Did we really just go from a global lockdown to global mass demonstrations in the streets? That’s quite a turnaround. So much for social distancing. You can’t keep young people cooped up for long.
As I first predicted three months ago, this was not going to be a repeat of the Spanish Flu. The world had advanced too far for that. A killer virus like that requires isolated populations. The world is far too interconnected.
It’s quite possible that Sars-Cov-2 has been percolating around the world for a lot longer than we realize. There are numerous examples of people who tested positive for the antibodies who were sick last fall. The first SARS outbreak was in 2003.
My wife Ginny thinks she had it five years ago. I remember it well. It was a violent hacking cough from which she nearly passed out. We went to the emergency room for answers, a rarity for the Emmerich family. They had no idea what is was other than some unknown upper respiratory virus.
I was quite sick in late February. I kept joking that it was the COVID. Now I’m wondering if the joke was on me. At the time, tests weren’t available. It seems like every other person I talk to thinks they had it.
As I dove into the world of viruses, I soon realized that science doesn’t know far more than it does now. Studies estimate there are probably more undiscovered human viruses than known human viruses.
Conceptualize this: The average human body contains 300 trillion viruses, including 80 percent of all known species. The human battle against viral infection is an ongoing process that never ends.
Fortunately, the human immune system is a marvel of God. We are not helpless babes at the mercy of a killer virus.
Nobody can predict the future. I was ok with a precautionary period, but the lockdown was taken to an extreme, damaging the economy and costing far more lives than the virus.
The goal was never to contain the virus, which is impossible, but to keep our hospitals from being overloaded. But somewhere in the panic, the goalposts got moved.
As I write on Monday, June 8, there were 373 U. S. COVID-19 deaths yesterday, the lowest in two months. That’s less than the average daily death rate from infectious diseases in a normal year.
Experts forecasted that Mississippi would need 4,000 ventilators. As of today, Mississippi has 83 patients on ventilators, down from a peak of 110. That’s a huge miss.
This is not to say that COVID-19 is not real. It most certainly is and has killed many. But our panicked response was far out of proportion compared to the risk of the virus. Other than the sick and the very old, COVID-19 is no more threatening than the flu.
It remains to be resolved how the entire world embraced the panic scenario, especially when Farr’s Law was first discovered 180 years ago. So far, COVID-19 has almost perfectly followed the bell shape curve of Farr’s Law regardless of lockdown severity.
This is good news! The European daily fatality rates are now 15 times lower than their peaks. U.S. daily fatalities are a third of peak and continue to decline just like Europe. Famous Sweden, which had the least restrictive lockdown, is seeing similar declines, albeit at a slower rate.
I have been frustrated by the media in many regards. For instance, you will still see articles such as “COVID deaths reach all-time high.” Well, true, even one new death will cause an all time high. But that is nonsense. What matters is the total daily death trend.
As someone who deals in the digital media space, I can tell you this: A headline like that will get a lot of reads and lots of ad revenue. As readers, we have to be smarter than that.
Wyatt Emmerich is the publisher of the Northside Sun in Jackson. He is also the owner of 22 newspaper in Mississippi including your Clarksdale Press Register.
