The Most Terrifying Prediction Of 2020

     Remnants of the covid class war will touch every domain of life for decades. Officials have suggested that social distancing will need to continue even after mandatory vaccinations. Masks have become a potent symbol of both physical purity and mutual mistrust. Our fantasy of a sanitized and deathless society has created a world where the home is a prison and friends and family are a health hazard. In this world children are told they are killing their grandparents simply by existing. Right now we are still at the beginning of sweeping changes that may include social credit, immunity passports, a rent-only economy, AI and robotics expansion, financialization of natural resources, increased mass surveillance, the Uberization of everything, and rolling lockdowns for climate change or the flu. We have a limited window of time to reclaim the things that make life worth living: family, community, cultural heritage, the social sphere, public institutions, common spaces, and free movement. That window may be closing quickly, but it is not fully closed yet.

     — Alex Gutentag —

     Please read the whole article. Believe me, it’s worth your time.

     Ponder this: The Communist tyrannies of the Twentieth Century used their subjects’ fear of one another to control them and ensure their continued power. At any time, deliberately or otherwise, your neighbor might make a remark that would bring the KGB to your doorstep. The aspiring tyrants of our time learned from those Communists. They too use our fear of one another to control us: your fear that your neighbor might...give you a bad cold!

     No wonder it’s so hard to write satire these days.

Cat Belling: The Whys Are Clear, The Hows Not So Much

     Over at Ace of Spades HQ, Buck Throckmorton makes a provocative claim. Here’s how he opens:

     Tyranny doesn’t end because citizens overwhelm the tyrant’s troops and then storm the tyrant’s fortress. It ends when the tyrant’s enforcers refuse to shoot ordinary civilians. And the reason they choose not to shoot civilians is because they’ve made a calculated decision that it is now their most prudent course of action.

     Newsom, Whitmer, de Blasio, and all the other tyrants born of Covid are drunk on the power they’ve claimed during this “emergency.” They have claimed that by winning an election – once - they may now assume dictatorial powers, ignore existing laws, and suspend the Bill of Rights. Chief among these powers is determining which businesses and lives they can destroy with a simple decree.

     Most of the police and city employees enforcing decrees that shut down businesses are just “following orders.” Although they may not identify as bad people, they are engaging in evil behavior and they must be compelled to stop doing so. And they can be compelled to stop. [Emphasis added by FWP.]

     They can? Without bloodshed? Hm. “Compulsion” usually involves at least the threat of bodily harm – and American cops do carry firearms. Buck’s prescription has a strong resemblance to the New Left’s notions about “monkey-wrenching.” Please read it there, as I don’t want to copy most of another blogger’s column. Here’s how Buck winds up:

     Peaceful people seeking to stop the tyranny will not initiate violence, but will not back down at the threat of it either. It might be a more prudent choice for the tyrant’s ground troops to just not enforce these unlawful decrees after all.

     That’s a statement of hope, not of fact. Hope is wonderful – it’s one of the three theological virtues — but as has been said many times, it’s “not a strategy.”

     Remember always that people normally pursue their chosen occupations at least as much for the inherent satisfactions those occupations provide as for the wages they pay. Cops don’t become cops mainly for the spiffy uniforms or the defined-benefit pension plan. Some are genuinely motivated by a desire to serve the public...but quite a few choose the job because it allows them to exert authority over others, and to back it up with force.

     Always be extremely cautious about assumptions concerning armed agents of the State. Some of them might be okay, but some are just looking for a reason to pull the trigger. Remember Waco and Ruby Ridge. These days, you need a program to tell who’s on the side of the angels.

You Shall Not Be Released...

     ...if the Democrats and their media handmaidens have anything to say about it:

     This past weekend we dropped a direct hit on the Democrat Party, their mainstream media and their coronavirus narrative and all hell broke loose.

     We’ve never seen anything quite like this. Democrats, their fake news media and their ‘fact checker’ allies were completely outraged over our post reporting that only 9,210 Americans died from the coronavirus alone. The rest of the coronavirus victims had different serious illnesses and co-morbidities.

     The other tens of thousands of COVID-19 deaths reported by the CDC have on average 2.6 other health conditions.

     Please read the whole article. Yes, it’s fairly long, but the details are important.

     What I’ve been calling The Pan[dem]ic (alternately, “The Pandemic”) may not have started out as a political tool, but it has most certainly developed into one. The Left hopes to use its ability to inflict “public health emergency” conditions – politically imposed penury and misery – upon millions of helpless Americans to achieve electoral advantage. Anything that undercuts the baseless fear of the Chinese Coronavirus a.k.a. the Wuhan Flu a.k.a. COVID-19 weakens the willingness of private citizens to comply with their “lockdowns” and mask mandates. Neither does it help the Left when their friends in high office, such as Nancy Pelosi, are caught disregaring the “emergency” rules to suit themselves.

     So the proliferation of the CDC’s revised COVID-19 figures is something the Left must prevent at all costs. They who dare to republish them for an audience that doesn’t already haunt the CDC’s website must be punished. Discussion is forbidden!

     A related development: I made an appointment to see my nurse-practitioner for a “wellness check” this coming Friday. She’s a good person, we get along famously, and I was looking forward to chatting with her again...but apparently I shan’t be permitted to do so. I was informed yesterday evening, by robocall, that I must wear a face mask if I want to be admitted to her practice. I immediately canceled the appointment.

     The day has come when physicians are too cowed by a trivial disease – a disease much less dangerous than ordinary influenza – to see patients under normal conditions. Why? Because the state medical-licensing board would take it amiss. Their licenses to practice might be pulled.

     There’s a certain evil logic to this. If the tyrants can’t keep medical personnel “on the reservation,” their whole scheme of oppression will collapse. So they use their licensing bludgeon to make sure no one with the power to prescribe veers off into freedom, that dangerous stuff.

     I got the same treatment from the optometrist I’ve been using for twenty years. I’ve done away with her, too.

     A current of rage is swelling. The conviction that we’ve been duped becomes more widespread with each day. The consequences will not be pleasant:

     It’s time to revolt against this pseudomedical tyranny. Indeed, it was time long ago. The longer we wait, the higher the ultimate cost will be.

The Totalitarians’ Most Successful Gambit Yet

     As I’ve said on other subjects, word gets around. Today it gets around faster than ever before in history. But a mechanism I described in that old essay is taking an uncomfortably long time to bear fruit:

     Something that people in general would want to know is something they will know, eventually. If you assist them in learning it, you will earn their gratitude. If you retard their edification, then when they've finally learned it, if they learn that you were responsible for denying them the data they need, you will reap the whirlwind.

     Now for a few links: the “words” that are starting to “get around:”

• CDC reduces COVID-19 death totals by 94%.
• Stopping COVID-19: What’s The Limit?
• A Tyranny Perpetual And Universal.

     So it’s now a matter of record – and from the Centers for Disease Control, at that – that the COVID-19 virus is about a fifth as dangerous as common influenza. Yet the nation remains gripped by fear of this relatively innocuous bug: a fear artificially produced and stoked by governments and the media. And the Left, which has been casting about for a rationale under which to destroy what remains of Americans’ freedom, is smacking its lips over its success.

“Mass unemployment” due to “automation” didn’t work.
“Deforestation” due to “acid rain” didn’t work.
The “population bomb” didn’t work.
The “energy crisis” didn’t work.
“Resource exhaustion” didn’t work.
“Eco-disaster” and “loss of species” didn’t work.
“Global warming / climate change” didn’t work.

     But this COVID-19 panic...they believe they’ve hit upon a winner there!

     I’m tired of writing encyclopedia-length articles that largely repeat arguments I’ve made and themes I’ve stressed before, so I’m going to cut this one short. But I will remind you of a statement by Argentinian novelist, journalist, and diarist Adolfo Bioy Casares, quoted by the great Thomas Szasz in his book Pharmacracy: Medicine and Politics in America:

     “When man believed that happiness was dependent upon God, he killed for religious reasons. When he believed that happiness was dependent upon the form of government, he killed for political reasons….After dreams that were too long, true nightmares…we arrived at the present period of history. Man woke up, discovered that which we always knew, that happiness is dependent upon health, and began to kill for therapeutic reasons….It is medicine that has come to replace both religion and politics in our time.”

     Still wearing one of those pointless, useless masks, Gentle Reader?

The Altucher Article

     James Altucher’s piece about the death of New York City seems to me to be largely on target. Yet there are cities that aren’t suffering a comparable exodus, which “should” prompt the question: What makes the Big Apple so vulnerable? Why is Manhattan emptying out, possibly never to be refilled, when other cities are holding steady?

     The question made me reflect awhile on New York’s unique economic structure. That NYC is the densest and most populous of our cities, everyone is aware. But the city’s singular economic pyramid is something non-New Yorkers might not have pondered.

     Altucher is correct in fingering the expansion of Internet bandwidth as a key factor in the exodus. Without that expansion, the exodus would not be nearly the size it has attained. But other cities have enjoyed the same increase in bandwidth. What makes New York different?

     It “should” be “obvious” that the effect of radically increased bandwidth is to make the transmission of information of all kinds faster and easier. NYC is no longer the manufacturing hub of the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. The pinnacle of its economy is informational: finance, data processing, publishing, entertainment, communications, promotion. Information, in this context, includes such things as real-time images and sound: the stuff of the typical meeting.

     When information is the only thing being moved from person to person and place to place, physical proximity is unnecessary. Bandwidth is all that matters. So the quarter-million to half-million New Yorkers whose occupations are information-based have no need to gather in one dense, expensive, difficult-to-reach place.

     But that’s not the whole story. “Obviously,” those hundreds of thousands of information-only workers are a small minority of the eight million persons who reside in NYC. What about the others: the ones who still work with physical objects that can’t be transmitted over the Internet? Why are so many of them fleeing the Big Apple?

     In many cases, their trades are made economically viable by the people and businesses that pay their salaries and fees: the extremely profitable information-only industries and their well-compensated employees. In that regard, NYC differs from nearly every other American city. The vitality of the information-only sector, rather than being a cherry atop the economic sundae, is what sustains a great part – possibly the greater part – of the livelihoods of other city-dwellers.

     Most of those non-information workers could still make a living without the patronage of the information-only sector, but for many it would not be comfortable at NYC’s level of expense. The loss of the information sector thus induces a degree of flight among the non-information workers as a second-order consequence.

     New York City won’t die completely. It retains assets that Internet bandwidth can’t replace: in particular, a magnificent harbor and a transportation nexus that serves the whole Atlantic Seaboard. But present trends continuing – always a risky assumption, but what else do we have to go on? – it will diminish substantially and will remain diminished for a long time to come. Yes, the Wuhan virus and the media-promoted fear of it acted as triggers. Still, in an era in which ever fewer persons must interact physically with material objects to earn their livings, something with this effect was likely to happen along sooner or later.

Declaration Of Personal Emancipation

     It’s time for some personal assertions of freedom.

     I broke a pair of glasses, just yesterday. I thought to bring them to where I purchased them, whether to be repaired or replaced. But at the door was a sign that informed the prospective customer that no one would be allowed inside without a mask. I turned around, went directly home, and emailed them that they’d lost my patronage.

     I’m in New York, one of the least free, most sheeplike states in the U.S. I can’t move for reasons of family. And I chafe at the complete idiocy of persons wearing useless face coverings and demanding that I do the same as a condition of doing business with me. When the demander is in the medical field, the irritation is especially great, as these cloth masks don’t even inconvenience the tiny COVID-19 virus. All they do is impede one’s breathing while reducing one’s recognizability.

     The worst part is the cowardice. “Well, it’s corporate policy.” Then the corporation has no respect for its customers. “But there’s a dangerous disease to consider.” COVID-19 is less dangerous than the common flu and is easily remedied with safe, inexpensive drugs. “The state has mandated it.” The state has no authority to do so!

     So I’ve decided on a one-man rebellion. I refuse to do business with any firm that requires me to wear a mask. Moreover, I let them know that, for the cheek of refusing my patronage on ridiculous grounds, I shan’t do business with them ever again. Virtually every business has enough competitors that there’ll be one with spine enough to act like a free man.

     Will it have any effect? We shall see. I’ll keep you posted.

Why the Pro-Maskers Are SO Ready to Exact Retribution on the "Q-M2" Types

It's a long argument, and requires some patience. It also leans on my understanding of the PMMs (Pro-Mandatory Maskers), and how they reason.

BTW, Q-M2 people are those who Question Mandatory Masks.

First, some assumptions:

• Some of the PMMs work in high-risk fields - Medical/Nursing, Heavy Public Contact, Teaching (those germy little buggers are EVERYWHERE), etc. They wouldn't be human if they weren't concerned, and anxious to reduce their vulnerability.
• Some of the PMMs are in positions where failure to be Pro-Mandatory could cause them to lose their job or risk lawsuits. Really can't argue with looking after your own self.
• Some of the PMMs are anxious to put distance between themselves and famous non-maskers - Trump, for example. They fear that reliance on the actual science involved might put them in jeopardy of being lumped in with Bad Orange Man.
• Some are Karens - those people who yearn to be able to lay down rules for others, particularly when they can claim the high ground. In this case, THEY CARE ABOUT PEOPLE - you are a HEARTLESS KILLER!
• Some are just Drama Queens - not something new, there have always been whose primary way of dealing with the world is to over-dramatize their part in it.
• And, some are just going along with the crowd. Because going along is the easiest thing to do.

Now, the whole issue - to mask or not - is not that simple. It can be divided into:

• Masking around sick people - most, if not all, people would agree with that.
• Masking in crowded situations - most would say "OK" to that.
• Masking outside - there are those who do, but most people can't wait to exit a store or building, as eager to take off the mask as a woman is to shed that push-up bra upon closing the door to her house.And, despite the meme stating that government mandates bras, wearing them is optional (although, if the females do, Thank You!).
• And, MANDATORY masking, a government-imposed requirement, with penalties that may include fines, arrest, and even imprisonment.

That last is what is causing MOST of the problem with me.

Most people will wear masks when necessary. Cases like that celebrity who held a big mask-less party, then toddled off to visit his elderly relative - well, those are rare. Most of us, when it involves close contact with actual sick or immuno-compromised people, will sigh, pull on the covering, and comply with their demands.

Even though it's been recently proven that those without symptoms are generally NOT contagious.

But, others are scared. So...easier to go along - in the short term, for limited times.

What some have a problem with is keeping the mask on for extended periods of time. Yeah, yeah, I know it's the norm in operating rooms.

But, when the doctors and nurses leave, the first thing they do is to take off the mask.

What happens when you can NEVER take off the mask, all day, every day. Even on breaks. Even at lunch. Even when the mask makes it very hard for the hearing impaired to understand you. It's worse in many large offices, where the fad for Open Offices has made distancing yourself just not possible. Worse, Shared Co-Spaces are common in many businesses in the New Economy.

What happens when the police tell you to put on a mask? Even hand you a mask.

And, you still refuse?

Will they wrestle you into the back of the police car?

Will they do it if you're Black? If there is a crowd that is yelling "Police Brutality"?

Or, will all of this just affect the White part of the population?

What about the crazy homeless? Will they be arrested?

Or, just the sane ones?

What if citizens take this into their own hands, and attack the mask-less? Will they face jail time? Or, will their actions be excused, because the mask-less person was CLEARLY trying to kill them?

The ZMan has some important things to say about the prevalence of contagion for most of us. I'd suggest you read it, soon.

Me? I'm busy; I have to complete Medicare Annual Re-certification this week, followed by other work-related stuff, working on Science Lessons with my husband, and - perhaps most important - set up my new laptop, scheduled to be delivered on this Thursday.

So, too busy to spend much more time on this topic for a while. Or, to bother with most Social Media.

They’re Going To Try It Again

     That was my immediate conclusion upon reading this piece:

     Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testified Tuesday that an emerging virus found in pigs in China shares traits with the 2009 Swine Flu and 1918 Pandemic Flu, and U.S. public health officials are monitoring the disease.

     Fauci, a White House coronavirus task force member, explained before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee that the virus — known as “G4 EA H1N1,” — doesn’t appear to infect humans, however, it has shown “reassortment capabilities.”...

     Fauci warned lawmakers of the “possibility that you might have another swine flu type outbreak as we had in 2009.”

     “It’s something that still is in the stage of examination,” he added.

     We’ve had Nancy Pelosi and Sleepy Joe Biden nattering about a national mask mandate lately, and getting approximately zero interest from sane Americans. Several state governors are also trying their damnedest to perpetuate their lockdown and mask mandates. But decent people are tired of it all. More, they’re beginning to realize that if a virus as low-mortality as the Wuhan virus can be used as a rationale for the shutdown / mask mandates, then anything more dangerous – e.g., ordinary influenza – would serve even better. The implication is that we’d be “social distancing” and wearing masks for the rest of time.

     Ironically, cloth masks accomplish nothing positive. They’re moderately effective against the transmission of bacterial diseases, but viruses easily penetrate them in either direction. Worse, if worn for a protracted period, they can concentrate bacteria, compel the wearer to rebreathe them...and thus make him sick. Are you at all surprised that the media has said nothing about that, Gentle Reader?

     It’s possible that Red China is ginning up a new threat to us. It’s also possible that Anthony Fauci, who purely loves the spotlight, is using this new swine flu scare to retain public attention and the deference of officialdom. But it’s not very likely, given that travel between the U.S. and China is now tightly restricted, that we’re in danger of disease sufficient to justify any of the measures foisted upon us on the basis of the Chinese coronavirus a.k.a. COVID-19. Our fortunes have sunk too low to justify another wholesale stoppage of American life and commerce of the sort from which we’re only now slowly emerging.

     That doesn’t mean the power elite won’t try to foist it on us, of course.

What Is Happening In NYC Hospitals?

     Presented for your consideration:

     Are there other witnesses to this?

What Is Counted And What Is Not

     Not long ago, in promulgating his entirely unConstitutional lockdown orders over New York State, the scrofulous Andrew Cuomo said that “if it saves even one life, I’ll be happy.”

     I have a question: How is he to know?

     Remember Barack Hussein Obama’s “jobs created or saved” scam? You should. It was Obama’s way of claiming that his “stimulus” measures were “saving the economy.” The “gentlemen of the press,” any of whom would have wiped Obama’s ass for him, so completely enamored of the man were they all, let him get away with it.

     It’s all about what is counted and what isn’t: two figures that often – usually? – depend on who’s doing the counting.

---

     One who seeks hard information about the overall health of a nation must start by looking at daily death rates and the trends therein. What can we learn thus?

     Plainly, the crudest datum is how many deaths per thousand of population the nation has recorded. If there’s disaggregation by nominal cause of death, we can get some sense for that. However, there are ambiguities, uncertainties, and exercises of discretion buried in any such array of putative causes. Ferreting them out is usually impossible without access to details far lower than those amassed in statistical presentations.

     Consider a typical but interesting case. Smith has died by his own hand: a suicide. His method may be of interest to cranks who seek to ban firearms or some assortment of drugs, but no further than that. The key fact is that Smith chose to take his own life. His demise is thus included in the death rates as a suicide; the charts tell us nothing further about it.

     But why did Smith choose to kill himself? Isn’t that a more significant datum than the mere fact of his death?

• Was Smith depressed over his financial situation?
  
• Was he hopelessly addicted to alcohol or another drug?
  
• Did his wife empty his bank account and abandon him?
  
• Was he in terrible, uncontrollable pain from an incurable disease?
  

     Those are only a few of the reasons Smith might have had for killing himself...and he is only one of roughly 50,000 suicides that will occur in these United States in 2020. If Jones wants to reduce the suicide rate, it is far more important that he know and address Smith’s reasons than know how many Smiths will attempt to suicide.

     Consider another interesting case, hopefully less typical. Davis, an AIDS sufferer, has just died. What does his death certificate say about the cause of his death?

     If the listed cause of death is AIDS, the coroner has scamped his duty. No one dies of AIDS: Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Death is caused by some disease AIDS has made possible: an opportunistic infection, a cancer such as Kaposi’s Sarcoma, or something else virulent that can afflict a patient with a destroyed immune system.

     Yet quite a number of death certificates issued in Third World countries list the cause as AIDS...because aid money from First World nations depends on the rate of AIDS affliction.

     So it’s not enough to know the nominal death rates, nor the rates of deaths officially attributed to particular causes.

---

     A couple of commentators have emphasized the importance of deaths in excess of prevailing rates as measures of the significance of a new threat. Their logic is thus: if the prevailing rate before threat T emerged was X, but since threat T has risen to X+ΔX, then the increment ΔX can be attributed, prima facie, to threat T. It seems sensible at first...but only at first. What it omits is the list of factors that are beyond statistical control.

     In our current circumstances, “threat T” is the Wuhan virus (a.k.a. Covid-19). But both the virus and the responses to it have impacted the statistical universe of American death rates. The nationwide shutdown of enterprise, social mechanisms, and much else has undoubtedly had an effect on death rates. How large? We cannot know:

• Did Smith suicide out of loneliness or financial despondency?
• Did Jones die from not being able to afford medicines or food?
• Did Davis die because local paramedics are badly overburdened?
• Did White kill his own family out of lockdown-induced insanity?

     Those are some of the secondary consequences of the “social distancing / stay at home” regime we currently suffer. Yet as real as they are, it is practically impossible to measure them – and they contribute to the “excess deaths” we suffer in this era of the Wuhan virus.

     There is no way to disentangle the secondary-consequence deaths from the rest of the statistics. There is no way to know, were the “social distancing / stay at home” regime not to have been imposed, whether the “excess deaths” would be higher or lower than we currently suffer. These are “experiments” we cannot perform, in the nature of things.

     Neither can we trust the many government-paid “experts” who orate to us daily to be honest, much less correct, in their pronouncements.

---

     Today’s calendar date, April 4, is one of the most famous dates in all of fiction. It’s the day on which 1984, George Orwell’s novel of a totalitarian future England, begins. A snippet from this classic is relevant:

     Down in the street the wind flapped the torn poster to and fro, and the word INGSOC fitfully appeared and vanished. Ingsoc. The sacred principles of Ingsoc. Newspeak, doublethink, the mutability of the past. Winston felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable. What certainty had he that a single human creature now living was on his side? And what way of knowing that the dominion of the Party would not endure for ever? Like an answer, the three slogans on the white face of the Ministry of Truth came back to him:
     WAR IS PEACE
     FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
     IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
     He took a twenty-five cent piece out of his pocket. There, too, in tiny clear lettering, the same slogans were inscribed, and on the other face of the coin the head of Big Brother. Even from the coin the eyes pursued you. On coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, and on the wrappings of a cigarette packet — everywhere. Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed — no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.

     Reflect on that, Gentle Reader. Reflect on what our acceptance of this “social distancing / stay at home” lockdown portends. Reflect on what those who worship power could do with such a regime — what the vilest members of the political class surely will do with it, given time and opportunity.

     To enforce our isolation and subjugation will require the functional equivalent of Orwell’s telescreens. Many Americans voluntarily carry one around with them – and state governments are already using them to monitor our movements. Despite a complete lack of Constitutional or charter authority to do so, law enforcement agencies are pursuing and harassing Americans who choose to ignore the decrees from “our rulers.” Do they confine themselves to disapproval, or are they using force? What becomes of those who refuse to submit?

     What will be counted, and what will not?

Guest Post: A Pandemic Tale

     [The following comes our way from Historian, the worthy proprietor of Views From Liberty Hollow. It will not leave you dry-eyed. Read at your peril.]

---

     I work at a hospital. Not as a doctor, to the well-concealed disappointment of my late mother (and the well-concealed satisfaction of my late father, who loathed doctors,) nor a nurse or a medical technician; my job is to ensure that the facility itself is capable of supporting the demands of those who use it. I'm a construction project manager for a mid-sized non-profit hospital in one of the mid-Atlantic United States, and I'm good at what I do.

     Generally, this hospital is well run, well organized, and well staffed with high quality people, ranking among the top US hospitals, part of a larger system also well ranked. If friends or family were to need care, I'd take them to my hospital, which I consider one of the two best in the system and the area, one reason I accepted an offer to work there.

     Over the years, I've overseen a large number of projects for this organization ranging from small cosmetic renovations to large multi-million dollar additions and renovations.

     The Facilities department saw this pandemic coming, and unlike a number of other facilities in the Mid-Atlantic now scrambling to get long-neglected systems functional, (which I hear about through my contractors but which will remain forever un-named), all of our HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning) systems and all our negative pressure rooms (of which we have an unusually large number) were checked well ahead of time to ensure that they were fully functional and had received full Preventative Maintenance well ahead of this pandemic, along with most everything else. By early March we had all of our existing systems confirmed to be in excellent order, as did all of the other facilities system-wide; some needed more work than we did, but all were brought to good condition.

     Regrettably, in hindsight, system leadership was hesitant to expend funds or cut revenues prior to the onset of the pandemic outside China.

     Perhaps understandably, they were reluctant to commit significant funds for facility modifications or to take occupied rooms out of service for any length of time, so we waited and watched as case numbers overseas and here in these united States began to grow. We made more suggestions about contingency planning as the cases continued to increase. We started seeing cases in the area. And still we waited.

     We started seeing cases in our hospital, and finally we were directed to convert existing patient rooms to negative pressure rooms.

     For the uninitiated, this is a non-trivial modification. A negative pressure room or isolation room, has to exhaust ALL of the air coming out of the room directly to the outside. Standards are for 12 air changes per hour, and the room must meet certain negative pressure standards. That means that the entire volume of the room gets replaced every 5 minutes. Our facility policy is to filter all of that exhaust to ensure that we are not placing passers-by at risk of infection, further complicating matters. Normal air conditioning, even in many areas of a hospital, recycles most of the air to reduce energy costs, so when you throw that air away, as you must do for an isolation room, you significantly increase the load on the air conditioning system. It is a BIG change.

     I'll spare you, gentle Reader, the details, but in 3 days last week we went from about 10% isolation rooms in our hospital to 15%, i.e., a 50% increase in isolation rooms by dint of much effort by a number of contractors, vendors, and hospital staff. Those rooms were virtually empty last week, and hospital volumes were WAY down. It was rather eerie. After that success, I was directed to convert another 12% of our rooms to negative pressure, and we are working that now.

     This is now much more difficult as seriously ill patients are starting to swamp the hospital, and the rooms which were empty a week ago are all now filled or rapidly filling with patients on O2 or intubated, most of whom had been seen a week or two ago, evaluated as not seriously ill, and sent home with instructions to come back if they started to feel worse, not better. Well, they DID get worse, and they are coming back.

     In significant numbers, and this is just the beginning.

     This is compounded by the fact that contractors willing to work in a Covid19 ward with infected patients in the NON isolation rooms right down the hall are hard to find, and willing contractors are finding it hard to persuade their staff to work there, regardless of PPE, pay or anything else. I have been feeling more than a little bitter about the time thrown away, about having to deal with trying to modify patient rooms that are filling faster than I can get needed materials and equipment (which every half-decent hospital in North America now wants,) to modify them. I've now seen first hand room after room with sedated intubated patients, and I've seen the security staff bringing the bodies of those who've died to the morgue. And I know it is likely that if I catch this bug and get a severe case, I'll make that trip to the morgue in a body bag myself, because I'm old, with several risk factors.

     This bug scares me, and I have been weighing my duty to my family against my duty to my employer and my coworkers. I've been setting the example to my contractors and my staff by walking the work areas in Covid19 units, inspecting completed work several times a day. I never ask anyone to do anything I won't but lately I have been questioning the wisdom of doing that and thinking about finding something else to do rather than risking my life shoveling against an overwhelming incoming tide.

     And then this morning, while I was trouble-shooting a pressurization problem with one of the converted rooms, in a ward filled with Covid19 patients, I saw something I did not expect. In a ward now inhabited by unconscious patients, and nurses and doctors in scrubs, there was a man all in black, with a white collar, talking to our chaplain. It took a moment (and hearing the man called 'Father'!) for me to realize that I was seeing a Catholic priest in a Covid19 unit. While I wrestled with my pressurization problem, I also wondered why this priest, who I have never seen before, was here, in this unit.

     A few minutes later, when I saw him next, he was awkwardly donning, with the help of a senior nurse and our chaplain, the PPE required to enter a room with an intubated patient on a vent- cap, splash guard, respirator, gown, gloves, the whole setup. I overheard the chaplain say, "Father, are you sure you want to do this?" and he nodded. I realized that this man, who obviously had never been fit tested in his life and had no idea of how to properly don or doff his PPE, who was having to be helped by nurses to wear this stuff, was going into a room occupied by a dying unconscious Catholic patient, to get right up next to the head of that dying patient who was breathing out aerosolized infection, and administer Last Rites. That priest was walking into a room where any mistakes on his part, and he was virtually certain to make at least one, would mean he was breathing in serious illness, or death, and that dying man would never know it, yet in he went. Why? I'll never know for sure, but my guess is that he saw that as his duty, to himself, to his fellow Catholic, but most of all, to his faith, and he had to be true to that.

     Having seen the pressure issue dissipate (although we did not get to the root cause until later on,) I returned to my office, but I was mightily moved by what I had seen. How could I walk away, having seen that? How could I abandon my job, allowing some unknown, but likely less competent and less experienced person tackle one of the greatest personal and professional challenges I have ever faced, during the worst pandemic in living memory? Yes, leadership has made some stupid mistakes and they need to own them, but how could I leave my friends and colleagues, all the good people I know there, when I can help?

     I can't. As long as I can help, I'm going to help. I'm going to do my best not to get infected, but I'm going to stay and help as long as I can. Fear is not sufficient cause to leave. Failure of material support would be, but so far we have that.

     A few after-notes:

     Normalcy bias is real, and it has bitten a lot of people. You who survive this need to remember that.

     Refusal to believe reality will kill people. As Rand put it, "You can ignore reality, but you cannot ignore the consequences of having ignored reality."

     If you still truly think that this virus is "not as bad as the flu", I invite you to visit the nearest hospital and spend some time in the ICU with the intubated Covid patients. Of course, the only way you can do that is if you yourself are seriously ill and have to be intubated, and about 3/4 of those folks that sick die. If you survive the experience I'll bet you'll sing a different tune.

     This bug killed over a thousand people yesterday. If the death rate continues to increase, in three weeks we'll be losing the average annual flu deaths in a day.

     Lastly, it is better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it. True for food, toilet paper, ammo and N95s among many other things. I mention these because family, friends and co-workers, none of them stupid, needed my help to acquire same.

With regard to all who serve the Light,
Historian