No shirt. No shoes. No service.

Advanced Civilization.

        There was a trial a few years back of a guy that had AIDS, knew it and was still having sex with other people. To make matters worse he was a swinger. He got caught was charged, tried and found guilty. A person can’t legally do that. In addition to being legally wrong it’s morally wrong. It is one sick, despicable, piece of crap person that that would knowingly and wantonly do something like that. They probably served their time and are out of jail now. Medical science has advanced enough to keep AIDS mostly from being an immediate death sentence.

        I read another post from a President Trump supporter using the ol’ automobile comparison. You know the one. So many people die by cars each year but we don’t ban cars. This was followed by more equally inane comparisons. The interesting thing is that there are laws on the books governing everything mentioned on the list. Everything.

        If a person drives a car while intoxicated, gets in an accident and kills someone they are going to be charged. There are laws on the books dealing with drunks that drive. Aren’t their Constitutional rights being violate.

    States, cities and counties have health departments and they in turn have laws that they enforce. So really there isn’t anything new taking place. The nation has had to enforce quarantines from time to time over the years, including during the Spanish Flu pandemic. There were people even then that didn’t want to wear masks.

Anarchists
        There is no Constitutional right to kill and endanger others. It now appears that conservatives in general support the right to do just that. They don’t want to respect the rights of business owners to require people to wear something as simple as a mask to protect others from them. They say that is a violation of their rights. The law is what they say it is.
        I remember when the first health regulations came into being (in the 70s, I believe) that required restaurant patrons to wear shoes and upper body clothing (along with covering below-the-waist parts). These regulations resulted in the now ubiquitous signs stating: “No shirt, no shoes, no service.” Why haven’t those rabid diehard Constitutionalists been grabbing their guns and storming Capitols to demand their rights NOT to wear shoes and go shirtless?! They’re obviously leaning that way already. Why haven’t they been demanding their rights to drive as fast they want to on their roads?! If other people don’t like that then they should just stay off their roads! How about their Constitutional right to smoke! Laws are for little people! The deaths of others is an infringement on their rights until they themselves need to go to an ER or ICU.
        They are anarchists.

Perspective
        Then there are other lists being provided showing the number of deaths caused by other historical events including wars. The Viet Nam war is now being left off of those lists since the recorded number of deaths from COVID-19 have now exceeded the number lost during the war. President Draft Avoider Bone Spurs missed that war. These comparisons are done to make the numbers of deaths that we have so far seem far less consequential. They call this keeping things in perspective.
        What these kinds of lists do is avoid focusing on what is actually taking place. Hospital Emergency Rooms (ERs) and Intensive Care Units (ICUs) are being overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients. There isn’t room for all those that under normal circumstances would be going to ERs and ICUs. The problem is that we’ve had so far 70,000 people die in just 2 months. Add onto that all the sick from COVID-19. Add onto that those that will continue to have medical problems from the disease with additional people needing rehabilitation. All of this is over and above what is usually taking place. Then add onto that Doctors, Nurses, EMTs, medical technicians and others on the front lines are catching the disease and some of them are dying. This is not usual and not normal and has been going on for weeks with weeks to go yet.

Looking for work.
        When this is pandemic is over or even abates enough for health care workers to take a breather there are going to be a whole lot of vacancies in the health care industry and not just from deaths. People are going to leave that profession and look for a less dangerous line of work. Understandably some of them did not know that they were signing on for something like this. They did not know that the leadership of their country would hang them out to dry.
        You know who will be tapped to fill some of those job vacancies including the essential low wage ones? Immigrants. That will put a hardship on racists. But this nation has traditionally turned to immigrants to fill difficult jobs. You know like the jobs that Hispanics are doing now.

Homeward bound.
        We’ve seen some new faces down here at the lake this weekend. They’ll be heading back now. Some will be passing through from other states. Coming from the beaches, the countryside and the big cities. Some will stay here. The unseen passenger will be traveling with some of them.

Did the passenger hop off at your place?

Pandemic Contact Tracing

Full circle

        ^ Years ago and by years I mean decades. We’re tripping back to the late 50s and early 60s. One of the couple that the folks played cards with was a nurse. Her job was to track down cases of sexually transmitted diseases.

        ^ I wasn’t old enough to be a part of this conversation. I was however old enough to find a place to listen in on the conversations of adults without being detected. Many small children possess this ability so parents be wary. (I had discovered a medical reference textbook that parents had and read way above my age group so I was technically knowledgeable way beyond my years.)

        ^ Anyway, the nurse was relating the culmination of a contact tracing that had taken months. (No she didn’t use names even then.) It started with one guy that she interviewed that had contracted syphilis. She got the names of who he had sexual contact with and then visited them. Then she found out who they had contact with and visited them. And so on and so on. She ended up talking with 180 people that had contracted the disease starting from just the one guy. The sad news. She ended back up with him. That’s right. The same guy that started it all ended up catching it again. One. Guy. One. Hundred. Eighty. People.

HIV/AIDS

        ^ Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS). When AIDS came along it was widely regarded as a disease that affected gay people. Queers were deemed to be the primary target of the HIV virus. There were Evangelicals then that considered AIDS to be retribution from God. Then somebody thought to test prostitutes in Dade County in Florida and discovered that half of them had AIDS. Then people got interested.

        ^ One of the most effective PSAs that I heard then was that when a person had sex with someone they just had sex with every person that person had sex with. In other words if the person you were with had had sex with a person that had AIDS then it was possible that you could contract the disease without knowing it. Kind of sobering. AIDS is still out there. No cure has been discovered and there’s no vaccine. So there is still risk.

        ^ When I was in the service and stationed in Korea soldiers contracting venereal disease was a huge problem. At one time almost all the guys in my section were confined to base until they were cured of their venereal disease. I knew two married guys that went home with venereal disease. Yep, took it home to their wives. (BTW that wasn’t supposed to happen but it did.) My guess knowing these guys is that they would blame it on their wives. But that’s another story.

Confined.

        ^ Guys with sexually transmitted diseases were confined to base to limit their contact and spreading of the disease. Business girls that had it were banned from the enlisted club until they tested negative. Thursday was the day that “entertainers” for the EM club would get tested to be allowed to visit the EM club.

        ^ Since we were in the Army there was no expressed concerns for our Constitutional rights being violated. Uncle Sam owned us.

        ^ Quarantines are not new. They are used as a matter of public safety. The scope of this pandemic is certainly larger and more complex compounded by the incredible lack of leadership at the Federal level.

No one checked.

        ^ Contact tracing during a pandemic is a whole other ball game. Those tracking people down don’t have months to do their job. It has to be done fast and efficiently. People have to know what they’re doing and have a unique set of skills when it comes to getting the necessary information from people. They have to have their boots on the ground at the very beginning.

        ^ SARS-CoV-2 was spreading undetected and unchecked for weeks. People were spreading the disease without even knowing that they had it. There was no contact testing being coordinated nationwide. According to the President it was under control and would blow over. The disease had spread all over the globe. The warning signs were ignored. Good grief, it showed up at Mar a Lago and that wasn’t enough! I’m surprised that there isn’t a conspiracy theory tying Hillary Clinton’s emails to it.

        ^ Tests weren’t available in the beginning because it SARS-CoV-2 was new. SARS-CoV-2 is the scientific name for the virus now. The tests developed since then that are needed to detect have still not been distributed as was promised by the President early on. Widespread testing is needed for contact tracing to have success.

        ^ In the story that I shared in the beginning the guy that contracted the venereal disease was tested and came back positive for syphilis. In this pandemic people were tested and died before the results came back. At times it was days before the results were known.

“Will Circle be Unbroken?”

        ^ If the country can get to the place where adequate testing can be conducted to tell who has it and who had it without knowing then the country can begin to get a handle on it and better prepare for a second wave IF one comes. That is a big unknown. The virus can also mutate and become more lethal to a broader spectrum than oldsters and black people.

        ^ The one guy mentioned above spread disease to 180 people. One. Guy. This whole limiting crowd size to groups of 10 or less is arbitrary. Especially with an airborne virus. 10 is not some magic number that automatically confers safety upon those in the group. It still only takes one infected person to infect others. Staying 6 feet away from people is helpful but it is an airborne virus. Upwind? Downwind? Does it hang around in calm air just waiting for some unsuspecting person to walk into it? Keeping away from people as much as possible is what works.

        ^ Everybody wearing a mask would be incredibly helpful. Not likely though. Trump supporters and Republican Jesters on the whole think this is a hoax. Their primary concern is playing to their base and getting reelected.

        ^ The meme circulating that adds percentages to mask wearers versus non-mask wearers are not substantiated. However wearing masks is substantiated as reducing exposure. Obviously it can still happen. But we have the people claiming that they have a constitutional right not to do anything safe just because they don’t want to do it in their world view. Their right to not self-quarantine is more important than not killing you. It’s no different than those guys and gals that think that it’s funny to cough on people during a pandemic. They believe in the rule of law except for the ones that they don’t want to follow.

And then good people will die trying to take care of their sorry asses.