New Year, Same Old, 24. This Isn't a Thriller.

There's no running away from news of the virus. We are nearing the peak (I hope) of the third wave, and there is much lamenting. Hospitals are overwhelmed. Doctors are calling for another confinement. Some are beating their chests over lax Christmas rules. In the meantime, people are getting sick, and too many are dying. One that stood out this past week, was a 46 year old man that died rather quickly after begin admitted to the hospital, despite having no pathology of any kind. Our township, despite having had its borders closed for a month, is lucky. Today, we have 41 positives, the most have been 55. We've been down to 35, but have come back up again; still, out of a population of just a thread over 11,000, that's a manageable number at this point.

The news is out, too, that this year, because of masks and keeping apart, there have been almost no flu cases. Even some contagious illnesses that parents don't like to vaccinate their children for, such as whooping cough, chicken pox, and others, haven't shown up at all. Mention is being made that perhaps masks are here to stay, if only to keep contagion of other illnesses down after the pandemic is under control. (Not if I can help it. As soon as I can, I'm burning mine!) 

As with anything else that is big enough to affect a large number of people, there are those who say this is not a pandemic. That there are people out there who don't want to listen to reason is one thing, that there are doctors out there peddling this junk is another. Yet, there are. They formed a group called Medicos por la Verdad, which has branches all over Europe (World Doctors Alliance, though that may be a different one) and the Americas. (The direct English translation is Doctors for Truth. There exists an association in the United States called American Doctors for Truth, but it is a right-wing group related to reforms in insurance coverage, and comes out against the Affordable Care Act.) 

This group (not an association with all the named officers and paperwork that would involve) is negationist. It is made up of about a hundred doctors or a little bit more, and each and every one denies there is a pandemic. They claim Covid is a mere flu-like illness, and go even further, and decry the vaccines, which is to be expected because they are also anti-vaxxers. They say there were no extra deaths last year, because Covid doesn't kill any more people than the flu. They claim PCR tests find, not only the DNA of Covid, but also of any other virus that may be infecting the patient, creating false positives. As for the masks, according to them, they should only be worn by doctors and patients, never by healthy people because they could produce hypoxia (In this case, shouldn't they be even more dangerous for ill people? Are doctors immune to hypoxia if they wear them for hours during long surgeries?).

Of course, they have done concentrations against the measures taken by the government to try to control the pandemic, and have the support, covert if not overt, of the far-right party, Vox. They claim governments around the world are using the excuse of a novel virus to try out ways of controlling the masses, to turn us all into sheep led to slaughter. The group takes reports set out by legitimate commissions, and turn the words in them around to suit their lies. More than anything, they are conspiracy enthusiasts, who take George Soros, the Chinese government, Bill Gates, and their hatred for anything left-leaning, and create elaborate hoaxes that, unfortunately, too many fall for. 

People fall for this mostly because they distrust the government. Why? For many reasons. Too many times politicians have made promises that never came through. Too many times people have seen their trust shaken by someone in power over them, be that a supervisor or a mayor, or a person they looked up to. People are told they shouldn't believe in what they can't see or touch, or experiment for themselves. Doubting Thomases have always been with us, and sometimes, experiences have made them even more doubtful than they originally were. It's good to take news items with a grain of salt; it's not good to assume they are all false. 

Not everyone lies. The conspiracy theory that "they" are out to turn us into sheep through a false pandemic, or microchips in vaccines, is too extremely far-fetched. It is so much easier to create sheep through ordinary means without going as far as that. Create a society in which people "need" things that are not necessary, and you're halfway there. For once, by limiting our freedoms, our elected officials are trying to keep as many as possible of us alive and capable of working once this is past. Right now is not the moment to cry that our freedoms are being taken away. The moment is once herd immunity has been reached, a vaccination schedule set out, and life slowly returns to normal. At that point is the moment when we should make sure that we regain the freedoms that have had to be taken away to keep the majority of us safe. 

Life continues.