Jan 11
The Death Derby — COVID And the Meaning of Freedom
If you don’t understand the meaning of freedom during COVID, you will have killed nine people by the end of this year. That number may include yourself.
If you get infected or infect someone else TODAY you will infect more than 100 other people in the next 3 weeks.
From those 100 infections, one person will be hospitalized. For every six people hospitalized, one will die.[1]
This means that when you avoid giving someone an infection, you save three lives every year.
Let’s say COVID lasts another year, adding up to a total of three years for the pandemic. You have nine lives on your hands over three years.
Imagine you see this in a dream: you are walking down a line of nine corpses, standing in a row. They are pale, blue. Flecks of foam from damaged lungs hangs around their mouths. They are still. Cold pours from them. Only their eyes move, as you walk down the line. Their eyes follow you. Some are accusing. Others are bewildered: “How could you have put me here, when you could have saved me so easily?”
If you answer: ‘My freedom from getting a vaccination or wearing a mask means more to me than your life’, I doubt they would be impressed. Perhaps they would answer: “freedom for you means eternal nothingness for me! Do I not deserve freedom as well? Freedom from the grave is a bit more important than freedom from getting a vaccination. Especially nine freedoms!!”
Almost every entry that I have seen from anti-vaxxers who are dying of COVID, bewails the pain of their illness. They claim that they had no idea the disease would be this bad. While I sympathize, I also wonder whether this is some kind of giant Darwin Award, where nature is trimming humanity’s tree of the lowest-educated members.
I say this without malice. The dying people are not stupid. They are largely poorly educated and poorly informed. They cannot make good decisions. They follow cartoonish memes and set their emotions to “rage”. Their common justification for not getting appropriate protection is that they are protecting their “freedoms”.
They are likely to be Republicans, because Republicans are least-educated. Republicans are science-deniers.
If COVID goes on long enough, you can see a day when the Republican opposition will die away. Literally. No more voters.
In the meantime, none of them seem to worry that their freedoms are entwined with the freedoms of everyone else! Especially those nine corpses that they have walked on.
And it goes beyond the corpses. Let’s say when you get COVID, and you recover… your ordeal is not over! Every sixteen months, your resistance to COVID (without a vaccine) dies out. Every sixteen months, you enter the roulette game again. Fresh meat. And that COVID trigger keeps clicking every time you leave the house; every day until you get COVID and either die or end up crippled.
Because with COVID, the word ‘recovery’ is a misnomer. Three-quarters of patients with COVID have illnesses that last months and years; it’s a gift that keeps on giving. Known as ‘long-haulers,’ those with post-acute COVID-19 suffer from lingering, and in some cases, life-altering symptoms, ranging from extreme fatigue, silent strokes, shortness of breath and heart palpitations to brain fog and depression.
So while you are waiting to die, you are likely to be very ill.
How free is that?
Working together makes us all freer. It even keeps Republicans alive. So it’s a mixed blessing, perhaps, but those are the ways of science.
[1] At a death rate of 17% https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7920817/
