Recently I read a book called Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell. The book’s heart isn’t really centered upon achieving better communication. It concerns instead a problem with policing in the United States under neoliberalism. I know that because the author stated that a particular instance of policing in Texas, an incident involving Sandra Bland, inspired him to pick up his pen and write Talking to Strangers. You may wonder what has happened to policing in the United States, and I’ll tell you about that in a few more paragraphs. But first, some background.

Neoliberals have wanted to change the United States in so many ways. Their ambition seems boundless. How police do their jobs is only one example of something they have been changing.

After all, we’ve seen changes in our schools, in financial deregulation, communications deregulation, transportation deregulation, energy deregulation. More recently, in our ailing economy, we’ve now seen a seizure of power in our job markets by officials who have blown covid-19 fears out of all reasonable proportion. First, trillions of dollars bailed out banks again when they couldn’t get paid in the repo market. But this bad response to pay banks for making bad loans wasn’t enough. Local economies were also misdirected. At first, taking their cue from health officials and the President, local governments comandeered a health emergency and responded to it by pretending that isolating healthy people has been a proper response when it isn’t. They shut down large parts of the economy. Private businesses were harmed the most when they were sorted into a category the government called “non-essential.” The closure of independent places of work has been wrong. This has become a terrible economic storm. It has swept millions of people’s livelihoods away. Rent and other debts are due and some can’t pay who could have paid before the covid-19 panic.

Fines have been levied against some businesses for opening outside government guidelines. These fines have also been wrong even though the courts have supported the closures and the fines. Our courts supported the business closures based on the theory that a real epidemic that constitues a health emergency requires a government response. The courts have ignored the fact that covid-19 isn’t a healthcare emergency (because it doesn’t have an unusually high death rate as compared with the seasonal flu). They have ignored the inappropriateness of business closures over the whole span of time since March until June, well after covid-19 has proven to be a non-emergency.

Courts are behaving as though they exist in a land of judicial argument rather than this real world that we all live in. The real world has arguments that are reality based and arguments that are fantasy based. Courts are supposed to be able to tell the difference. By now it’s obvious that the covid-19 emergency is a fantasy. Why isn’t it acknowledged by our courts and politicians? Covid-19 has certainly enabled a power grab and a money grab. The covid-19 power grab and money grab seems to have found it’s own new purpose in power-seizure and money-seizure.

I heard that stacks of bricks have been brought to downtown city-centers. Riot instigators were active in the 2016 election and now I hear that they are back. Bricks are brought in order to provide ammunition to rioters so that they can damage property. With cameras on every corner, why haven’t riot instigators been identified? After all, isn’t that what all those cameras were installed to do? It looks like a group of trouble-makers want to vie for power with all the other power grabbers. It’s enough to make you wonder. Are the riots a further excuse for a power and money grab? Aren’t riots a great excuse for even more policing? Is this social destabilization just the outcome of a larger political and economic failure?

If one of the things you’re wondering about is what happened to policing in the United States, I can now explain what Malcolm Gladwell wrote in his book. Gladwell said that a new book encouraged police to take a more agressive stance whenever they stopped someone for a traffic violation or any other problem that grabbed the police’s attention. This book was published in 1995. It was titled Tactics for Criminal Patrol, and it was written by Charles Remsberg.

Many ordinary people in police and government responded to this book in a way that supported their interests from a certain point of view. That is the logic of neoliberalism: self interest from a narrow perspective.

Police reformers wanted to improve crime control. They wanted to use the book’s methods to patrol areas that are more crime-ridden and to reduce the crime there. If you could only get more agressive policing in those areas, it would reduce crime, they believed. This was a spirit of focusing policing where it would do the most good.

But that’s not what city officials wanted. City officials wanted more revenue. They used the new strengthened policing to get more revenue by encouraging officers to ticket as many offenses as they could discover after any stop. The ordinary person would get multiple citations for any infraction of any law that the officer could cite at the time of the stop.

Police officers wanted something different than what reformers or politicians wanted. Police officers faced enough trouble that couldn’t be avoided and they responded to the new agressive guidelines and higher ticketing requirements by seeking out more docile citizens in more peaceful settings. Police officers wanted to face fewer agressive and problem causing criminals. They wanted to apply more agressive policing to people who would comply. And if those people didn’t comply, police would respond with stronger force, sometimes deadly force.

The Sandra Bland arrest happened in 2015. It was an instance of aggressive policing that ended with the patrol officer’s firing and her suicide. Sandra Bland wasn’t a criminal-type. She was a law student. Her experience of having ten previous police encounters, and 5 tickets that left her $8000 in debt due to fines, made her feel like her life wasn’t hers and she was found hanged in her cell after being arrested for failing to signal after she yielded to a police officer. Her death was determined to have been a suicide. The more recent death of George Floyd was a death by strangulation during a police arrest. It has led to the firing of four police officers and criminal charges laid against the arresting officer who has been accused of killing George Floyd by choking him to death. George Floyd and Sandra Bland were both black Americans. Their deaths resonate strongly with people from the Black Lives Matter group. Prejudiced policing is only part of the problem.

As more people have become jobless in a shrinking economy, there are more opportunities to police. Police agression has grown. Even now, there are lots of power grabbers who want even more power, even more trouble, even more strife, even more violence. What will you do? Can we all demand a different approach to policing–one that is less agressive in stops, arrests and ticketing? It’s time to end this crazy neoliberal power grab. It’s also time for wider economic and political reforms in the United States.

If you want to understand more about our nation in these times of uncertainty, buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com. I will explain all the details that the news agencies aren’t explaining about how we got to our political and economic here and now.

The press corps doesn’t want you to believe that hydroxychloroquine can help a person who has contracted covid-19. I don’t believe the press corps. I suggest that they are just making this move according to political strategies and goals that might have something to do with game theory.

I have therefore added a book about game theory to my summer reading list. I will continue ignoring their claims against hydroxychloroquine as I go about sussing out some sort of reason why our press corps would make them. I am sorry to see this massive push to ignore a treatment that can save lives. Balderdash.

I have already read reports published by doctors and seen videos of doctors who have worked on the front lines who have been treating covid-sick people and they have said that hydroxychloroquine is safe and effective in careful doses to treat people who have tested positive for covid-19. I believe the doctors. Hydroxychloroquine is by a large margin, their drug of choice for better treatment outcomes.

We have all heard the press corps make up lies to help some political candidates and destroy others. This current launch of a disinformation campaign against hydroxychloroquine fits in well with previous ones like the Russia Hoax. I no longer give such claims against reality any credence.

The American press corps is owned by five or so mega-corporations that have monopoly power in the news world.  You and I don’t have a reason to trust these mega-news-monopolists after the 2016 election and the subsequent news distortions that have become all-too-familiar. A great resource to learn about monopoly press in the United States is Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media, by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, published by Pantheon Books, New York in 1988 and renewed in 2002. From the copyright date, you can see that monopoly press gained influence decades ago.

To continue, I disagree with politicians who want to continue suggesting that covid-19 is more deadly and dangerous than it is in reality. Deaths by covid-19 are being exaggerated.

The notion that people across America were compelled to wear masks is not true either. They did it out of courtesy to help their neighbors.

The idea that conditions still exist that justify an expansion of government power is also not true. There was never a need to quarantine anyone who was not sick. Continued fines against people who open their businesses against a government mandate after covid-19 has proved to be a lesser threat are unjust and un-American.

If you want to learn more about why your government has become so wrongheaded about so much of what it is doing, buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com., where I will take you through the steps of change that have perverted our nation’s operations and produced the mess that surrounds us all.

According to the U.S. Constitution, Congress is responsible for setting a budget for federal spending. The original idea the Founders had was for Congress to spend what is needed to keep our nation in good repair, to put federal monies to good use and to add federal taxes as needed to do normal federal duties. That was when Congress was limited in the scope of its activities to regulate the U.S. economy. Later, justices in the Supreme Court decided to reinterpret the Commerce Clause to expand it and make it possible for Congress to take an active role in shaping our U.S. economy. The Founders didn’t require Congress to have a balanced budget amendment because the Founders thought that in an emergency, it would be better to overspend, for instance in the time of war, rather than lose a war. In the not too distant past some members of our contemporary Congress proposed a balanced budget amendment but it has never passed into law becuase there are too many Congress members who don’t want one.

Today’s Congress has decided to avoid a limited spending budget altogether. This is fiscal policy abuse and it would alarm the Founders. It alarms me. For years the Congress hasn’t approved a final one year budget for the federal government. Instead they keep adopting temporary spending bills so that they can “keep the government open.” There are hysterical media dramatizations about harms to tourists and government employees whenever an increase in spending isn’t approved immediately after a government shut-down. The pitch of hysteria rises until the government passes another temporary spending bill. You wouldn’t think at first thought that it would even be possible to spend past the money contained in the U.S. Treasury. The Treasury is not only empty now, it owes money that the government doesn’t have. And Congress doesn’t pass more tax bills because most people are against more taxation. The nation’s trajectory endangers every American at this point. Recently passed trillion dollar spending bills show that Congress is abusing its monetary policies to cause inflation…a backdoor tax increase. One that will hurt the poorest Americans the most.

A virus scare has been a convenient excuse to interfere with the American economy and pass large spending bills that benefit large capital holders. The press seems to want to keep the virus scare going. Public announcements prolong virus fearfulness with phrasing that refuses to acknowledge that the rate of infections peaked in March. Even though there are realistic and effective treatments for infection by covid-19, many deny that those treatments exist and work. In fact those treatments can work very well as long as they are implemented early. The call for a vaccine is just a stalling tactic when in fact the world has never developed an effective vaccine against a rhinovirus or a coronavirus. Even if someone claimed to have a vaccine and even if it didn’t work well, there are some who would want people to be required to take it to give the vaccine-maker money for a faulty vaccine. We already see that pattern with flu vaccines.

Congress continues on a spending spree. Some Congress members have recently drafted yet another spending bill in the trillions of dollars. Many political interests are getting special attention from Congress in the name of the covid-19 emergency which has now turned into an excuse to create more debt approved by Congress. This is inflationary and it should not be happening.

Congress has turned the purse of the treasury inside out. They are putting promises into that purse for you to pay money or assets that Congress doesn’t have and can’t tax for. They want you to be the solution in giving over your freedom, your wealth, your life to them in the name of your welfare which the Congress has clearly failed to protect because their current policies promote insolvency.

Shame on Congress. Stop, stop, stop making a mockery of a free republic. “Free” doesn’t mean that Congress can oversee a fantasy government with unlimited power, unlimited spending, unlimited influence and unlimited oversight of everyone and everything. Congress is behaving like everyone’s worst enemy.

If you have come to distrust the American education system and you want another better chance to learn about our two hundred year history in the United States,including changes in politics and economics, including timelines that connect important events in the flow of change, buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries, available at Amazon.com.

During the 1970’s novel opportunity was found in music, art, drugs, sex, civil rights, meditation, war, commerce, banking, recycling, energy, science, and conversations that confronted generational change, new workplace opportunities for women and minorities. It was everyone’s chance at reinvention. The idea was that each person could become an agent of their own personal transformation through an exploration of new experiences. Job interviews were more relaxed than now. They didn’t use an algorithm. Hiring was about trying to find someone who wanted to work and had basic qualifications. The 1970’s had stagflation and people were trying to use less and make a little money go farther. Do-it-yourself tables made out of wooden cable spools were popular. President Carter put solar panels on the roof of the White House.

Interest rates went higher under Paul Volker’s leadership in an effort to stem inflation, from 10.5% to 20% in 1980. By 1982 there was a recession. After the 1970’s people had a hangover and the consequences of all that ’70’s exploration were making people a little miserable. They were looking for prosperity and hoping to find some. President Reagan had his “Morning in America” ads about people finding work and making money. Reagon got rid of Carter’s solar panels. Reagan wanted America to know that we weren’t really running out of energy while he paid a lot of attention to the Middle East and its oil resources. Reagan deceived everyone in his national speeches about American involvement in the politics of South America. The idea of outsourcing to get cheaper labor was transforming the world of entrepreneurs. 1986 was the year of Margaret Thatcher’s deregulation of the London Stock exchange in the Big Bang. The Savings and Loan crash happened in 1987.

By the 1990’s times were changing because of the personal computer and the cell phone. Both were starting to transform people’s lives in a small way. London’s Big Bang was affecting global trading as hot money travelled the world bringing newly arrived capital to some nations and then destroying capital and leaving huge piles of debt behind as large capital holders gobbled up assets all around the world. The Gulf War erupted in 1990 and started a spate of wars in the Middle East that would divert capital for decades into its hungry maw. It was still possible to get a college degree and have a long term career. But scientists who worked for corporations or government lost the right to own royalties from their inventions when most of the places where scientists worked put that into their contracts. After that, the money for science inventions went to employers instead of inventors.

The World Trade Center was destroyed in 2001. A recession followed. In the twenty first century, there seemed to be less going on in terms of new kinds of opportunities. Banking was growing. The real estate market was booming. But the world of invention was slowing down. In 2007 and 2008, the sub-prime mortgage crisis led to bank closures and foreclosed properties. President Obama was elected as a president promising hope and change. Homelessness and hunger grew across America. Real estate lost 30% of its value overnight. After a few years, investors started buying properties and flipping them for a profit to drive up the price of housing. Wages continued in a long-term slump and job security evaporated during a frenzy of mergers and acquisitions. Real estate seemed to be worth more but only because houses had become a traded asset by asset investors not by home owners. Many couldn’t find a good enough job to pay for an expensive mortgage and health insurance cost as much as mortgages had cost in the 1990’s. Debt soared. School tuition costs doubled and tripled. Lots of people with college degrees couldn’t get a good job. Several government programs rescued bank investments. There were cross border capital flows at low interest rates. We saw TARP and ZIRP and QE. Banks were too big to fail according to the Federal Reserve.

The Obama Administration brought Obamacare which failed to improve healthcare but cost a lot in terms of healthcare inflation. The Obama era created a lot of minimum wage jobs. Eric Holder failed to prosecute for torture in the Middle East. The economy dragged along.

Now it’s 2020. Where is opportunity in America today? Our quiet resolve to endure economic upheaval has left us with bigger regrets than we had after the 1970’s. And when will these large upheavals end? Only a few years ago the disruptors were bragging about their transformation of our economy but they’ve grown quieter about upheavals lately. What can Americans hope for and what can we actually achieve in this neoliberal reality where government and industry have partnered up and split the economy between them? What can any of us achieve to change the world into one that comforts people with economic security? What is the reward for hard work when disruption undermines every person’s efforts? That is the question that everyone faces today.

If you would like to learn about economic and political change over the span of American history, buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries at Amazon.com.

We can’t stop infections with covid-19, which can cause worrying or dire symptoms in a fifth of our population. Therefore, I have only gratitude for Dr. Paul Marik, MD, Chief of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine of the Eastern Virginia Medical School who has published a treatment protocol.
Since much of our nation has chosen to reopen their businesses, we need this protocol right now. Social distancing has done what it could by buying time for doctors to develop a protocol and now this one has been published. You can find it at the source listed below.
Please notice that hydroxycloroquine is a prominent part of the protocol to treat infection and quercetin, a bioflavonoid, is used prophylactically. It acts to strengthen the tissues of the circulatory system. I’m also giving you a reference for an article published by The Lancet about why covid-19 causes cardiovascular complications. Good luck to all who fight against this illness.

Sources:
Dr. Paul Marik, MD, Chief of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine Eastern Virginia Medical School, Norfolk VA, EVMS Medical Group EVMS Critical Care Covid-19 Management Protocol, https://www.evms.edu/media/evms_public/departments/internal_medicine/EVMS_Critical_Care_COVID-19_Protocol.pdf, ongoing updated information, 20 April, 2020, accessed 1 May 2020.

Zsuzsanna Varga, Andreas J Flammer, Peter Steiger, Martina Haberecker, Rea Andermatt, Annelies S Zinkernagel, et al, The Lancet, Endothelial cell infection and endothelitis in COVID-19, published ap 20 2020, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30937-5/fulltext

If you’d like to improve your understanding of our political machinations and our economic situations, buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries, available at Amazon.com.

Looking back at the public policy of social distancing as a mandate, it appears we went too far. For one thing, we didn’t know that much about covid-19 when we undertook the policy. We didn’t really know how to stop it from spreading because we didn’t know how contagious it is. And we didn’t know what it would do to all of us as it filtered through our population. We undertook a public policy change in order to cope with the unknown when it seemed so scary.
Historically, it has made more sense to isolate sick people rather than to isolate healthy people. Why did we isolate healthy people? Maybe because we have seen too many scary movies about epidemic illness. We also probably wanted to believe that we could stop the common or uncommon coronavirus with a large social effort that coordinated our resources. Now it looks like we failed to stop covid-19 because it was too contagious and spread too quickly.
One of the ideas that is a little troubling now that I can look back over the last few months is the idea of non-essential jobs. No job is non-essential. Most jobs that exist in our economy only exist because they are essential and are supported by buyers of the goods or services that they provide. It is interesting that any job would be culled from the economy as though it didn’t perform a function that matters.
The idea of some professions being non-essential is related to economic interventionism by government. That’s when a government picks winners and losers by subsidizing certain parts of the economy more than others. Jobs that are important to achieve certain policy goals get government help instead of allowing markets to prove the worth of each one. But economic interventionism doesn’t work in the economic world to stimulate economic vitality. Economic interventionism serves political goals instead. Over time, companies that get government help can become an economic blight that suck up resources instead of producing goods and services that people want and can afford.
I’ve never seen our economy look worse than it does today, and I think that the mess that we find ourselves in has been caused by economic interventionism, including through taxes and bank deregulation. Maybe social distancing as a mandate is just an extension of the economic hubris and political hubris that has become all too common in the United States. Maybe the time is here now for us to reconsider.
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To be sure, some good people have died from covid-19. People die of the flu every year and the most recent guess by our experts regarding the lethality of covid-19 puts it near the kinds of flus that come every year. Some years, the flu is worse and covid-19 is like those flus but not like the Spanish flu. In our history, we haven’t shuttered the economy in response to that kind of flu challenge.
I am troubled to see that some want to discredit effective treatment with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin. In the face of evidence that it’s an effective treatment, I read recently about a Veteran’s hospital study to debunk it. If you give hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin to someone close to death who seeks treatment for the first time at the extremity of illness, hydroxychloroquine combined with azithromycin can’t always save them. This is unsurprising. The outcome would be similar at death’s door no matter what you tried to do. Claiming that the hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin combination doesn’t work based on that kind of situation is really dodgy. Whose interests are served by debunking an effective treatment?
I’ve been frustrated to see the press campaign to prolong social distancing continue, apparently for as long as possible. “We are all in this together,” say the campaigners. I felt ok about social distancing when we were uncertain about the lethality of covid-19. But the situation has now changed. We know that covid-19 isn’t as scary or as deadly as was feared. Also, graphs are showing that social distancing has failed to stop infections with covid-19; that social distancing failed to lower the rate of infection because the virus had already become established before social distancing started. Public health based social restrictions aren’t supposed to be used except in the case of an emergency. Covid-19 epidemic doesn’t appear to be an emergency now.
In any case, your safety and mine wasn’t the reason that we started social distancing. The purpose of social distancing was to reduce the numbers of acutely infected individuals so that hospitals could cope with them. Even during the peak of covid-19 infections, New York hospitals have not needed overflow treatment areas.
These days, there seems to be a campaign to unite everyone behind social distancing, maybe even more than before even though it won’t reduce the total number of infected people. A study out of Santa Clara California showed more people already have antibodies to covid-19 than was recently thought. They overcame the infection a while ago. With widespread antibody testing, we may learn more about that in many other cities. With many more people infected than what was recently known based on active positive infection testing it appears that covid-19 isn’t killing people at the percentages we’ve been shown. Social distancing controls on healthy people aren’t needed.
The politicization of covid-19 has already included false estimates of how many will die of it, missing descriptions on protocols that show how it should be treated and ignoring treatments that work, and some states prolonging social distancing past its usefulness possibly for political or financial gain. Fantasies involving covid-19 are an excuse for powers in banking to get more money, with inflation that will insure you’ll pay that money. Global warming similarly was fraught with phoniness. Global warming was always meant to increase the tax base. Now similarly, covid-19 appears to be the bugaboo that promises higher taxes and greater advantages to some at a huge cost to most of us.
If you want to keep your distance, you are welcome to. But the social distancing initiative should end now. Meanwhile, buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries: Liberalism, Pragmatism, Opportunism available now in print or electronic form at Amazon.com.

Along with the end of panic for covid-19, it is time to end the Greenspan Put. Back in the day when Alan Greenspan was in charge of the Federal Reserve, he promised investors that the Federal Reserve would support the stock market if there was a loss of financial liquidity in the age of enhanced risk. That promise is the Greenspan Put. Before that happened, the age of enhanced financial risk was helped when the Federal Reserve ended the policy package of the Banking Act of 1933 which separated commercial and investment bank monies. Most people have called that separation Glass Steagall. Cross border capital flows became normal after the London Stock Exchange deregulated and opened its financial markets to foreign investors in the London Big Bang. Hot money began to look for bargains as it circled the world snapping up cheap assets. As hot money entered and left nations, it created imbalances that also provided investment adavantages to people who held large amounts of secure capital. These changes were processes that led to global bank deregulation.
We can see that since the Greenspan Put was applied to the banking sector, it provides a subsidy whenever banks run into problems. Uncle Sam steps in like an enabler that helps an alcoholic to continue abusing whiskey. It’s time to stop enabling banking hubris. When derivatives created imbalances in the stock market during the subprime mortgage crisis, collaboration between the Treasury and Federal Reserve subsidized the losses of large banks. Some, like Timothy Geithner, claimed that this saved the economy but even more than ten years afterwards, many people experienced life in an economy that had a lot less opportunity for them. And banks have continued dominating the economy in an unhealthy way.
Banks have also profited from the covid-19 panic. They were having trouble with collecting loan debts in the repo market and the Federal Reserve was already providing them with more liquidity. Now ever more liquidity has been made available for failing ventures large and small but the economy continues behaving like a fragile invalid with debts that can’t be paid. The whole world is sick from bad banking. The world needs better banking policies. That would include an end to the Greenspan Put, an end to derivatives, an end to ZIRP and an end to cross border capital flows. Solvency is better than risk.

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According to Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia, the best choice in Georgia is for businesses to reopen right away. He is open-minded about reopening after he viewed the consequences of business shut-downs all over his state. He views continued closure as extremely damaging to many Georgians. After the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, minimum wage jobs proliferated all across the nation and many of those jobs are particularly vulnerable to closure. In addition, the people working for minimum wages have little money in reserve to protect them after their employment closes down and their income goes away.

Even in healthcare, he wants to return to practices that were in place for conditions of business as usual. He noticed, for example, that hospitals had ended elective surgeries and without the deluge of covid-19 patients that had been planned for, the hospitals were losing money. Although it was thought that hospitals would be overrun with critically ill people, that never happened. Now hospitals need to resume their usual operations in order to stop losing money.

The Governor admitted that people may need to adapt to reduce close contacts but he believes that it is critically important to stop planning for a dramatic deluge of sick people because we haven’t seen that situation in real time and space. It’s time to stop planning for a covid-19 catastrophe.

A lot of what people were worried about when covid-19 escaped China to infect the whole world hasn’t happened. In comparing infection rates in Sweden, which never closed its businesses with the rest of the world that did close businesses, the rate of infection is similar. It looks like we didn’t stop infections with social distancing even though we had all hoped that we caused dramatic changes in the rate of infection. Sweden did isolate its most vulnerable populations but they allowed groups of up to 50 people to gather in public places and they didn’t shutter their businesses. The experiment to isolate healthy people instead of sick people appears to be without merit. Meanwhile it is costly.

Now in addition to comparing with Sweden, we can compare with Georgia. As we do that, it may become apparent that Georgia is on the right track.

If you would like to get a bird’s eye view of the politics and economics of our time in a format that is easy to understand, buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com.

source: John Fund and Joel Hay, National Review, http://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-resposne-sweden-avoids-isolation-economic-ruin/, April 6th 2020, accessed on 23 April 2020.

Most people in developed nations rarely are confronted by an acute illness. Most developed nations have populations that suffer from chronic inflammation instead of sudden death from an overwhelming infection. Many of us have forgotten that people everywhere were once familiar with surprising deaths due to acute infections. Modern sewage treatment and water sanitation have reduced mortality from acute illnesses. Congratulations for being born now.
Several days ago I posted the reminder that our culture still hasn’t managed to cure the common cold. This fact is still all too true. Despite the dramatic comments that are everwhere discussing the danger of covid-19, it is a coronavirus that is a lot like the common cold in two ways. The first is that it is very contagious and the second is that it can’t be controlled. It is lucky for us that it appears to be about as deadly right now as a bad influenza virus that isn’t nearly as deadly as the Spanish flu. The early models about covid-19 that predicted a higher mortality were just wrong.
Yet with all the data that has been collected there continues to be a neurotic call to do more testing. This, in spite of the fact that there are asymptomatic carriers. But we don’t need more testing and there’s no need for further panic if you look at the virus as we have already come to know it.

There have been deaths from covid-19 but the world has mostly been lucky. The luck is that it hasn’t been more deadly. The luck is that not everyone gets sick from it and some people who do get sick have a mild course of illness. The luck is that for those who have more severe symptoms it can be treated with drug combinations that work to get rid of the virus after 5-6 days. The luck is that some of the treatments not only can get rid of the virus but also attenuate the immune response to make our own body systems more gentle on us while they also remain effective against covid-19.
When someone dies from an acute infection, it’s a sad loss. Doctors and nurses that lose patients feel bad that they can’t save them all. Families grieve for their lost loved one. But we are still lucky that the death toll is smaller than what we first feared.
It’s surprising that so much panic has been caused by the fact that we don’t have control over covid-19. We haven’t yet been able to stop it. We haven’t yet been able to control it to keep it from spreading across national borders, across oceans, across to different languages and cultures and traditions of treating illness. Please, can’t we stop trying to lay blame somewhere? There’s no one to litigate. Humans have always been powerless in exactly this way.
We don’t fully understand the origin of the virus. We don’t yet comprehend in detail all of the manifestations of illness that are possible in response to this virus. And this powerlessness is an old story so there’s no reason to panic or to dramatize our situation.

Learn more about history, and the dance between economics and politics: buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com.