I’m going to say something that’s likely to upset a lot of people. I don’t wear a mask. I also don’t own any hand sanitizer, don’t wipe down my shopping carts, haven’t stayed “safer at home” and since I have a beard, I touch my face all the time. In fact, I haven’t done anything recommended to help keep me alive. Yet here I am.
Here are some of my reasons why:
- Showing videos of people being wheeled out of the hospital after having miraculously “survived” the virus is manipulative and misleading. That implies that having survived the virus is a really big deal when, in fact, it isn’t.
- Most people survive. There’s actually a lot of people who catch the virus and don’t even know they have it. But, those numbers don’t make the news.
- Everyone agrees that the virus hits harder the people who are at risk. This includes the elderly, infirm, obese or people with other underlying medical conditions. I am none of those. Herd immunity can’t be achieved until a lot of people first get sick and get better. I volunteer to be one of those people.
- If you relax restrictions, of course you’re going to see higher numbers. Telling people it’s OK to get their hair cut or eat in a restaurant will undoubtedly result in more people getting the disease because more people are being exposed to the disease. No one should be surprised when more exposure results in more cases. That’s what “flattening the curve” is all about.
- Masks won’t make you invincible. They’re probably going to help but, as everyone knows, putting a bandanna over your mouth is at best going to be partially effective. But, what masks also do is make people who would normally be staying at home start to venture out putting them further at risk of infection.
- We see an increase of COVID-19 cases whenever we increase testing. So, knowing the raw number of cases isn’t particularly helpful because we don’t have any context. We’d need to know at least both the results and the total number of people tested before we have useful information to work with. When you see a rise in cases but started testing 10 times a many people, does that absolutely mean more people are getting sick or just that you’re now aware of people who were already sick? The numbers, as reported, are alarmist.
- The number of COVID-19 deaths are being exaggerated. There is a difference between dying “from” COVID-19 and dying “with” COVID-19. But, the death tolls count people “with” the virus of having died “from” the virus. In other words, if I was in an accident and died from massive blood loss, if I had the virus, it counts as a COVID-19 death. While I died “with” the virus, I didn’t die “from” the virus. If someone is dying from emphysema but they were later found to have the virus, did that person actually die of COVID-19? Of course not, they died “with” COVID-19. But the death counts being reported don’t take that into consideration.
- Every day people die. More specifically, every day a certain number of people are expected to die. So, what we’re interested in is if there has been an increase in the number of deaths in an area over a period of time. If someone was already really sick and would have died on Tuesday anyway, does it really matter what they died of?
- The people in charge obviously have no idea what they’re doing. When we’re told that it’s OK for some people to gather but not others or when politicians are shown on TV disregarding all the rules they expect us to obey, they lose all credibility. Once their decisions are influenced by political factors, how can I believe anything they say is simply for the good of their constituents?
- Testing negative for COVID-19 is a useless thing to know. That only means that someone tested negative at the instant they took the test. By the time they receive the test results, they might have already contracted it but believe they’re OK because they tested negative.
- I will not live in fear.
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