Home »
With COVID-19, it ain’t over until it’s over
“Perceptions,” by Gerry Warner
Op-Ed Commentary
There are times when I don’t blame people, including anti-vaxers, for saying what’s the big fuss about COVID-19. No kidding! But don’t stop reading. I can explain.
There I was the other night watching the World Series. Huge stadium. Thousands in the stands and as I watched I scrutinized the screen closely, but as hard as I did if someone was wearing a mask, I didn’t see them. Not a single one and this in Houston, Texas, a state with one of the highest Covid infection rates in the good ol’ baseball-loving USA.
Doesn’t that strike you as a bit incredulous?
It does me because we’re not exactly out of this pandemic yet, but that fact didn’t seem to bother the packed stadium in Houston Tuesday where a capacity crowd of more than 40,000 gun-loving Texans showed up to cheer their beloved Astros. It was a great crowd and I doubt if any of the crowd were thinking much of the 71,214 Texans who have died of Covid since the pandemic began in March 2020.
Talk about the bizarre value system of “modern” civilization. We’re a society where the joys of watching absurdly overpaid sports heroes swinging at a ball the size of a fist is more important than vital public health measures to save people’s lives. The sadistic Romans watching the lions consume the Christians at the Flavian Amphitheatre (Colosseum) had nothing on us. Kind of sad don’t you think? Is there not a chance that 40,000, unmasked people sitting together cheek-by-jowl at a ball game could trigger another mass infection?
So, what’s the connection of all of this with the anti-vaxers’ beliefs that outrage so many of us? Many anti-vaxers like to point out that the actual death rate from catching Covid is exceptionally low. Less than one per cent, in fact, for people under 65, but rising quickly as people grow older. So why force almost everyone to wear masks and be quarantined if the COVID-19 mortality rate is so low for most people, the anti-vaxers argue.
This argument may make a modicum of sense if you’re prepared to turn your back on the quickly rising number of seniors in our aging society and ignore the serious health threats Covid also presents to people under 65 whose health status is compromised by many medical conditions. Not to mention what the sheer number of Covid cases is doing to our public health system as a whole by tying up almost all of our ICU and surgical beds to the point that thousands of us are waiting in pain or dying in the backlog of postponed surgery cases.
The anti-vaxers conveniently ignore this, but it’s not being ignored by physicians, nurses, administrators and health care workers, many of whom are burning out in the deadly chaos caused by Covid.
Some anti-vaxers argue that developing herd immunity would be the best way of dealing with Covid because it would allow business to carry on more or less as usual and jobs would be saved and society wouldn’t be nearly so inconvenienced by masks and quarantines and people could travel again and go out to bars, restaurants and night clubs. Like it or not, there may be some merit to this argument even though I think it would strike most people as a callous and dangerous approach to take against a global health challenge that has already killed more than five million world-wide as of Oct. 29 according to Oxford University’s Martin School of Data as well as 763,911 in the USA, 28,929 in Canada and 2,147 in B.C. and climbing every minute.
I’m sorry to say that despite recent news reports that Covid deaths are levelling off in some places this horrendous pandemic is far from over and if you take the COVID-19 threat lightly it may just take you.
Or someone you love.
– Gerry Warner is a retired journalist, who tries to take a “tell it as it is” approach to COVID-19.