The Covid Chronicles: Part II

On the threshold of another round?

Our world is forever changed, separated into pre-Covid and post-Covid for better or for worse, and all at the hands of humans themselves.

When Covid broke out, we were made to think that some horrific man-killing virus had emerged from the deep dark forest where wolves chase Little Red Riding Hood, that it had spread from an infected Pangolin in one of those dirty Chinese markets that sell all kinds of strange things we have never heard of in the West, to humans and was going to kill us all!

It was actually the perfect fairy tale to trigger all of our ingrained subconscious fears: the deep dark forest, filled with unknown creatures, some invisible, that are coming to kill you! A Jungian analyst would have a heyday with this one.

As a veterinary medical doctor, steeped in biology and the sciences, from genetics to ecology, immunology to virology, I had a different perspective from the very beginning.

First of all, I worked for 3 years in the clinical pathology laboratory of the veterinary school to support myself through vet school, and to learn a lot about diagnostic testing: how to do it, how to analyze test results, its shortcomings, and its benefits. I had the benefit of spending days with incredibly knowledgeable scientists, from microbiologists, and hematologists, to pathologists.

The pathologists always amazed me, they were walking encyclopedias. We would talk about how we were 100 years overdue for the next epidemic/pandemic. The Ebola virus outbreak had just happened in New Jersey and it was a huge topic of discussion in the lab. How would we protect ourselves? How would we bolster our immune systems to be less susceptible, not to infection but to developing disease?

It was from these discussions that I learned to watch the death rates. Those would tell us how bad this thing really was. Morbidity is one thing. Mortality another.

Second, I had come down with a virus earlier that year, laid up in bed on New Year’s Eve as the year rolled over into 2020. I had a high fever and was hallucinating I was in the trenches of a WWI battlefield and could not breathe due to the mustard gas with explosions going on all around me. The explosions happened to be fireworks going off in the neighborhood but the high fever and difficulty breathing were from the virus that had not yet been named.

Covid hit South Florida early, around the holiday season at the end of 2019. People were heading to the hospital with pneumonia and severe breathing issues. My housemate was working at a large retailer with 3000 shoppers filing through every day. Everyone he worked with got sick, two ended up in the hospital. I became symptomatic two days after he did.

It took me a long time to recover. Two weeks post-fever I found myself out of breath climbing a short staircase. I was lethargic and wiped out for weeks. I went in to see my acupuncturist to help me regain my strength. As I was checking out, she received an email from her mother in China. It was February and she always traveled home for Chinese New Year. A concerned look spread across her face and I asked her if everything was alright. She replied that her mother was telling her to not come home. Something very bad was happening there but she did not know what it was because lines of the email had been blacked out by the Chinese government.

About four weeks later they announced the virus here in the States, the lockdown soon to follow.

My housemate and I began searching the internet for information. I looked up Traditional Chinese Medicine doctors to find out how they were diagnosing COVID using tongue and pulse, the pattern of the disease along with herbal treatments that seemed to be helping. I was on websites looking through pictures of human tongues, on ZOOM calls with well-known TCM experts discussing herbal formulas and even looking up what veterinary immunologists and virologists were saying. Coronaviruses appear in dogs and cats as well as humans.

My housemate found an interesting interview on March 17, 2020 of Francis Boyle, a professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law. He drafted the U.S. domestic implementing legislation for the Biological Weapons Convention, known as the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, that was approved unanimously by both Houses of the U.S. Congress and signed into law by President George H.W. Bush.

Here is the link:

In the video he shows scientific papers published by different laboratories within the U.S., including one in Stanford and the lab in North Carolina, that were working on turning the coronavirus into a biowarfare weapon. He also mentions the Obama administration placing a moratorium on the research and the research being moved off of U.S. soil to the Wuhan laboratory.

Thanks to my Advanced placement biology teacher in high school and the Internet, I looked and promptly downloaded the papers, afraid they were going to be deleted.

And then the games began:

Let’s sing Happy Birthday as we wash our hands - not a bad idea and probably one of the smarter things to do.

Let’s social distance - makes sense.

Let’s wear masks - wait a minute, how big is the virus? and how big are the holes in the mask? Masks filter out respiratory droplets and bacteria but are not great at filtering 0.1 micron viruses, especially when they thin, with gaps along the side and worn underneath the nares.

Two weeks of lockdown turned into 2 months, and into 4 months…