The reckless reaction of the media junkies who get their dopamine fix from the myopic COVID-19 coverage which resulted in locking everything down is a more lethal pandemic than the virus itself.
Anyone who does not agree with the total shutdown is labeled with a straw man argument by the complete shutdown fanatics as being “selfish” or they “don’t understand the seriousness” of the pandemic.
This novel coronavirus is no joke, and can be fatal for some.
Because of the seriousness of the virus, an emotional response of trying to run and hide under your bed in a panic until the monster is gone, and forcing everyone else to follow suit is contemptuous.
On the other extreme, the folks who don’t take the virus seriously and not being cautious are the most foolish of all, and can be a danger to the vulnerable.
The reality is, there are risks everywhere in life, and you cannot just run and hide from risk.
Many people who are telling everyone to stay indoors and hide from the virus are behaving on the premise that it’s not worth adapting and becoming resilient to the viral threat.
Perhaps they are the same type who, with good intentions, “helicopter” over their offspring to shelter them from risks in life, resulting in the “snowflake” culture that runs and hides from any adversity, and cannot handle presumably offensive articles like this one, or that one.
They seem to forget that epigenetic adaptations are the reason why H. sapiens has survived for hundreds of thousands of years.
Genetic adaptations to environmental insults such as viral and bacterial threats are how all previous generations of human life have evolved resulting in your existence.
Are you going to let all those years of adaptation go to waste now by shutting the world down?
Carbon based life not only adapts to some threats, but over time, has formed symbiotic beneficial inter-dependencies with them (“old friends theory”), such as gut bacteria, fungi, worms, viruses, and even the fascinating mitochondria.
Do you really want to throw away the protocol of adaptation and resilience that millions of years of evolution has resulted in by hiding away in your home and having your rulers lock everything down across the planet?
“But Jeremy, first we need to flatten the curve and slow down the momentum, and maybe later on we can do the immunity adaptation thing.”
That sounds like a good idea initially, but shutting down and hiding away will have a consequence of bringing on a bigger second wave and a third wave.
Are you planning on hiding away again during those future attacks too?
Also, the volume of a flatter longer curve with waves over time will be much more than the volume of a tall curve.
Are we trying to save lives for just a few weeks, or are we, as Walter E. Williams would say, -thinking beyond stage one, to where we think about lives saved beyond just this month?
Future seasonal waves of the virus without population adaptations will result in more harmful viral mutations.
If we were to run and hide from the flu viruses every flu season, the population wouldn’t be as resilient to it, and the flu would become much more fatal over each flu season, and then maybe someday the world would go on lock-down every flu season until potential extinction.
If you have a compromised immune system to which any insult would be too much to recover and adapt from, then hiding away is the rational thing to do, but if you’re systems have the potential for more optimal functioning, it may be more rational to practice adaptation and resilience while still being cautious of the dose of insult you expose yourself too, and keeping away from the vulnerable.
Of course each protocol is context specific too.
An individual in NY city will have a different protocol than an individual in rural Montana.
Epigenetic adaptations typically do best with the Goldilocks principle of staying away from extremes.
For example, if you want the adaptation of increasing melanin pigmentation to make your skin tanned, you must frequently expose your skin to moderate insults of light rays in which your DNA expresses modifications to accommodate the light.
If you have too much exposure to sunlight, the body doesn’t adapt as well, because it has to focus energy on recovery from burning rather than adaptation.
The same Goldilocks principle can be used for physical fitness, medicine, and acquired immune responses to bacteria and viruses.
The media blitz of telling everyone to obsessively wash hands and become sterile is also reckless, and could make things worse for the population.
Those who know me well, are familiar with the fact that (pre and peri-pandemic) I always have hand sanitizer with me, I don’t touch my face, and I’m always conscious of potential pathogen exposure, but being aware is different than being blindly obsessive.
It’s important for the Goldilocks approach to be used with sterilizing the body too.
For example, the Dendritic cells on the skin destroy pathogens you come in contact with, and then, like intelligence officers, they relay information about the enemy to the lymphatic system and spleen to make the body more resilient to that enemy in the future.
If people sterilize themselves the way the media is telling them too, they are washing away the helpful Dentritic cells, it is probably making them more vulnerable than protected.
Keeping people isolated from each other over time will weaken the acquired (adaptive) immune system.
This system needs to have bacterial and viral insults so it can learn from them and file away information about them so that antibodies can defend similar or mutated threats in the future.
You can’t run and hide from the novel coronavirus or the 2.0 version for the rest of your life.
It’s also shameful to see people trying to shut down parks, trails, fishing, hiking, biking, etc.
Do they not realize the people who are out exercising or being active are probably doing the best thing to optimize acquired immunity to viral threats?
Of course, being able to stay active, eating nutrient dense whole foods or fasting, sauna, and quality sleep all within your home is admirable too.
Just remember not to become too sterile.
Those who are not part of the vulnerable, and are hiding inside, being sedentary (BTW I used to be that guy), eating highly processed food, avoiding sunlight, and evading anything resembling a pathogen, are likely contributing to the pandemic, because a population with that behavior is surely to be wiped out with evolution over time.
You can’t escape the inevitable environmental insults from mother nature.
It’s almost as if they actually think the virus will just go away if everyone hides inside long enough, or that the virus will spontaneously appear if people outside come in close proximity to each other, or that the virus won’t spread as long as the grocery isle is one directional, or that the virus is around when you drive your car for anything non-essential, but when you get pulled over, the virus temporarily goes away while you are in close proximity to the officer, or they think the virus is statically floating in the middle of a lake, trail, golf course, or baseball field waiting for its next victim in which if a viral dose of any size infects that golfer, they will surely infect all other golfers and attendants and die.
I understand and respect the caution needed during these times, especially for the more advanced age to be isolated.
The assertion that there is a perfect solution to the COVID-19 problem if you only had the right humans as your rulers is false.
There is no perfect solution to make the threats of mother nature disappear, so the wise thing to do is to take a more cost/benefit style protocol within the context of your environment to find the best way past this threat rather than shut the whole world down in fearful panic and hope things miraculously work out somehow without even worse effects later on.
Moreover, the lock-down is a disgusting violation of the non-aggression principle, and anyone who is in favor of the lock-down may not be aware that it promotes violence imposed with limitless guns.
But that’s just scary talk that you need not worry about if you have to mow the lawn, burp the baby, and go to IKEA, etc.
This should also be a lesson to those who incorrectly think governments can fix everything and magically make risks vanish if the voters just got the right anointed human from either political party to rule over them.
