zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — establishing the proper connections between words and realities — things, places, persons, emotions, actions — has long been a preoccupation for poets, philosophers and the curious more generally ]
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From a New Yorker piece, titled Seattle’s Leaders Let Scientists Take the Lead. New York’s Did Not
By Charles Duhigg
The initial coronavirus outbreaks on the East and West Coasts emerged at roughly the same time. But the danger was communicated very differently. —

— here’s the relevant context:

The first diagnosis of the coronavirus in the United States occurred in mid-January, in a Seattle suburb not far from the hospital where Dr. Francis Riedo, an infectious-disease specialist, works. When he heard the patient’s details—a thirty-five-year-old man had walked into an urgent-care clinic with a cough and a slight fever, and told doctors that he’d just returned from Wuhan, China—Riedo said to himself, “It’s begun.”

For more than a week, Riedo had been e-mailing with a group of colleagues who included Seattle’s top doctor for public health and Washington State’s senior health officer, as well as hundreds of epidemiologists from around the country; many of them, like Riedo, had trained at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in Atlanta, in a program known as the Epidemic Intelligence Service. Alumni of the E.I.S. are considered America’s shock troops in combatting disease outbreaks. The program has more than three thousand graduates, and many now work in state and local governments across the country. “It’s kind of like a secret society, but for saving people,” Riedo told me.

And here’s the key —

Upon learning of the first domestic diagnosis, he told his staff—from emergency-room nurses to receptionists—that, from then on, everything they said was just as important as what they did. One of the E.I.S.’s core principles is that a pandemic is a communications emergency as much as a medical crisis.

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D’oh — coronavirus is a communicable disease..

On second thoughts.. that’s the point, isn’t it? We call diseases “communicable” because they spread in a manner that’s analogous with the spread of ideas — or fears, for that matter — through human communications networks.

[ by Charles Cameron — first, a taste of bach — then a superb paragraph from a friend on the east coast, describing the variant accounts of the coronavirus given by sources inside and outside the mainstream, and more ]
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Ah, for sheer pleasure while you read the rest:

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Our various explanations of the coronavirus:
From that friend on the east coast:

Concerning the coronavirus, the opinions of the experts I’ve read run the gamut: The coronavirus is exactly as the CDC and WHO have been telling us, is a genetically engineered bioweapon, is related to the 5G rollout, is the last precursor for a totalitarian world government, and is more deadly than we’ve been told or is less deadly than we’ve been told. It originated from horseshoe bats in Yunnan province, originated in a Wuhan biolab, originated in a wet market, or originated at Fort Detrick. Covid-19 is not one disease but a number of them incorrectly lumped together because they have similar symptoms which explains why there are such mixed success rates with various treatments. Viruses, including the coronavirus, are exosomes, which are secreted by exocytosis in most living cells, where their role is to render harmless toxic substances in the body. These exosomes/viruses are the result and not the cause of illness. Therefore, there is no proof that Covid-19 per se is contagious. Alternatively, it is highly contagious. And all of this doesn’t even touch upon the variety of expert opinions concerning how nation states should best handle this situation.

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And a head-grabbing headline:

I’ve run into many of these in my own explorations, and navigated them as best I can. One particular headline caught my attention by bringing the coronavirus, which presently preoccupies me, and terrorism, which I was similarly preoccupied with some time back:

That’s a pretty stunning headline about now — adding extreme human malice into the coronavirus mix. Let’s see where else hatred leads Tim Wilson — here are some of the other targets he’d discussed with an FBI informant / friend:

he was considering sites ranging from a nuclear plant and Islamic centers in Missouri to the Walmart headquarters or a synagogue in Arkansas

Oh — and:

at one point last year Wilson talked to an undercover FBI agent in graphic terms of an idea for shooting up a predominantly black elementary school

Islamic centers and a synagogue, a nuclear plant or Walmart HQ, or a prewdominantly black, get this, elementary school — quite a range of choices to point his hatred at — and then he choses a hospital.

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Variations everywhere!

[ by Charles Cameron — religion can tear us apart by bringing us together – it can also bring us into balance – the three movements here are Diné (Navajo) – Dreher – Diné ]
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Diné:

It was at a smaller meeting at a church commonly associated with tent revivals that COVID-19 seems to have struck the Navajo nation:

Navajo Times, Virus strikes at rally: Chilchinbeto church gathering may be source of outbreak

The nation — the Diné — is highly susceptible to the coronavirus, susceptible by virtue of widespread diabetes, obesity, and other underlying conditions. In the words of the New York Times:

As of Wednesday night, the virus had killed 20 people on the reservation, compared with 16 in the entire state of New Mexico, which has a population 13 times larger.

It is not the fault of the religion —

The participants in the large gathering that congregated March 7 at the Chilchinbeto Church of the Nazarene Zone Rally — a meeting in which pastors deliver messages to their members — may have all been exposed to coronavirus by at least one person who later tested positive for the disease.

— but perhaps of a failure of government to inform the Diné with sufficient clarity in enough time, or of this particular congregation to refrain from congregating when that puts the congregants, and the Diné as a whole, at risk of death.

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Catholic:

Rod Dreher is a pretty interesting writer`, a conservative Catholic who draws a lot of his ideas from St Benedict, the founder of Western monasticism> A paragraph of his caught my attention recently:

I’ll end by repeating what I think is a useful simile: going to church during the pandemic is like participating in an Appalachian snake-handler worship service, because it puts the participant in mortal danger. The virus is the poisonous snake, which may or may not bite you. But the virus differs, in that a person who is exposed to it at church could carry it out into the world, and share it unwittingly with every person he meets thereafter. It’s like leaving snake-handler church with pockets full of copperheads, which slide out in the grocery store, and everywhere else the worshiper goes.

Very insightful, IMO.

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Still relevant, IMO, are the prayers of the Navajo Night Chant:

In beauty may I walk.
All day long may I walk.
Through the returning seasons may I walk.
On the trail marked with pollen may I walk.
With grasshoppers about my feet may I walk.
With dew about my feet may I walk.
With beauty may I walk.
With beauty before me, may I walk.
With beauty behind me, may I walk.
With beauty above me, may I walk.
With beauty below me, may I walk.
With beauty all around me, may I walk.
In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, lively, may I walk.
In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, living again, may I walk.
It is finished in beauty.
It is finished in beauty.

How could the Navajo ideal of balance, Sa’a Naghai Bik’e hózhó — untranslatable, at least by myself — balance, beauty, blessing, or more literally In old age walking the trail of beauty — how can this most basic of Navajo concepts ever be less than relevant? In the words of Mountain Way:

Thereby blessing extends from mountain ranges roundabout, thereby I shall live in blessing.

[ by Charles Cameron — a miscellany of must read articles in must read times — with just a taste of each of them ]
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Be at peace, take up your courage, fight the good fight, be at peace: happy Easter

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George Monbiot, Covid-19 is nature’s wake-up call to complacent civilisation

I hope we never have to witness fights over food. But it’s becoming difficult to see how we will avoid them.

A large body of evidence is beginning to accumulate showing how climate breakdown is likely to affect our food supply. Already farming in some parts of the world is being hammered by drought, floods, fire and locusts (whose resurgence in the past few weeks appears to be the result of anomalous tropical cyclones).

Locusts?

While we’re worrying over COVID-19, Africa has its own natural calamity, threatening countless lives with death by starvation:

Newsweek, Locust Swarms as Big as Cities are causing a Crisis in Africa as experts warn they could get 400 times bigger

And in case that title is hard for you to read in red, here it is in black and white, in bold and in italics:

Locust Swarms as Big as Cities are causing a Crisis in Africa as experts warn they could get 400 times bigger

“The herders will have a real challenge of pasture, and this may also cause movement from one place to another in search of pasture, with inherent risk of communal conflict over pasture or grazing land or passing territories,” the UN Ambassador for Kenya, Lazarus O. Amayo, said in a statement.

Others will have no choice but to stay put.

“At least for livestock keepers in northern Kenya, south and eastern Ethiopia and north and central Somalia, they have an option of moving with their livestock to areas not affected by the locust swarms, but for smallholder agricultural farmers, they are left with no option but to consider their hard labor and food source gone,” said Emoru.

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Locusts? Coronavirus? When what’s barreling down the tunnel of future high likelihoods is nothing less than an uninhabitable climate, uninhabitable planet?

David Wallace, The Coronavirus Is a Preview of Our Climate-Change Future

if the disease and our utter inability to respond to it terrifies you about our future staring down climate change, it should, not just as a “fire drill” for climate change generally but as a test run for all the diseases that will be unleashed in the decades ahead by warming. The virus is a terrifying harbinger of future pandemics that will be brought about if climate change continues to so deeply destabilize the natural world: scrambling ecosystems, collapsing habitats, rewiring wildlife, and rewriting the rules that have governed all life on this planet for all of human history

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For the warfighter, all this means war:

Kahl & Berengaut, Aftershocks: The Coronavirus Pandemic and the New World Disorder

if we want to understand the even darker direction in which the world may be headed, leaders and policymakers ought to pay more attention to the two decades after the influenza pandemic swept the globe. This period, often referred to as the interwar years, was characterized by rising nationalism and xenophobia, the grinding halt of globalization in favor of beggar-thy-neighbor policies, and the collapse of the world economy in the Great Depression. Revolution, civil war, and political instability rocked important nations. The world’s reigning liberal hegemon — Great Britain — struggled and other democracies buckled while rising authoritarian states sought to aggressively reshape the international order in accordance with their interests and values. Arms races, imperial competition, and territorial aggression ensued, culminating in World War II — the greatest calamity in modern times.

And that war was a nuclear war, Hiroshima, Nagasaki remember all too well.. a coupld of small holocausts — burnt offerings, fire sacrifices — at 10,830 °F if you were close to ground zero..

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For the United States, “Democracy may be dying”:

Paul Krugman, American Democracy May Be Dying

the scariest news of the past week didn’t involve either epidemiology or economics; it was the travesty of an election in Wisconsin, where the Supreme Court required that in-person voting proceed despite the health risks and the fact that many who requested absentee ballots never got them. ..

Authoritarian rule may be just around the corner.

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And right now, in our hospital ERs and ICUs, the medical profession lices — an dies — as it saves lives..

Nicholas Kristof, Life and Death in the ‘Hot Zone’

Ms. Gifford recalled a patient who had come from an assisted-living center. “I’m really scared,” he told her. “I don’t want to have Covid. I’m in a facility and there are people dying there.”

I’ve chosen that snippet because it cuts so close to home (my own nursing facility) for me..

But more generally:

For health workers, intubation is nerve-racking because it causes the virus to spray out from the lungs into the air. In this case, the procedure was performed in a room on the edge of the hot zone with negative air pressure, so that the virus would remain in the room. A plastic box was placed over the patient’s head, and the nurse-anesthetist put her arms through holes in the box to perform the intubation.

And the doctors and nurses perform this nightmare procedure perhaps eight or more times in a day.. What an unimaginable, multiple proof of the strength of the Hippocratic Oath!! If you yearn for miracles, look no farther.

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Be at peace, have courage, fight the good fight, be in peace, : have compassion..ight the good fight, be at peace: have compassion..

[ by Charles Cameron — Arundhati Roy nails the relation of science and religion in a brilliant double insight — plus misc other COVID – religion articles ]
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Arundhati Roy:

Which scientist or doctor is not secretly praying for a miracle? Which priest is not — secretly, at least — submitting to science?

with this telling pair of questions incorporating a witty reversal — arguably a form of logical chiasmus — the Indian novelist and radical Arundhati Roy shows us what it is to perceive, and what it is to write.

BTW, Ms Roy continues:

And even while the virus proliferates, who could not be thrilled by the swell of birdsong in cities, peacocks dancing at traffic crossings and the silence in the skies?

Note that “peacocks dancing at traffic crossings” clearly belongs along with the goats and coyotes in the streets in my Animal Farms DoubleQuote of a few days back.

Source:

Financial Times, The pandemic is a portal

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Some religion & coronavirus articles:

Counterpunch, God’s Vengeance: the Christian Right and the Coronavirus

Steven Andrew is pastor of the USA Christian Church in San Jose (CA) who warns, “Obeying God protects the USA from diseases, such as the coronavirus.” He goes on, Bible thumping, “Our safety is at stake since national disobedience of God’s laws brings danger and diseases, such as coronavirus, but obeying God brings covenant protection. … God protects the USA from danger as the country repents of LGBT, false gods, abortion and other sins.”

Andrew is not alone in decrying the coronavirus as god’s curse.

AL Masdar, ISIS calls coronavirus ‘soldier of Allah’, threaten attacks in Chicago, London

WaPo, Can faith healing work by phone? Charismatic Christians try prayer to combat the coronavirus.

Roy and Darlene Curry say that they — like all believing Christians — have the power to miraculously heal the sick. Roy once raised a friend from the dead right at the coffin, he says. A few years ago at their house church in Severn, Md., the couple laid hands on the cancer-riddled body of a young woman who was soon disease-free.

Guardian, The rightwing Christian preachers in deep denial over Covid-19’s danger

A number of American religious leaders have endangered their flock by holding services – and by claiming the virus can be defeated by faith in God

CNN, Ammon Bundy vows to defy stay-at-home order

“Our goal is to get enough people together and secure our rights… we are not trying to provoke, we want people to be able to worship,” Bundy said in a phone interview.s for Easter gathering

Addendum:

NYT, Coronavirus Invades Saudi Inner Sanctum

Its rulers began restricting travel to Saudi Arabia and shut down pilgrimages to the Muslim holy sites of Mecca and Medina even before the kingdom had reported its first case, on March 2.