BLURRED IMMUNITY

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (10-08-20)- Please remember small business in your town during this coronavirus pandemic

 
Blurred immunity
     Let me be perfectly clear: I'm not a doctor, I didn't play one on TV, and I didn't even play doctor with the nurse down the street when we were little. Actually I do remember having a "doctor's kit," which had several items in it. It had a small plastic hammer that you could test your little sister's reflexes with by hitting her over the head. And it had a plastic stethoscope so you could check if you still had a heartbeat after your little sister grabbed the hammer and hit you over the head with it even harder. And it had little pince-nez plastic glasses with no lenses so you could see what you were doing, but you couldn't smell anything because they pinched your nose shut. And it had a little mirror with a headband on it that you could wear so your patient could see her tonsils and figure out immediately that you overcharged her for taking them out. Everything was made of plastic so that you could learn how to perform plastic surgery and be the darling of your mom's friends when you grew up. My medical career didn't work out but I'd like to play doctor with you now.

     Everyone's doing it. One unfortunate by-product of inept leadership that undermines science and disregards experts is that people start to feel that there are no real answers, and they start making up their own. So everyone has had to educate themselves and come up with their own idea of what is safe and what is not during a pandemic. Is it safe to go to a restaurant? If no one there has covid-19 you could still be killed if a waiter trips while holding a swordfish, so nothing is completely safe. Can I go to church or synagogue? Even if you wear a mask, there's a lot of singing involved, which is not healthy in a pandemic, but there is also a lot of praying, which may be.

     I'd like to know what percentage of people who tested positive for the coronavirus were asymptomatic. I'd like to know what the odds are of getting the disease from touching an infected surface as opposed to someone breathing on me. I'd like to know if people who are asymptomatic and contract the disease again after their immunity wears off will be asymptomatic again. I'd like to know dumb-sounding things like, if I blow a fan sideways while I'm talking to someone, will it blow all the little covids away from both of us and out the door into the garage?

     It would be helpful to have some accurate science on the proclivities of the coronavirus so that I can make intelligent decisions, something I probably should do more of. There is a statistic in baseball known as "Value over Replacement Player," or VORP. If I have a slide rule I can figure out your VORP once I replace you. And after you've been replaced with a guy worse than you, I'll have to replace him to find out if you were any good or not. Do you get where I'm going with this? If so, call me when I get there. But my point, if there is one, is that we have plenty of meaningless stats in baseball, where hardly anyone dies, and yet there is seemingly no national database for reliable information about the effects of the coronavirus. It's because everyone in government is so concerned about optics that they are afraid to report the truth.

     I just got my flu shot today- it's free at CVS. Most doctors agree that it's more important than ever to get your flu shot this year to avoid confusion of symptoms. If you find you're short of breath, have no appetite and have a fever, it could be the flu or covid-19, or you might actually be in love. If you get the flu shot and test negative for coronavirus, congratulations, I'm sure you'll be very happy together. You can give me a ring to thank me, and I'll certainly wear it proudly.

     What is the status of medical treatments? Plasma from recovered patients and corticosteroids have shown promise during clinical trials in preventing people from dying of the disease, I guess that's better than nothing. An antiviral called remdesivir was used in previous pandemics and prevented the virus from replicating itself. Those deficient in vitamins C and D have shown increased susceptibility to the disease, so there may be a benefit to them. There are people still running around touting the charms of hydroxychloroquine, even though doctors have said a hundred times that it has no proven benefit with covid.

     Experts warn how easy it is to catch the coronavirus. But in New York we've learned how easy it is NOT to. I never heard the words "hand hygiene" used so often, but it makes washing your hands sound really gross. My own hands have some kind of deal worked out, and one hand washes the other. Until this thing blows away we'll just need to do what the experts say you should do. I'm talking about the people who know what they're talking about. Not the ones who say that they are geniuses, but the ones who NEVER say they are, and yet when they say what they say it's obvious that they are.