• The Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 is estimated to have killed 50 million people. COVID-19 has killed around 1 million by a recent count. Pandemics that kill many millions are no longer possible because the world population is interconnected. Any new disease will be related to an existing disease and the population will start with a measure of cross-immunity.
• The media reports cases of "Long COVID" - recovery times that run into weeks and complications ranging from depression to organ damage. Gupta explains that these are rare complications of all respiratory illnesses.

EVERY IDEA IS ON THE TABLE

Governor Inslee did drop one potentially encouraging comment in passing, which was that "Every idea is on the table." I'm afraid that the ideas he is looking for are new ways to put restrictions on Washingtonians. I'd like to put my own idea on the table - the Thanksgiving table to preserve Thanksgiving, which is to adopt a new type of PPE - The 1 Virus Buster - to conduct our indoor gatherings in safety. The virus buster is a small pouch a person wears that puts out an invisible cloud that attracts and disables airborne pathogens. The product recently gained FDA registration as a Class 1 medical device and independent lab results have become available. I won't repeat more about the product here, I've written an extensive blog about the virus buster at this link:

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE 1 VIRUS BUSTER