Post 26 - April 6, 2020
Day 26…
A tiger has tested positive for COVID-19 at the Bronx Zoo.
There have been scattered reports of dogs testing positive in China, but this is the first confirmed non-human case in North America. Several other tigers and three lions at the zoo are also showing symptoms. They seem to have become infected via their keeper who has also tested positive, although is asymptomatic.
I think that it is important to say that there is NO evidence at all to support the idea that live animals pass this to humans. These animals were infected BY humans. All of the tigers and lions at the Bronx Zoo are expected to recover by the way.
In China it is common practice to eat dogs. And cats for that matter. It is thought that that may have been how the virus started in Wuhan. Recently, the city of Shenzhen has become the first city in China to ban eating dogs and cats.
The take-away from this? Please don’t eat your house pets.
For the first time in weeks, we decided to watch the President’s news conference yesterday. We turned on the TV and just watched the regular 24/7 coverage of the virus before it began. The anchors on MSNBC announced that the news conference was coming up and would be followed by their usual post-conference Presidential fact-checking segment.
How has that become a regular and expected part of this crisis?
There was plenty to fact check. The President, again, was relentlessly pushing the completely untested anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine as something that people should try. “Why not, it couldn’t hurt”. When Dr. Anthony Fauci attempted to answer a reporter’s question about the dangers of using this drug and Trump interrupted and wouldn’t let him answer. One person has already died from using this drug improperly. The assumed reason for this is that either Trump himself, or somebody else close to him owns stock in the company that makes the drug.
There were plenty of other facts that needed checking.
He spouted numbers and facts that he’d just made up.
It had been long enough since I’d last listened to him live that I had forgotten just how incoherent he really is. He absolutely cannot string a sentence together that makes sense from beginning to end. I’m not being partisan I am just stating a demonstrable fact.
He then turned the conference over to Dr. Deborah Birx.
Dr. Birx is not a public speaker.
Her presentation of facts and statistics are almost impossible to follow or to put in any sort of context.
Most of us are not medical professionals.
Whomever is addressing us should be tempering their vocabulary to be able to reach the majority of the population.
Her charts are not conducive to public broadcast. They are far too small and have details on them that the camera cannot pick up.
And the President stood directly in front of them.
The take-away from this? Please stop watching these conferences.
So, how do we trust the information that we are getting?
When somebody says that they have the answer, are we agreeing with them because it is something that we want to hear or is it the truth?
For most things that come up, we can easily fact check what is going on by a little digging on the internet.
What’s the source? Is it corroborated anywhere? Is there any evidence that it’s true?
The answers to many questions these days are unsatisfying.
More often than not, the answer to a difficult question is, “I don’t know.”
We have to accept the uncomfortable “I don’t know.” for now.
“I don’t know” is far better than something that is patently untrue no matter how good it may make us feel.
Governor Cuomo’s news conferences continue to be informative and easy to follow.
He is a comforting presence. Tough and direct.
He is coherent.
He has a sense of humor.
Everything he says is broadcast with easy to read bullet points that follow along on the right of the screen.
When he doesn’t know he says, “I don’t know.”
The longer this goes on, the more we learn.
Animals don’t get COVID-19 was an accepted fact.
Yesterday, we learned something that changed that.
A tiger at the zoo got sick.
We weren’t lied to before this.
It’s just that nobody knew.
Nobody was recommending wearing masks, now they are.
We can’t let the changes in the rules throw us.
Guidelines need to remain fluid as we learn more.
It’s a good thing. Truly.
We need to keep open to new information and suggestions as they crop up, but we need to be smart about which of them we follow.
Nobody knows everything however much we might want them too.
That’s OK.
We’re good.
(By the way, Cuomo is on at noon today rather than 11.)