What if the COVID-19 Shoe Dropped and No One Noticed?

Many have been waiting for the other shoe to drop from Operation Maskless Freedom (thanks, Trump; thanks, Murdoch; thanks, Putin). We assumed those people would get sick and die (the full humans among us considering the prospect tragic).

That was an unthoughtful and ignorant expectation. I have to admit that I was sucked into the anti-science of the Left (both sides have anti-science tendencies). Taking off your mask is not a death sentence for you or those around you. It increases your odds of maybe getting/giving an infection that might present symptoms which might become serious. That's a lot of maybes, each a rather steep plateau. The real danger is for society at large; i.e. worsening the odds for everyone by a few critical percentage points, tying up emergency rooms, etc. This is not anthrax; it's not a Michael Crichton novel where a slip-up - a small tear in your hazmat suit - means you're a goner. That's not the proposition here.

A dozen Maskless Freedom types I know have mysterious "colds that won't go away." And I find that everyone knows a few such people. They surely don't have Covid (they just know it), they're just fatigued and coughing. They'll never test themselves because Fox told them it's a hoax, and, anyway, they dislike bad news (that transcends politics; I know many people who never test for anything ever).

Some will get worse. Most won't. The possibility of lifelong neuro or cardiovascular damage - or of fresh issues emerging in victims years later, ala polio - is, of course, the terrifying x-factor (and the reason herd immunity whackos are whackos). But this is the comeuppance: loads of people with mysterious perma-colds, a handful of whom get so bad they need to go to doctors, where they're tested and diagnosed. Those are the ones counted; the tip of the underestimated iceberg represented by current upsurge stats.

The shoe dropped without any of us realizing. It was never going to be vast swathes of MAGAs perishing, because, again, the real peril with this virus is at scale. And you won't hear about this on the news, because there's no hard data on people "having trouble getting rid of a cold". We don't go to doctors for that.

I should have predicted this outcome - we all should have - but let's learn from our mistakes and try to think more clearly.


Jim Leff's Slog: Perennially trying (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) to think more clearly.