It's natural- though lethal- to be confused about COVID

Despite my strong feelings about the way the COVID pandemic continues to be mismanaged by the Trump Administration and the blatantly irresponsible treatment of the entire subject by so many on the right, I can understand a certain amount of skepticism about what the experts tell us.

It's not the experts' fault that information is turning out to have such a short shelf-life, and when we have a president who is actively and enthusiastically spreading misinformation based on his own very uninformed gut feelings while ignoring what the experts say, the problem becomes even worse. What- and who- should we believe? But there's a reason why they call this a novel coronavirus. It's new. We've never seen anything quite like it, and it seems that as we learn more about it conventional wisdom is changing by the week.

The overwhelming majority of cases are mild. That's good, right? Well, not entirely. It means that this virus is incredibly adept at spreading through the population because many people who have the bug don't even know it.

It only is really dangerous for old folks, people who have had cancer, people with high blood pressure or heart disease, people who are obese, who have diabetes, or who have any of several other specific conditions, right? Well, no. While it doesn't happen as often, kids catch COVID and die. Young adults seem to be recovering from mild cases and suddenly suffer fatal strokes. If you're young and healthy, your odds are better. But contrary to the propaganda being spread by some of the less knowledgable among us, we have probably drastically undercounted the number of people who have died of COVID because their deaths have been attributed to other causes. Often they died at home, without ever seeking medical help.

Originally touching surfaces with active viruses on them was a big danger. Until it wasn't, because it was mostly spread through droplets when infected people sneezed or coughed. Except when it wasn't. So wash your hands or use hand sanitizer.

The confusion caused by OSHA warning notices in boxes of face masks that they are not medical grade and cannot be counted upon to stop COVID is profound. Actually, it turns out, they're only moderately good at protecting somebody from getting COVID, but that's not why the CDC wants us to wear them. They're quite good at preventing people who have the virus from transmitting it by coughing or sneezing in somebody else's personal space. This distinction has not been very well explained, and tens and maybe hundreds of thousands of people are refusing to wear masks because they don't do something they were never intended to do.  Not only that, but while the evidence is overwhelming that the universal wearing of masks would significantly reduce the severity of the pandemic and save tens of thousands of lives, people are declining to wear masks on the ground that it's their right to risk their health if they choose.  But the whole point is that since they don't know for sure that they don't have the virus, by not wearing masks they're risking other people's health and even lives. There are enough half-baked libertarians out there who somehow don't see that there is no personal right to infect others that the entire stupid debate about masks is centering on a red herring!

It's a respiratory virus, right? Except that you can contract it through multiple routes and it attacks pretty much every system in the body. Beware of fever, loss of smell and taste, and other classic symptoms, we're told, Except that many people who are shedding an awful lot of virus have no symptoms at all. But WHO said a few months ago it's rare that the virus is transmitted by asymptomatic people. Except that some experts now say that most transmissions are by asymptomatic carriers! Hence, the masks!

There is no evidence, we're told,  that you can get COVID by eating food with viruses on it. Except that that now it turns out that the gastrointestinal system has more ACE-2 receptors through which the virus can enter the body than does the respiratory system! Diarrhea symptom all of a sudden (although they say that if it shows up that way you may never get respiratory symptoms at all, and may not even run a fever).

I had a scare a few days ago when I suddenly developed diarrhea. This coincided with my reading that for many people diarrhea was the first symptom of COVID. I didn't have a fever and felt fine. But it seems that many people for whom diarrhea is the first sign of COVID don't have fevers and never stop feeling fine. I've been careful in most ways, but I'd eaten out a few times recently and some of the things I've eaten have been salads, which by definition were not cooked. Since then, I've discovered another and far more likely reason for my diarrhea that is relatively benign and totally non-contagious. But the experience brought home to me just how paranoid one can become- and with good reason! Like many Americans, I'd gotten a little sloppy about some aspects of my anti-COVID precautions. I've reconsidered! But also like most Americans, sometimes I find myself reaching a point at which I wonder whether I'm going overboard.

Most people aren't news junkies like I am. This is the age of the conspiracy theorist, the ideological fanatic, the dwellers in rival echo-chambers in which most of us live safely insulated from attitudes and opinions which conflict with our own and as a result completely certain of a great many things that don't happen to be true. We get our news from different sources and, being human, tend to believe what we want to believe. I am not the most patient person in the world and I easily lose it when I encounter people being cavalier about COVID or taking things I know to be nonsense as gospel. The virus is a subject concerning which misinformation is lethal, not only potentially for ourselves and our loved ones but even for total strangers, with whom we interact in a casual way which we may not even think of as being potentially dangerous.

But it's a time in which it's remarkably difficult to have accurate information, not only because the places where we get it are contaminated by partisanship and propaganda (how insane that a public health emergency should be the subject of partisan controversy!)  but precisely because the virus is new and so little is known about it even now. We've never before encountered a respiratory virus that can attack the body in so many other ways as well as through the lungs, that can wreak such havoc on just about every organ and system in the body, that can kill in so many ways, that is so good at spreading itself- and which is in every way so unpredictable. And all this is happening at a time when our trust in our institutions is at an all-time low.

It seems to me to be a no-brainer that everybody from the government at all levels to the medical community to the media needs to be publicizing two things just as widely as possible: first, our accurate, up-to-the-minute and detailed best understandings and best-practices concerning the virus and the pandemic;  and in some ways even more urgently, the fact that our knowledge of the virus and our beliefs concerning how best it can be controlled by their very nature are provisional and probably will be for some time. It's not that people are lying to us. It's not that there's some kind of a conspiracy (although the crazies who explain everything by suggesting conspiracies will doubtless keep on doing so).

We all need to pay closer attention, keep more current, and distinguish between what we might in our partisan hearts want to believe and what the facts, as best we understand them, tell us at the moment.
We're learning as we go, and the fact is that we don't know as much as any of us think we do. Sometimes things everyone was sure about last week are going to turn out to be dead wrong. and that all we mortals can do in this situation is our best.

We are going to make mistakes. And yes, people are going to die because of them. But if somebody dies, we need to do everything in our power to make sure that it's because of an honest mistake either on their part or on the part of the people from which they got their information and not because of partisan conspiracy theories or half-truths spread by people with political or ideological axes to grind.

Here's a biggie we should take to heart right now: a new study says that while masks, in general, do a good job of preventing people from spreading the virus to others, bandanas are almost useless and those neck-hugging things aren't much better.

Something I, personally, need to learn from: cloth masks are better than the disposable ones I've been using.

We're a nation that values freedom and individualism like nobody else in the world. Those can be strengths. But right now, asserting them inappropriately is literally killing us. It's probably the number one reason why the COVID pandemic is getting worse in the United States at a time when the general trend in the rest of the world- even in many Third World countries- has been toward improvement.

We need to get on the same page, even if we all have to turn that page frequently. And above all, we need to start pulling together rather than working at cross purposes. As one recent Federal court decision put it, there is no Constitutional right to infect other people with a deadly virus.

Yeah, this is controversial. But it's also common sense, and the Founders would have been fine with it (especially given the precautions Washington took to control that smallpox outbreak in the Continental Army during the Revolution): we need to have a national mandate.

We all need to be wearing masks whenever we leave home, and in the absence of a good excuse (and there are a few),  people need to be fined if they don't.