Here’s the Bubble Tea
September 22nd, 2024Go Ahead and Fly With Covid
Yesterday, I was reminded of the vast coronivarus-information gulf between conservatives and leftists. Leftists are irrational and hysterical, always advising ridiculous, harmful overreactions, and conservatives are always patiently refuting their hysteria with facts. Then we are accused of ignorance and selfishness, as always.
I just got back from Europe. My wife and I got covid on our trip, as we often do when traveling. Somewhere on the web, I mentioned it, and I said I was glad we were able to fly home sick. In the past, we were often in danger of forced and extremely expensive quarantine.
Some character responded and said I had been “very considerate of” my fellow passengers.
Right away, I had questions about his brainpower. We are considerate TO others, not OF them.
I don’t know if leftists will ever catch up. These are the people who, when polled, said they thought an infected person’s chance of requiring hospitalization was about 40%. The world would have ended. I’m pretty sure the black death is down around 30%.
My wife and I were probably infected in Switzerland, because my voice sounded a little raspy before we left. By the time we left Italy, where we heard sick people coughing all around us, we were getting better. Neither of us is completely well, but we’re fine.
What’s the standard these days when it comes to covid and travel?
In practical terms, there is no standard. Do what you want. There are no tests or travel bans. As recently as ’22, it was easy to find entrepreneurs to do PCR tests on tourists. Now the industry has collapsed, because no one cares.
I have Googled, and while I have seen random sites that have no authority telling people to stay home, actual government sites say it’s best not to fly until you start to feel better, and that’s about it. They don’t say to hide out until you’re completely well.
Why are they saying it’s okay to fly as long as you’re getting better? My guess: no scientific reason at all. They just need to say something in order to look like they’re doing something. It’s like the 6-foot rule, which we now know had no basis in science.
The web says covid is contagious for 8 to 10 days after symptoms start, and if that’s true, then you can be contagious after you start feeling better. So the rule is horse manure.
The travel bans had no basis in science, either, nor did the mask laws. America kept travelers out while half the population was sick, as though flying a few thousand more in would make an important difference. The masks only worked when they were expensive masks, worn properly, changed several times per day. No one did any of that outside of hospitals. Even then, they worked poorly.
Whatever. We were getting better when we flew, so we are good little do-bees.
People can be really thick. Imagine how things would have gone had we decided to stay in Rome.
1. No food. The hotel had no room service. If food delivery is a serious industry in Rome, we saw no sign of it.
2. No laundry. The hotel didn’t do laundry.
3. No hotel room. Our booking would have run out. Where would we have gone? Maybe we could have found a room nearby, but hotels in Rome were really jammed. How would we have moved without exposing lots of people? Two “dangerous” sick persons, dragging luggage up the road and having it thrown into and out of a cab. All the way around, it’s a stupid idea.
4. No tickets. We would have been charged huge change fees. And who knows when we could have gotten flights? We would have had to wait until covid decided to test negative. A week? Ten days? If we had tested negative on a given day, who is to say we could have flown home the next day? Our flights were crammed. This isn’t the month for flying home from Rome on the day of your choice without advance notice.
5. No one to look after our house and business.
6. No place to store Marvin, my parrot. He was staying at a boarding place, and it was busy. He could have been thrown out. What then? Maybe I could have gotten the boarding people to hook me up with some stranger. That would have been irresponsible.
7. No health insurance. Our health insurance, like yours, only works in the US. We had travel insurance, and it would have expired while we were quarantining.
We would have had to go out for meals and laundry. No way around it. We would have exposed people every day.
What about flying home?
Science preexisting the hysteria clearly says the chance of catching covid on a jet, while seated next to a sick person, is about one in half a million. Jets are really good at keeping air clean. So we exposed some people in Italy, then we got on jets where we were no threat to anyone, and since then, we have exposed a few people at a hotel, one restaurant, and a grocery store.
The people we exposed in Italy were already being exposed every day. I’m sure the same is true of the people we encountered here.
Here’s what I told the person who thought I was inconsiderate: if you’re a bubble boy, stay in your bubble. You can’t put a bubble around the world.
On the web, you can find left-wing writers saying that if you fly with covid, you may kill people. No. They may kill themselves. If they’re going out in public, knowing they may be exposed, failing to protect themselves, it’s on them, not me.
My presence doesn’t change anything in a world full of people wandering around with covid. Remove me, and people still get exposed.
They never complain about asymptomatic people–a huge demographic–killing people. They never complain about people with false negatives killing people. They’re not bright enough to understand.
Covid is no big deal to me right now. Maybe that will change as I age. If it does, you better believe I’m not going to put on my Karen hat and run around trying to get other people to wrap themselves in Saran Wrap.
Many sick people don’t know they’re sick. The ones who know they’re sick are not willing to quarantine; no one does that. If I become unable to fight covid, the world will continue to spray me with viruses every time I appear in public. This is an absolute certainty. My only hope, if I start needing help, will be to stay home. Maybe I could get some really good masks and observe mask protocols rigorously while doing necessary shopping, but that’s about it.
I will probably never be in any danger from covid. Age is a risk factor, but there are plenty of old people who never get very sick, and covid has already given me its best shot several times without harming me much. If it isn’t hurting me now, it probably will not hurt me when I’m 90.
Leftists love using their real or imagined health problems to control others. I saw an article the other day about a kook who tried to get everyone on a plane to give up peanuts because her daughter was allergic. No; the world does not work like that. You don’t drag other people down to the lowest common health denominator because you’re hysterical and love attention.
Nut allergies are not triggered by the mere presence of nuts, by the way. I could eat nuts next to an allergic person all day without doing any harm.
Imagine what the news would look like if nut allergies were triggered through the air. “Today’s nut death toll: 300,000! When will we have sensible nut control?”
Time to wrap up. I need food, and there is none here. I’m about to get in the car and take my viruses shopping. If you live near me and you’re a bubble boy, better stay home for a while and play Trivial Pursuit.
September 22nd, 2024 at 9:26 PM
My favorite lie of all time is what you see when you look at the CDC website for seasonal flu numbers for the last 30 years.
Every year has various infected and fatality numbers. Well, until you get to 2020 and 2021. Those years have an asterisk, which leads below to a note:
“*There was no seasonal flu during these years.”
Every single aspect of our lives had been utterly corrupted by a minor cold. Our society is controlled by insane, demonic people. As you have noted often.
September 23rd, 2024 at 9:03 AM
I’m no epidemiologist, and my ability with statistics is about average for what I do, but I think your thought that you often get infected while traveling might be sound.
The vaccine is no vaccine. A vaccine allows your immune system to immediately recognize a virus and attack it, rather than milling around the punch table at the dance while the bad kids from the other high school saunter in. The shots don’t do that: it is possible to get sick from Covid after vaccination, multiple times, after multiple shots.
Ok, they say that the shots will lessen the severity of Covid. Let’s agree to that, for the moment. So, what have we done? Ideally a pandemic will be plottable as a bell curve, as in the flu. Ok, we know it’s many curves idealized, but ok, so we have an x axis of time and a y axis of some proxy for severity (death, infections, hospitalizations, any index of severity.)
In an intense pandemic, the apex of the curve is high and the right end is relatively short. But, with this imperfect shot, maybe we’ve flattened the bell curve, with a shorter apex but a heavy tail? In which case, the volume under the curve can be greater than the volume under a curve with a taller apex. So, in a place like Switzerland, which I assume has a very high rate of people taking the shot, you could be mingling with many people who are less symptomatic, but still can infect. So, my sense is that an imperfect vaccine makes the condition longer, and arguably worse.