American Roulette

(I figure I'm going to lose some friends with this one)

We are all familiar with the concept of Russian Roulette, a form of life or death gambling with one bullet in a six shot revolver. In an attempt to let you know how I am feeling these days, as well as other members of my social minority, I’d like to present the parable of American Roulette.

Imagine that we accidentally meet at the grocery store. As we start talking, I casually pull out a weird looking revolver.

When I say weird looking, I specifically mean a revolver with a huge cylinder that has 100 chambers in it. A 100 shooter instead of a six shooter.

I spin the cylinder, point it at you, and pull the trigger.

At this juncture you undoubtedly have a couple of questions to ask me. Questions such as “WHAT the FUCK?” and “Have you gone comPLETELY inSANE?”

My bland answer is, “Hey, what’s the big deal? I don’t even know if it’s loaded. It might have one bullet in it, or none, or five, or ten. No idea. And even if it did go off, I wasn’t aiming carefully. Sure, I might have killed you, but I might have just wounded you. I suppose if I wounded you, you might die of a secondary infection or whatever later, or be permanently disabled, but it’s not guaranteed.”

I am sure that this would not satisfy you. You would be reassessing my sanity and maybe our friendship.

Now, imagine walking into your local grocery store and watching almost everyone else in the place carrying weirdly large revolvers and engaging in a constant, mindless game of mutual American Roulette. It would be maddening.

Yes, I’m writing about Covid.

It’s hard to make an exact estimate of the odds of Covid causing hospitalization, disability, or death for any individual. There are many factors involved, including age, gender, disability, vaccination status, obesity, comorbidities, and the particular strain of Covid involved. Overall, the death rate goes up with age and existing health problems. For your average adult it’s somewhere from a 200-shooter to a 100-shooter. For someone in their 80s, more of a 20-shooter. But that’s just for acute Covid.

An individual’s chances of multiple types of disease go up after a Covid infection. Bacterial and viral infections. Three times the chance of heart attack and stroke. Seven times the chance of a pulmonary embolism and five times the chance of deep vein thrombosis. Marked increase in breathlessness after exertion and reduction in lung capacity. Increased incidence of diabetes, early onset Alzheimer’s, and Parkinsons. Virtually guaranteed brain damage. (See my Cat and Mouse post) It’s early days because of the time lag involved, but there are indications that Covid increases susceptibility to cancer. There’s also a study showing that having Covid increases your chance of a car crash by 1.5 times. It robs you of a few I.Q. points with each infection. Basically, anything that has to do with brain damage, immune system damage, and spreading microscopic blood clots through the vascular system. A measurable increase in morbidity and mortality. For those on chemotherapy or immunosuppressant drugs, or those with immune system disorders, it’s close to a death sentence.

Somewhere between one in six and one in ten infected people suffer long Covid. People get months or years knocked out of their lives, lose their ability to work, and experience financial ruin. Some people simply never completely recover.

That’s important to know in terms of individual risk assessment and risk tolerance, but also in the moral calculation of what we are willing to inflict upon others.

Covid is asymptomatic for days when carriers are infectious. Some people have entirely asymptomatic cases, yet are still infectious. About 60% of infections are from people with no symptoms. Just such a case happened to a friend of mine not long ago, after he had a meal with a seemingly healthy friend of his. Absent a professional grade test, none of us can be sure.

An axiom of firearm safety is “Always treat every gun as if it was loaded.” Hard experience is that the number one thing people say after accidentally shooting someone is “I didn’t realize that it was loaded.” It’s too late at that point; someone is dead or hospitalized.

A firearm is a tangible, visible object and a virus can only be seen with an electron microscope. A firearm makes a loud noise and the effect is dramatic and immediate, while a virus is silent and the effect delayed. Still, a virus is just as real and can kill or disable just like a bullet.

If that seems hyperbolic to you, just ask the opinion of one of the hundreds of people who died from Covid last week. Oh, right, you can’t. They’re dead. They’re dead because someone thoughtlessly breathed virus laden aerosol in their vicinity. Or, you could ask the millions of people with compromised immune systems who live with microbial crosshairs on them. They are hard to find, because they have to stay out of public spaces because our ableist society has decided that brunch is more important than other people’s lives. You undoubtedly know people who have had months or years knocked out of their lives by long Covid. People who are not the same as they were before.

And yet, as I walk through the world, I see few masks and little effort to prevent Covid transmission. I wear a mask in indoor public spaces, but that’s like wearing a ballistic vest to a mass gunfight. It does some good, but nothing is perfect. An N95 mask is 95% effective, not 100%. But that’s for a lone masker. If two people wear N95 masks, their combined effectiveness is 99.75%. The chance of a viral aerosol particle getting through drops from one in twenty to one in four hundred. Almost nobody is willing to put in that minor effort.

I learned an expression recently: skeptical hedonism. That’s the human tendency to discount the worth and truth of things that interfere with our pleasure. Masks are unattractive, inconvenient, and annoying. Testing is expensive and inconvenient. Spontaneous socializing in crowds is fun. So we get bullshit statements such as “It’s only a cold” or “Covid is over” or “You have to live your life.” A month of widespread masking would end the pandemic, but that would be a full thirty days of minor self-discipline, slight inconvenience, and concern for the vulnerable and disabled, so it won’t happen.

What might actually happen is society starting to treat air the way we started treating water in the early 20^th century. Covid aside, millions of Americans are sickened each year by the pollutant laden microbial soup we breathe indoors. It’s been firmly established that high indoor levels of carbon dioxide and volatile chemicals wreck our ability to think. Employers and schools would see significant improvements in employee and student performance if they implemented modern ventilation and filtration. The side benefit would be far fewer people dying of Covid or having their lives ruined by its aftermath.

Over the past five years I have watched tribalism, delusion, and selfishness triumph over solidarity, reason, and generosity. I have felt despair, disgust, anger, and incredulity. I have watched people I regard as the most socially conscious blithely ignore the facts in front of them in favor of self-indulgence. The conservative tribalists with their “I will not comply” slogan didn’t bother me. I never expected much from them. What gets to me is the utter moral and intellectual failure of the portion of the population that is supposed to give a damn.

I keep thinking about Field Marshal Douglas Haig. He was the commander of British forces during World War 1. By all accounts, he was an intelligent man. He was well educated, and an experienced soldier. However, he sent hundreds of thousands of his men to pointless deaths. He did this because he couldn’t accept the reality in front of him. He thought he knew the right way to fight a war; the way he had fought it before. He looked at reports from the front that told him he was misreading the situation, that his tactics were failing, that men’s lives were being wasted. He couldn’t absorb the facts because he couldn’t give up his prior assumptions. It was a normalcy bias that led to mass death.

That’s where we are. 99% of people are being normal, ignoring those among them getting picked off. It’s like one of those horror movies where, as the monster stalks them, the main characters always do the dumbest possible thing. It’s a movie I’m tired of watching.

Those of you out there still masking, testing, filtering, and otherwise protecting the lives and health of your fellow human beings, I thank you. I admire your perseverance in the face of indifference, peer pressure, scorn, and harassment. When the H5N1 pandemic hits and the hospitals run out of refrigerated morgue trucks, it will be your job to patiently explain to your fellow citizens the absurdly simple ways to avoid dying.

To the other 99% of you who have given up on protecting yourselves and others, I have no idea what to say. If witnessing millions of deaths and ruined lives, to this day, can’t convince you to take an interest in self-preservation, or the lives of your loved ones, then what will my words do? I feel like Dr. Semmelweis in 1850, trying to convince his colleagues to wash their hands in between dissecting cadavers and delivering babies. Perhaps in thirty years reality will sink in.

Really, I’m not writing this with the expectation of convincing anyone. I’m writing this to get it out of my head. I hope it gives some gratification to my fellow Covid realists. I hope it gives everyone else some insight into the contained rage of those people you see wearing masks.

The Ardennes Counter-Offensive

Watching what is playing out in American politics right now, I am thinking about the Ardennes Offensive, also known as the Battle of the Bulge. Stay with me here.

I’ll give you the briefest overview possible. Stacks of books have been written on it, so hit the library if you like. It started on December 16, 1944. The Allies were slowly pushing eastwards through France and Belgium towards the Rhine. The Nazis were losing ground in the east and the west. Even Hitler realized that the best he could do was a negotiated settlement. His strategy was to secretly mass troops opposite a thinly held section in the Ardennes forest and break through with a lightning strike to the coast, taking the deep water port of Antwerp. That would split the allied forces and deprive them of supplies. The plan was to get from the existing lines to the coast in four days.

Of course, it didn’t go to plan. The Germans pushed a westward bulge in the line, but fierce resistance at key points slowed them down enough for the Allies to send in reinforcements and drive them back. There were striking moments of heroism. An 18 man reconnaissance team held off 500 elite German paratroopers for 16 hours until they ran out of ammunition and had to surrender. It was a vital 16 hour delay. The 101^st Airborne and the 969^th Artillery Battalion held the vital road junction village of Bastogne from the 19^th through the 26^th, although surrounded. Eventually the German attack ran out of soldiers, fuel, supplies, and vehicles, and had to turn back. The Allies finally pushed the Germans back to the pre-offensive lines at the end of January.

The key point of this whole ordeal was timing. The Nazis did not have the reserves or supplies for an extended attritional battle. It had to be a sudden victory. Even though the battle lasted a month and a half, a number of German generals later said that they realized they were defeated when the planned four days became eight, and then sixteen. They had known they were losing the war so they rolled the dice on a final blitzkrieg. Delay defeated them.

And here we are. Anti-democratic forces in the U.S. know that they are losing the demographic war. Their base is aging. Young people overwhelmingly reject their worldview. The base of straight, white, Christian conservatives has witnessed their social superiority eroded by a cascade of rights revolutions. People understand that big business has broken the social contract. The opportunity for them to regain former power is slipping away. So, a roll of the dice. A flurry of executive orders. A plan to wreck the functions and credibility of government. An attack on political dissent, starting with the least popular demographics. An attack on voting rights.

But it has to happen quickly to succeed. In my previous essay about Covid I wrote about how people respond in a disaster: Denial, Deliberation, Decision. The anti-democratic plan is to rush through the changes while the country is still in denial and deliberation mode. They also have to get the job done before the economic destruction hits their base of voters.

We are aided in our resistance by the whim, grudge, and bribe solicitation based economic policy of Trump. He is derailing the economy faster than expected. We still need some political heroics, though. That’s why my heart was gladdened by Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) using a Senate procedure to put a hold on 300 Trump nominees, as well as a handful of bills in the foreign relations committee. It would have been better to start on January 21^st, but I’ll take it.

That’s how you do it. Make the Republicans spend time, effort, political capital, and attention on our actions and our priorities rather than their own plans. The Republicans spent years obstructing the efforts of Democratic presidents and majorities. They became the party of no. Since the Republicans have become a racist personality cult serving a rich donor class, it is the responsibility of the Democrats to turn the tables.

Every Democratic senator should put holds on every nominee and bill the Republicans propose. They should filibuster like Cory Booker. They should use every parliamentary rule possible to slow down the process. No unanimous consent. All roll call votes.

They should bill troll, like Bernie Sanders with his $17 minimum wage bill. It has no chance of passing, but it forces the GOP to publicly oppose it and try to explain why. The Democrats should look at polling, select the most popular progressive policies, and start introducing bills. Then publicize it when the GOP leadership won’t let the bills  get anywhere. “We wanted to eliminate credit card late fees, but the Republicans serve the credit card companies, not you.”

Policies themselves are less important than using policies as a wedge to separate the identity of a voter from the identity of the Republican political establishment. People make political judgements based on identity, and we need to make the Trump cult an alien minority in American culture. Bigots and billionaires.

What should you do? Email and telephone your members of Congress. Tell them to gum up the works; obstruct, delay, confuse, distract. Tell them to bill troll the Republicans. Tell them to focus on identity; the GOP as the party of the corporate overlords and  the rich, with racist pawns doing the dirty work. Be polite but insistent. Tell them that time is the most important factor. Most members of Congress are careerist cowards. They will only do something if doing nothing is more unpleasant and risky.

Show up at rallies. It’s just a show, but it builds emotional energy and lets people know they aren’t alone. Humanity is all about belonging, and demonstrating that our group is invigorated, numerous, driven, and even fun, is incentive to belong. Find your local political groups.

Support organizations like Public Citizen that are filing lawsuits against the Trump administration over its multitude of legal and constitutional crimes. Fighting crime is the right thing to do, and it imposes a burden on the criminals.

Timing is key. Today, search for the websites of your members of Congress. Find the contact pages and bookmark them. Put their office numbers on your phone. Contact them today. Make it a weekly or biweekly habit to send them a reminder of their responsibilities.

If we can keep the fascists away from Antwerp for a bit longer we will win.

Cat and Mouse

A few weeks ago I had a conversation with a friend. She is intelligent, well read, and generally well informed. We were discussing our lives and she noted that I am the most Covid conscious person she knows. I made a remark about the brain damage Covid causes, and she was shocked. She hadn’t heard about it. I always assumed that this knowledge was at least vaguely understood by the general public, but I was wrong. Hence this essay.

The punchline up front: Covid-19 causes brain damage in 100% of cases. It’s usually incremental, but it has measurable effects.

You have probably heard about an effect of Covid called anosmia, loss of smell. The virus gets in through the nose and travels up to the olfactory bulb in the brain, causing damage. Right next to the olfactory region is the orbitofrontal cortex. Neurologists have done follow up MRI scans of people who had brain MRIs in 2019, some of whom had gotten Covid, and some not. There was visible brain shrinkage in the Covid group. Another focus of damage is the parahippocampal gyrus. (1)

There is a type of scan called PET-CT that can detect levels of sugar metabolism in parts of the brain. Basically, how active parts of the brain are. Neurologists have done PET-CT scans on people post Covid and noted hypometabolism (below normal activity) in the orbitofrontal cortex. (2) Covid degrades the brain’s ability to metabolize glucose in general, which could be a major factor in the mental exhaustion and well known “brain fog” associated with long Covid. There is an increased risk for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease post Covid. (3)

Other researchers have given standardized cognitive tests to groups of people who haven’t gotten Covid and then retested them after half of the subjects had gotten Covid. Everyone in the Covid group showed cognitive deficits in the retest. (4) Other researchers used MRI scans to study connectivity between areas of the brain in subjects post-Covid. They found that anosognosia (the inability to recognize a cognitive deficit in oneself) was associated with lower connectivity, worse measured cognitive outcomes and yet better subjective self-assessments. (5)

Another study looked at Covid and car accidents. It found that, regardless of vaccination status, getting Covid increased accident risk by a factor of 1.5. That brings us back to the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). (6)

The OFC does a few things, but one of its main functions is risk assessment. It calculates the consequences of our actions. People with damage to the OFC experience less or no anxiety when making risky decisions. The OFC also has a role in emotional regulation. The increased accident rate makes sense. Post Covid, people are less capable of calculating risk, less anxious about taking risks, and less emotionally regulated.

I also mentioned the parahippocampal gyrus. That region is involved in the creation and retrieval of memories. Memory issues are a common complaint post Covid.

There are a variety of other health issues resulting from Covid, from erectile dysfunction to heart attacks, but these are all a matter of odds. A 28% increase in the incidence of ED. A doubling of the incidence of heart attacks and strokes. Between 1.6 and 3 times the usual rate of overall mortality in the year following, depending on severity. The thing that distinguishes Covid caused brain damage is that it happens in 100% of cases. I’m interested in the why of a 100% incidence of brain damage. A virus is just a bundle of genetic material in a microscopic bag. It has no agenda except making more of itself. It doesn’t calculate, it just mutates and gets tested against its environment.

It makes evolutionary sense for an infectious disease to damage the brain, especially the orbitofrontal cortex. An infectious disease that degrades a host’s ability to assess risk and regulate behavior is a disease that has more chances to infect and reinfect a host species.

I will note that Covid also suppresses a neurotransmitter involved in the transmission of pain signals to the brain. (7) That means that Covid sufferers don’t suffer as much as they might otherwise. There are also accounts of people with other sources of pain getting temporary relief during the acute phase of Covid. (8) Feeling less sick would lead to more activity and less caution, leading to more infections.

It’s anecdotal, but I have read a number of accounts of people who have had multiple cases of Covid and can no longer remember that they have had multiple cases, or how debilitating the experience was.

This is where we get to the cat and mouse of the title. There is a microorganism called Toxoplasma Gondii. It infects cats and rodents such as mice. However, it needs to be in the digestive system of a cat in order to reproduce. It has evolved to modify the neurology of mice in such a way that they become unafraid of the smell of cats. (9) Normally the smell of cats makes mice anxious and cautious and they tend to leave the area. T. gondii infected mice are actually excited by and attracted to the smell of cats. Bad outcomes result for the mice; necessary outcomes for T. gondii. This microbe is one of a class of organisms known as host manipulating parasites.

Host manipulating parasites change the behaviors, the metabolism, and even the body shapes of their hosts in an effort to promote their own survival. There’s a worm that parasitizes crickets, but needs to enter water to reproduce. It induces its cricket host to jump in the water and drown so that it can live. There’s a trematode that infects ants but needs to get to the digestive system of a cow to continue its life cycle. It makes the ant climb to the top of a blade of grass and stay there, where the ant might more readily be eaten by a grazing ruminant.

Could Covid have evolved into a host manipulating parasite? There certainly were (and are) social and political factors that induce people to forgo masks, testing, air quality interventions, and other behaviors that slow an epidemic.

Still, overlaying it all I witness a strange apathy in the face of an epidemic disease. A disease, I should add, that is still killing a thousand people a week and permanently disabling tens of thousands a week. Everybody knows of at least one person who is either dead or disabled from it. We’ve all heard of long covid and seen the results.

At least three quarters of Americans have had Covid, so we have a large cohort of people with orbitofrontal cortexes operating at partial capacity. That same cohort has impaired memory and emotional regulation. On top of that, anosognosia, the inability to recognize that something has been lost. Just a general recognition that “people sure are driving crazily these days” and “kids are having trouble behaving in school.” It certainly seems as if Covid is making our species a better host for its proliferation.

Some people reading this might feel insulted at being described as having brain damage. No insult intended. Think of it as having blown out the ligaments in your knee and being told that you’ll never run quite as fast as you used to.

Our tendency is towards normalcy bias. In a disaster situation, people tend to go through three stages: Denial, Deliberation, and Decision. In a building fire or a shooting incident, people’s first tendency is to behave as if it isn’t happening. It can’t be. Those things only happen somewhere else, to someone else. Then, when realization dawns, people delay action. They look at what other people are doing, while those people look at them. People discuss the situation. Eventually people decide on an action. Much of the time it is ineffective or inappropriate to the situation. Many people just shut down, become inert, give up. A lot of people die in the first two stages. The people who survive disasters tend to fast track these stages; instantly accept the reality, decide on a plan, and execute it immediately.

It seems to me that most of this country is still in denial, or has gone directly to the shut down stage.

What should people who have had Covid do? Become consciously risk averse. Make it a habit to deliberately weigh options and think through future scenarios. Less instinct, more calculation. Deliberately drive more cautiously than you think you should. Use cruise control to stay at the speed limit and reduce cognitive load. The damage is incremental, but an incremental increase in risk added up over thousands of instances becomes significant. Wear a real N95 or N99 mask in enclosed public spaces. Wear it properly, adjusted to your face. Yes, be that weirdo. Your brain is on the line. The last thing you need is another hit to your cognitive capacity.

If you are community minded, push for indoor air quality improvements (filtration and ventilation) in schools, hospitals, public buildings, and businesses. This has been shown to dramatically reduce infection rates for all airborne diseases.

Covid-19 has evolved to make us careless. Don’t let yourself be manipulated by a mindless virus.

A good resource for the curious: https://youhavetoliveyour.life/

Footnotes:

1)     https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10063523/

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00503-x

2)     https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9281418/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7196385/

3)     https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laneur/article/PIIS1474-4422(24)00178-9/fulltext

4)     https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266703642400013X

5)     https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35350554/

6)     https://www.neurology.org/doi/10.1212/01.wnl.0001051276.37012.c2

7)     https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10441-021-09425-z

8)     https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34654780/

9)     https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/common-parasite-could-manipulate-our-behavior/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4512725/

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is Useful in a Bad Way

You hear it all the time: The Dow is up slightly in moderate trading. The Dow is steady in light trading. The Dow is down sharply in heavy trading. I could make a bingo card for you, with light, moderate, and heavy trading along one side and up, down and steady along the other. It’s inescapable, tagging the end of news broadcasts on radio and television, and faithfully tracked in the financial sections of news websites.

It is also completely useless as financial information, as broadcast and printed. It is not, however, completely useless.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average was created in 1896 by Charles Dow, founder of Dow Jones & Company and editor of the Wall Street Journal. It was originally a simple average of twelve of the largest industrial companies traded on the New York Stock Exchange. It gave a rough estimate of how the stock market of that time was doing when there were less than 100 listed stocks. Today there are about 2,800 companies listed on the NYSE and 30 stocks in the Dow Jones Average.

Of course, the first problem with the Dow is that it is only 30 stocks out of 2,800, a bit over 1%. Thirty big companies, but an investor could own none of them and dozens of the other 2,770. Aside from massive market wide shocks, a non-Dow portfolio might have no connection with the movement of the Dow.

The second problem is that it is a simple price average. It is calculated by adding up the prices of the 30 stocks and dividing by 30. There is no weighting for the number of shares of stock for individual companies. A smaller company with a high share price moves the Dow more than a larger company with a low share price. Those who practice the dismal science (economics) say that the Dow doesn’t even give an accurate picture of its own stocks.

It’s a number that doesn’t accurately represent the stock market in general, that doesn’t accurately represent any one stock on the market, and doesn’t even accurately represent itself.

I’ll try to be generous and imagine that someone is invested in a Dow Jones index fund, an investment that follows the ups and downs of the Dow. If our putative investor is in for the long term, then day by day, top-of-the-hour updates are useless. If we have a trend focused day trader on our hands, then the hourly updates on the radio and cable news are too intermittent to be useful.

What, then, is its purpose? There are three, two conscious and one that we might call evolved usefulness. The first conscious purpose is to make an effort-free stab at financial reporting. Any news outlet can easily insert a few words about the Dow at the end of a headline roundup and give the impression that some kind of economic news has been delivered. The second conscious purpose is now obsolete. The Dow used to advertise the Dow Jones organization itself, publisher of the Wall Street Journal. To be the keeper of such a supposedly important benchmark lent credibility to the brand. Now the Wall Street Journal is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and the Dow has been sold off to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, or CME.

The third and most important purpose is to make Americans reflexively think that the stock market going up is a good and important thing. This was not a conscious choice by anyone. The Dow just hung on in the public mind after it lost any pragmatic purpose. We can, in part, thank lazy news outlets for that. It is just one part of the mindless cheerleading for the interests of the wealthy. We can also blame the human desire for a simple narrative.

In theory, a stock goes up because the general opinion among traders is that the company underlying the stock is going to be more prosperous in the future than previously estimated. In reality, there are many factors that move stock price, including hype, fear, panic, corruption, emotional contagion, and artifacts of computer trading. Nevertheless, let’s take the long view and focus on value.
There are many ways that a company can be viewed as more valuable. It can bring a new and better product to market. It can be well managed. It can run a successful advertising campaign. Economic and social conditions can randomly favor its business sector. That’s the upside.

On the down side, a company can increase its value in many bad ways. It can have a brutal round of layoffs. It can dodge prosecution for a crime or negotiate a slap-on-the-wrist settlement. It can figure out a loophole in the law that allows it to pollute with impunity. It can get a pliant Congress to give it an unwarranted subsidy or tax break, or a law that favors it at the expense of society in general. It can break a union drive. It can get away with price gouging or deceptive practices. It can abuse and exploit its workers. It can profit from disaster and misery. It can simply plow its profits into buying back its own shares, to the benefit of its top executives and big shareholders. (Note: Share buybacks are not a law of nature. They were illegal before 1982)

An increase in share price is not an unalloyed good for society. This is especially true in that 60% of Americans don’t own any stock.

It is important to those who do own stock, especially those who make the bulk of their income from stock portfolios, that a rising stock market should be seen by the general public as a purely good thing.

My friend Robert Porter has proposed a theory of government in two propositions. The first he takes from Adam Smith; that a government’s primary job is to maintain a system of unequal distribution of wealth. The second is that the equally vital job of government is to maintain the mythology necessary to convince people to accept unequal distribution of wealth. There have been many variations on this mythology through history: divine right of kings, predestination, meritocracy, dictatorship of the proletariat, free markets. The relevance of the Dow is one of these vital myths.

 The air may be poisoned and employees may be living in their cars, but we are supposed to cheer for the Dow. That is the true utility of the endless repetition of the Dow Jones Industrial Average; to distract us from our lived reality and convince us that the true measure of our well-being is the stock value of thirty giant corporations.

Like a Pencil

Friends, loved ones, strangers, I am prompted to write by a recent conversation. An old friend of mine (by which I mean the mother of one of my childhood friends) got Covid a month ago. Thankfully she was fully vaccinated, so a mild case. I told her that she now needed to be extra careful about wearing a mask in public. She said, “Why? Doesn’t being infected make your immune system stronger?”

No. No no no. A thousand times no.

We have to get away from this pernicious analogy of the immune system as a muscle. It is in no way like that. Any immunologist will roll their eyes at this. And tell you no.

An imperfect, but better analogy is that your immune system is like a pencil. Break the tip (get infected), sharpen it (fight the infection), and you are sharp again, but the pencil is shorter. Break it and sharpen it enough and eventually it is a stub.

(Reference links at the bottom, including studies, mask sources, Community Transmission maps, and how to build a Corsi-Rosenthal filter box.)

Something important to understand about Covid-19 is that it is not trying to kill you. It might, but that’s not its ultimate purpose. Its purpose is to make as many copies of itself as possible, as fast as possible, and transmit itself to other hosts as efficiently as possible to make more copies as fast as possible. It penetrates cells and hijacks the reproductive mechanisms to spin out copies of itself. The ugly things that happen to your body are collateral damage.

There are several relevant consequences to this.

The first is that amidst all this copying there are errors. The more copying, the more errors, or mutations. Viruses are the ultimate brainstorm-and-see-what-works kinda guys. Banging around in millions of people Covid mutates, some versions failing, some succeeding, and some excelling. A virus in widespread distribution is in constant research, development, and testing. Inevitably it gets better at what it does. That is, transmitting, infecting, and dodging or degrading our immune systems. The latest one (that we know of), XBB1.5, is good. Like Liam Neeson, it has a particular set of skills. Skills that make it a nightmare for people like you. The version of Covid you get first will probably be unlike the next version you are exposed to.

The second consequence is that some of the damage that Covid does doesn’t just apply to the particular version that infected someone, or even just to Covid. Covid has a tendency to exhaust your naïve T-cells and B cells. What the hell does that mean?

Imagine you have a castle and a bunch of dimwitted guards. They have to be told who to go after. Guard teachers (B-cells in our bodies) go to some of the guards and say, “See those guys in green hats? Go after them.” The guards go after anyone in a green hat. In our bodies the green hats are particular proteins on the surface of the viruses. It’s important to always have some uneducated guards (naïve T cells) and teachers (B cells) in reserve, so if bad guys in blue hats or yellow hats show up, some other guards are available to be trained on them.

Covid over-revs your immune system so much that it can use up most of your naïve T cells. They are all ready to pounce on the version of Covid you just got, but not the next version. For that matter, not any other novel microorganism, be it virus, bacteria, yeast, or fungus. The most up to date research shows that people who have had Covid have long term (months, maybe years) immune deficiencies. The news stories about kids hitting the ICU with supposedly routine childhood illnesses are an indicator. Studies following people post-Covid show higher rates of infectious disease compared to those who are Covid-free.

Covid also sticks around. Autopsies of people who have had Covid show that it has taken to hiding in lung tissue, lymph nodes, and even cartilage. This, of course, keeps the immune system on constant alert, wearing it out more and causing autoimmune problems. Covid survivors have higher rates of rheumatoid arthritis, vasculitis, and other autoimmune disorders.

Another mechanism may be Covid’s tendency to imprint the immune system on the particular variant. I’ll skip the biochemistry and even the clumsy analogies and just say that your immune system learns to attack the variant you already got and takes longer to learn about novel variants.

To sum, if you have had even a moderate case of Covid, your immune system is probably a twisted pile of smoking wreckage. You should be even more cautious about Covid exposure, as well as exposure to other pathogens.

This is aside from the universal symptom of vascular endotheliopathy. That is, the inflammation of the lining of every blood vessel in your body, resulting in microscopic blood clots anywhere that blood flows. That is, the blood clots that increase your chances of a heart attack or a stroke by a factor of three. Covid is transforming from a hand grenade into a time bomb.

Another correction of popular mythology: The levels in Vermont aren’t low. The CDC changed its methodology from “Community Transmission,” based on infection rates, to “Community Level” based of hospital admissions. With high vaccination rates in Vermont, hospital admissions are down. However, Covid is still here with a vengeance.

So, be that person. That is, the person wearing a mask in the grocery store, in the hardware store, in the meeting, on the bus, in the airport. Eventually we’ll get a mucosal (nasal) vaccine that will actually prevent infection. Maybe enough people will die that…wait, no, over a million Americans have died and we’re still losing thousands a week and most people are strolling around barefaced, cheerfully breathing virus on each other. For now, and until you can get a mucosal vaccine, wear a mask in public. Filter indoor air. Test before and after spending time with groups of people. Be safe, loved ones.

LINKS:

A lot of studies

Armbrust masks, made in the USA

The 3M Aura 9210+, the most comfortable mask I have found

Maps compared. Scroll down to section 3 and select your state in the drop down menu in the right hand column.

Professor Corsi himself showing you how to make a filter for cheap