PLAGUE JOURNAL August 2020: More Aerosols & Irrationality: Fear of Elevators, Lobbies, & Sidewalks.
Fauci and the media use the new “science” of aerosols to spread masks everywhere.
[Note: All Plague Journal entries were written as events unfolded. I have edited the drafts for clarity, but the tone and content are original, reflecting what we could see at the time.]
Fumbling Fauci
Dr. Fauci does little to provide clarity or guidance. He is as influenced by the daily propaganda pump as the general public is, just a node in the loop. He likes the attention. He says something incorrect, vague, and scary, with the standard on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other-hand doublespeak, and the media report it. He does their yellow journalism for them. Answering questions from Congress on July 31st (2020), he sounded like the New York Times, saying some states “did well,” meaning they followed his rules, while others “did not,” pretending he knows how people behaved in all the towns and cities he criticized.
No matter—it’s the standard approach from everyone. Allege a result (usually without data), then ascribe the behavior you endorse or condemn. None of it has to be true. A scary photograph of a few guys having a beer on a patio tells us nothing about the daily behavior of millions but makes readers angry. Fauci blames disobedient citizens for their “surge,” saying, in his inimical style, “And one of the reasons is not doing some of the things that Dr. [Robert] Redfield mentioned in his opening statement, universal wearing of masks, avoiding crowds, physical distancing, etc. etc.” It’s always and only masks, crowds, and the six-foot safety bubble. Nothing about time, air volume, loud vocalizations, or the other things worth knowing—things that actually affect transmission, not the superstitious rituals demanded by the media.
Three days later, Fauci sucked up to the press when he said, “I think there is certainly a degree of aerosolization,” a vague invitation to panic without any benefit to public health. Predictably, he followed it by saying, “But I’m going to take a step back and make sure that we learn the facts before we start talking about it.” Too late. So why did he say it? We are half a year in, and he’s pretending we don’t know anything. Perhaps he wants a job at CNN. Certainly he’s learned to talk like them, or maybe they have learned to talk like him. Whatever it is, those controlling the conversation are casually and cruelly spreading maximum fear and alarm.
One could argue that anything has “a degree” of aerosolization. Although a bowling ball and a feather fall to earth at different rates, both are acted upon by the atmosphere they travel through. Lighter respiratory droplets, the kind we get in the dry, indoor, heated air of Brussels in March or the dry, cooled, indoor air of Phoenix in July, or in meat-packing plants and other refrigerated food factories, travel farther and drift to the ground more slowly than the heavy droplets breathed or coughed in humid air or near a swimming pool. Slower settling does not mean the droplets remain in the air forever, or that they remain potent over time. Aerosols are defined as “a suspension of fine solid or liquid particles in gas,” for example, “smoke, fog, and mist.” A fog bank doesn’t fall to the ground. The coronavirus does—more like rain than like fog, if at different rates depending on humidity, air movement, and other factors.
Fauci, as a health official, should know the difference. As someone with a public voice, he should clarify the difference. Leaders should lead, as FDR did in his 1933 inaugural address: Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.
Instead, we get a public official who spreads fear and confusion by implying that the virus is like a mist, as in the movie The Mist, in which citizens of a small down descend into madness, violence, and suicide when a monster-filled mist settles over the town. By not being clear, Fauci lets us believe that we can become infected by entering a hotel room that someone sneezed in a week ago. People who use their own senses know better, but he’s doing his best to confuse and alarm us.
Fearing Elevators
And it’s working: on July 31st, the homeowner’s association of a vacation rental I own sent me a nearly hysterical document, which I am now required to send to every rental guest. It is written in all caps, all bold, with many sections in red, the color of blood, the color of alarm, the color of the scare balloons displaying the case counts in the New York Times, the color of Republicans. The specter of aerosols informs the new, stricter requirements:
SPECIAL CARE AND COMPLIANCE WITH THE MASKING LAW IS TO BE EMPHASIZED IN AREAS OF SMALLER SIZE, WITH LESSER AIR CIRCULATION AND HIGHER HUMAN TRAFFIC.
THESE INCLUDE MOST IMPORTANTLY THE ELEVATORS IN ALL BUILDINGS. THESE ARE HIGH USE AREAS, POTENTIALLY RETAINING VIRUS PARTICLES ON DROPLETS FOR UP TO 3 HOURS. AN EMPTY ELEVATOR IS NOT A SAFE ELEVATOR.
DO NOT RIDE AN ELEVATOR WITHOUT A MASK.
USE THE STAIRWAY TO GO TO ADMINISTRATION ON THE LOBBY FLOOR AND OBTAIN A MASK FROM THEM.
We have the tracing studies, in which the carrier is usually known, as he typically develops symptoms within a day or so before or after the spreading event. A person can get infected up to twenty feet away from the carrier if the carrier shouts or sings in an enclosed space for an hour or two. But we don’t know of a super-spreading event in which a group of people became infected from merely walking through a room hours after someone sneezed. (But how do we know? It could have happened. We just don’t know. Stay safe.)
The building requiring solo masking is only five floors high. The ride from top to bottom would take less than a minute; you could hold your breath for most of the ride, not that it would be necessary. But the people who wrote the rules don’t know much about transmission, thanks to our abysmal public health messaging and politicized media.
People don’t get sick from elevators unless they somehow attended hours-long birthday parties or weddings or choir rehearsals in them. In my city, no one required masks until late May [2020], about the time things began to open up and people began poking their heads outside to see if the menace had lifted, which might inadvertently have led people to associate masks with the outdoors. Masks were virtually non-existent until late April, and relatively rare until late May. My city has 37 buildings with 32 or more floors, and every one of them has elevators. There are hundreds, maybe thousands more buildings that have five or more floors, and they have elevators also. Yet our outbreaks occur in elderly care homes, refrigerated places such as meat plants and frozen-foods plants, prisons (although fatalities are low, just three out of nearly a thousand cases), and grocery stores (few cases, very few fatalities, possibly spread at home, otherwise probably in the meat department or other refrigerated environments).
Most deaths have come from long-term care facilities. These places are generally only a few floors high, not elevator-rich environments. Yet in the building that posted the sign—mostly empty, a ski condo, now in the off-season—the elevators have apparently become deadly, because we have public officials and newscasters pretending that aerosols will do us in.
High-rise buildings in my city have not experienced Covid outbreaks although they house tens of thousands of people, virtually all of whom ride the elevators. If Fauci’s aerosols lingered indefinitely, like dust or pollen, at full potency, and if you could get zapped from a single breath of infected air, as Fauci’s comments and a hundred thousand signs in our buildings imply, we would all be falling sick. They simply make things up to keep us tuning in and to exert control.
In my state of nearly six million people, at the beginning of August [2020], there are just over 200 COVID patients in the hospital, down from nearly 900 in April. The last month has been very hot in large cities across the country, pushing people into indoor, air-conditioned spaces. And there has been a massive increase in testing. Currently, just over 3% of tests come back positive, down from a high 23% in April. We now average just one death per day, overwhelmingly among the elderly and compromised, down from about six per day at the end of April.
In Colorado, we spend more time outdoors in July than the people of Phoenix or Dallas or Bakersfield, which means we will see less summer spreading than they will. Yet while all the numbers have trended in a positive direction, and we have fewer deaths than we have from car accidents, the alarm has only increased. Entire towns now require masks outdoors. We are irrational beings. The more news we absorb from our screens, and the more we listen to public officials such as Fauci, the more irrational we become.
For more about the invention of coronavirus aerosols:
Ned,
By August 2020 several things had become clear:
This was a common cold virus, one of several families, all of which caused the same symptoms. From the Spanish Flu a century earlier we already knew how to deal with viruses: Focus protection efforts on the old and the fat, leave everyone else alone until we know more. Put sick people outdoors in sunlight, because even a light breeze will dispel a droplet cloud and sunlight damages viruses.
Instead, we acted as though everyone had an identical risk profile and locked everyone inside.
Operation Warp Speed would probably fix the problems. The virus originated in the Wuhan Institute; those of us who had been in the intelligence field knew that it was the Chinese center for biowarfare. The wet market was a smoke screen. The Chinese had allowed SARS, MERS and a few others to escape over the years, and I believe it was all unintentional.
Social distancing was BS. The six feet was taken from a German bacteriologist's work in Hamburg in the 1890s, when he photographed droplet clouds and determined that they went a maximum of two meters, or 6.5 feet. Following World War II we improved optics to be able to photograph a viral droplet cloud, which went eight meters, or more than 26 feet. Masks were useless.
The traditional track and trace could only be effective in island nations which could exercise absolute control of its borders. The US could not do that, and once a patient entered the New York Subway System he was lost.
Yes, I had an advantage. I had had multiple careers, including intelligence and medicine. But, nothing I knew was privileged or hidden.