Post 44 - April 24, 2020
Day 44…
The first thing that I would like to say this morning is that nobody, anywhere on the planet, should be injecting themselves with disinfectant.
I’m not a doctor.
I don’t pretend to have all of the facts.
Even if I did, facts change.
The thing with facts is that none of them are absolute.
We accept things as facts until evidence comes to light to prove them wrong and then they are no longer considered facts.
The earth is flat.
Evil spirits live in Brussells Sprouts.
Ice-pick lobotomies are an acceptable cure for mental illness.
All of these were accepted as fact at some point in our history.
Now we look at them and laugh at how silly we were to believe them.
We look back at them in horror at what those "facts" did to people.
Now they are not considered facts, but I bet you can find people out there who still maintain that they are true.
Based on current thinking and evidence, however, the overwhelming PROBABILITY is that those things are not true.
It has recently come to light that the first confirmed death on US soil from COVID-19 occurred on February 6 of this year rather on the widely reported February 26.
All of the models about how this virus spread in the US were based on the February 26 date. The fact that we now have evidence that the virus was freely circulating a full three weeks before that changes everything in terms of the projections.
A friend of mine returned from China where they’d been teaching some weeks before even that and got ill with all of the COVID-19 symptoms.
The February 6 date is unlikely to be definite either.
The models that we are basing our responses on need to be reconstructed.
Even so, they are just models of probability.
They aren’t cold hard facts.
A few days ago, there was a dust-up between the President and the Governor of NY when the former blamed the latter for over-reacting in regard to how many ventilators the state would need to weather this crisis. The Governor shot back that his reactions were all based on the projections that the White House itself, through the CDC, had sent out. He was merely preparing for what he thought they would need based on what the White House thought would happen.
Nobody knew. Not the CDC, not the Governor, not the President.
They were all guessing.
They were all doing their best to project based on what few facts they thought they knew.
Testing, testing, testing.
That is what everyone is fighting for.
The idea is that the more information we have on where the virus is and where it has been, the better we will be able to PREDICT what will happen when we open up.
In New York state alone there are a dozen or so different machines that can perform the COVID-19 test.
Each of those machines require different reagents and materials to function.
Each of those machines take a different amount of time to reach a result.
Each of those machines and tests have a slightly different margin of error.
Testing is not absolute.
There are both false positives and false negatives - sometimes the error is as much as 15% or more.
There is not enough information yet to even know whether once a person has developed anti-bodies in their blood from the virus, whether it will then give that person immunity from contracting the virus again.
We do not know yet.
The best that we, or anybody in a leadership position can do is to gather as much information as is possible and make an educated guess on how to proceed.
That doesn’t mean accepting every idea that comes down the pike as a reason to alter our behavior.
Hydroxychloroquine SEEMED like it might have some beneficial effect because it was used in a few places and it SEEMED like it worked.
Well, in the last weeks, there have been many trials of it and, now, the mounting evidence of those trials suggest that Hydroxychloroquine actually SEEMS to do nothing to affect the virus.
It also suggests that, in fact, it SEEMS to have negative, potentially fatal effects, in terms of how it affects the heart.
Facts?
No.
Probability based on extensive testing.
Probability that gets closer to accepted truth with the more information that comes in.
That’s what we’ve got.
We all want absolutes.
This is what we should do, and it will definitely have this result.
This is right and this is wrong.
There is no such thing as an absolute.
There are no absolutes with this virus.
There is simply not enough known about it yet to be able to make absolute choices about what the course of action should be to move us forward to getting us back to the lives we lead two months ago.
We have to accept that we just don’t know anything with a high probability of confidence yet.
It’s OK.
All of the evidence that we have so far -
taking in the lessons learned from the 1918 pandemic and other similar viruses from the past, taking in the lessons learned from other countries ahead of us in their curves,
taking in what the trends seem to be from repeated clinical trials
- all of that evidence points towards the probability that reopening our businesses right now is unlikely to end well.
The odds are hugely stacked against a successful outcome.
There is a tiny possibility, though, that it will be fine.
That tiny possibility is why people play Lotto.
It is why people play the slots.
Those million-to-one gambling odds should not be what we our basing our lives and the lives of others on.
Should we be staying home?
The mounting evidence suggests that yes, it is having an effect on the growth of new cases.
Should we wear masks?
There is now some evidence that droplets containing the virus can remain airborne for as long as three or four HOURS.
Wearing a mask COULD stop you unwittingly spreading the virus that you may not even know you have.
Will it?
I don’t know. Nobody does for sure.
It seems like it might have a demonstrable positive effect so, OK, I can wear a mask for the good of those around me.
Should businesses reopen now?
Given all of the evidence - anecdotal and indicated by testing - probably not.
Not yet.
But we will see.
Nothing in life is a definite.
We live with uncertainty every day of our lives in every aspect of our lives.
Living through this crisis is no different.
It’s OK that we don’t know.
We are figuring it out.
It will take time but eventually we will be on the other side of it.
Eventually we will have enough knowledge that the probability that we are wrong will be the tiny sliver of a percentage that is currently the probability that we are right.
Before that happens, we owe it to each other to do the best we can, given what we think we know. What we think we know from distilling what the people who have devoted their lives to the study of infectious diseases are putting out there.
We owe it to each other to listen to these people and NOT to the politicians.
The experts think that it will be beneficial to stay away from each other.
The experts think that it may be beneficial to wear a mask.
One thing that all of the experts seem to agree on is that we should NOT inject ourselves with disinfectant.
Until something proves this wrong, injecting ourselves with disinfectant seems to be an insanely dangerous and misguided option.
Please don’t listen to the President and do that.
Don’t listen to the President (or me for that matter) on ANY medical matter.
Listen to your doctor.
Listen to your doctor but screen it through what they may be saying because of politics.
Trust your heart and your brain too.
Doctors may not have an answer either, but somebody who has devoted their life to the study of something PROBABLY has a more valuable idea of what to do than somebody who is just terrified of the unknown and wants a black and white answer right away.
There is no black and white answer.
There will be no answer right away.
There is no absolute.
That’s OK.
There never has been.
We’ve been living quite happily with the unknown all along.