Virus not as lethal as fear is making it appear?

Why would people like Lee Mein, Michelle Vanderkooi, and more, take the time to stand their ground and exercise our freedoms? Defiance of fear.

Coronavirus case numbers rise, but still there’s little said about viral severity. Ventilators, tacitly, were mostly not used. But last spring’s fear is kept current, even as the virus itself wanes in potency.

At Wayne State University, Mich., researchers discovered that by August, up to 90 per cent of positives carry “barely any virus” and don’t require quarantine.

A University of Maryland School of Medicine paper Aug. 31 announces, “SARS-COV-2 is undergoing profound genomic changes that make it less virulent and infectious”: “Our analysis shows the emergence of a deletion in nsp1, one of the most important determinants of pathogenicity of SARS-COV-2.” Prolonged summer exposure weakened it. The researchers call for broader specimen collection to map the emergence of its strains.

The pandemic’s less lethal than fear made it, and claimed fewer lives than opioids or isolation. But no policy revisions match these updates in our knowledge.

Instead, governments act subversively: Justin Trudeau issues a gun ban without Parliamentary process. B.C. and Ontario absolve themselves of liability for any lockdown-related injuries. Even Alberta grants its ministers emergency powers, without legislative oversight, in Bill 10 — all behind a viral particle, slowly degrading beneath the ultraviolet Sun.

Then there’s internet censorship: an Aug. 29 CDC page quietly updated the American CV-19 death toll, without comorbidities, as 9,210. That page as quietly went 404. Medical doctors who used hydroxychloroquine (with zinc) had video uploads removed and their social media accounts frozen. Big corporate tech approves widespread apprehension, not therapeutics.

The mask mandates assume widespread contagion, and that’s really not true. But the panicky huff their exhalations until hypoxia takes the edge off, and maybe that’s why masks calm them.

The rest of us don’t like the ongoing fear for the same reason we don’t like being subverted or lied to. Exercising our expected standard of freedom, and nothing less, is the best way to communicate our expectations. A mask protest is one place to start.

Tom Yeoman

Lethbridge