Time for some of us to get back to normal!

While I'm sure that health officials in NYC and parts of California are stacking Covid-19 victims up in the streets like cord wood, that's just not the case in much of the rest of the United States.

In Taney County, Missouri where I live, there just hasn't been much of a problem with Covid-19. That's if you even believe the 'stats' that are put out. The John Hopkins University, for instance, cites just three dead out of a population of 56K. The Taney County Board of Health, on the other hand, has the county at 16 deaths. Hmm. That's quite a disparity. The differences could be due to the way that various health centers list the cause of death. This is something that I've actually never seen brought up anywhere. Typically, most Covid-19 deaths, in the US, happen in a hospital setting with the attending physician listing the final 'problem' that caused the patient to expire. On the death certificate, there are a number of lines that document other comorbidities or diseases that contributed to the top listed item. So, while a person might have died as a complication caused by the Covid-19 virus, there are often others that lent a helping hand; diabetes, obesity, heart disease and the like. The bottom line is that Covid-19 is really just another risk factor that people already at risk must cope with. For the healthy and especially for the young, the entire mess that's been the Nation's reaction to this disease has been greatly overblown, in my opinion.

Living your everyday life is a risk assessment situation, from the time you arise, to the time you go to sleep later in any given day. The true risks each person faces is dependent on a host of temporal, geographical and career based choices. Obviously, a twenty year old working in Wyoming in an office enjoys a lot less risk, then say a 58 year old working at construction in the heart of a large city! Either way there always is some rick of dying for each of us, all day and every day... Some have more and some less.

That's been the way of the world for millennia. That is, until just recently with the advent of mass communication via the mass media. Just as soon as a politician got the idea of using a crisis for political gain, the real games were on! That's precisely what we are seeing with this viral non-event event. Had no one been told to be afraid, we likely would have gone on and paid little to no attention. That's what happened in other countries that decided it wasn't a big deal. Sweden did just fine and without a lock down! I'm betting we could have done the same just by employing social distancing and making sure to wash our hands. These are both good practices, even in a year with low disease rates.