I’ve always been very much a stay-at-home person. I was largely home-schooled. I never had to commute to work because our family printing business was adjacent to our living quarters. I never had much ambition to go out shopping or to public events. So the Covid virus hasn’t made much difference in my life. But I think my perennial “shelter-in-place” approach did have negative repercussions for me in the past when it came to my susceptibility to the old run-of-the- mill germs.
When
I would occasionally hurl myself out into the wide world, going on a “See
America” trip or tours to other countries – I almost always would come down
with some horrible illness. I’d usually arrange to arrive by myself at our
target destination a few days early so I could explore on my own, off the
beaten tourist track. But I almost always ended up wasting away those extra
days in bed in my hotel room, in stuffed-up, fevered infirmity. I would have to
use every ounce of will power I had to rally on the fourth day and join the
newly-arrived tour group.
I’d
always try to distance myself from fellow-travelers as much as possible and to
take all precautions against spreading my disease to them. I would keep in
touch with most of them for short periods after our trips, and as far as I
know, I never once infected anyone else. It seems the germs that downed me were
entities I was uniquely susceptible to, perhaps because of my general pattern
of sequestration. I’d be at home, at home, at home – then suddenly abroad with
a naïve immune system that hadn’t been exposed to low doses of whatever
microbes were floating around. My system was therefore as unprepared as the
systems of the Native Americans facing the European invaders.
Before
Covid, we had just been getting to the point of recognizing that early exposure
to a potpourri of germs might be a good thing, that it might be good to get out
there occasionally and mix it up with the world so that our immune systems
could gain some familiarity with whatever might later attack in earnest.
Parents who were too fastidious about keeping a germ-free environment were
being encouraged to loosen up a little. A friend and I joked that the ideal
mother would be one who urged her toddler, “Why don’t you go out and play in
that open sewer, honey?” Ma and Pa Kettle might make better parents than the
spotless suburban housewife of 1950’s laundry detergent commercials.
Some
doctors were suggesting that the toughening that would result from some
exposure might even extend to making people less subject to allergies. A child
who’d been exposed to EVERYTHING - to all sorts of germs, all sorts of
unprocessed foods, all sorts of mess, in moderation - would not only be better
able to fight off a variety of diseases along the way, but might be less likely
to suffer from the likes of peanut or pollen allergies. Some have even
suggested that broad exposure to low levels of pathogens might better enable an
individual to tamp down rogue cancer cells as they spring up – all as the
result of having developed a toughened up, street-wise immune system.
►So
my first question is:
Are
we setting ourselves up for contracting all sorts of illnesses when we finally
do emerge from quarantine from the Covid virus? Will we be especially
vulnerable to the remaining Covid germs floating around, as well as to all the
usual garden-variety cold and flu germs? Just as many of my vacations were
partially ruined, possibly because I had spent too much time out of life’s
fray, will our first months and years back out in the world be fraught with
hacking coughs, fevers, runny noses, and perhaps even more serious ailments?
I’m
not encouraging people to go out and foregather in crowds now without masks or
distancing. I am responsibly adhering to all health officials’ directions. But
I’m just wondering…
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Then
just before Covid hit, scientists had been starting to caution us against
washing too often, especially with anti-bacterial soap. They pointed out how
the widespread use of this soap was helping to give rise to superbugs, germs
that have evolved resistance to the anti-bacterial agents we’ve been spreading
through the environment. These soaps are also implicated in killing certain
kinds of beneficial algal growth and at the same time in promoting other kinds
of algal growth that are invasive or harmful in other ways.
All
regular soaps will work to kill both bacteria and certain viruses, such as the
Covid virus, that have a lipid outer shell. The surfactant action of ordinary soap
rips apart that protective lipid shell. Anti-bacterial additives might give an
additional kick-in-the-shins to bacteria, but they do nothing to help kill viruses.
So my next
question is:
►Why
aren’t health officials making it clear to the public that they should continue
to avoid the use of anti-bacterial soaps?
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Then
I wonder how much good wipe-downs really do. As restaurants, bars, and other
venues are being allowed to open up again if they take certain precautions, I
see staff members swiping over tabletops with presumably antiseptic pads. But is
such treatment effective? Again, it seems possible that such cursory swiping
might actually be helping superbugs evolve.
Hospitals
have long tried to be conscientious about sterilizing their premises. But the necessarily
incomplete job that’s done of killing germs has helped give rise to especially
lethal infections such as MRSA. I remember when I volunteered in a hospital, a
head nurse showed us the results of a little research she had done on her own.
After a housekeeper had gone through her usual routine of cleaning rooms, the
nurse randomly swiped some surfaces, rubbed off what her swab had picked up into
a petri dish, and then waited a few days. She held up the resultant petri dish
for us to see. Horrors! It was abloom with an effulgence of different-colored
germs and fungi!
We
have been so concentrated on the dangers of the Covid virus we have almost completely
forgotten about the approximately 400,000 people that die every year in the
U.S. as a result of medical mishap in hospitals. Many of these “mishaps” are
infections contracted in the hospitals.
Yes,
that figure is 400,000 deaths a year, every year! That number has been debated
somewhat. Early reports on this largely ignored health hazard started by citing
a figure closer to 100,000 deaths a year. But further assessments found that
early cited total of needless hospital deaths to be too conservative. The definition
of “medical error” was expanded somewhat and so the 400,000 number was reached.
Perhaps that overestimates the problem as much as the earlier figure underestimated
it. But either way, that figure only takes hospital deaths into account and doesn’t
include the many thousands of people who likely die annually as a result of
mistakes and misdiagnoses that take place in doctors’ offices and as the result
of pharmaceutical errors outside hospitals.
Since
such a large percentage of whatever shocking number of needless deaths are
occurring are indeed due to infections that are contracted in the hospital, it
seems likely that standard sterilizing and wash-down techniques don’t reliably
work. Those blooms of germs that the head nurse found could likely be found in
every hospital today. Hospitals are notorious hothouses for the growth of
standard forms of old germs as well as for the cultivation of dangerous new
hybrids and evolved forms of infectious agents.
So
the question is:
►What
kind of testing has been done to determine whether casual wipe-downs accomplish
anything? How vigorous and prolonged should the antiseptic cleaning be in order
to rid surfaces of a sufficient number of germs? How powerful do those
currently advertised sanitizing UV lights have to be in order to do the job and
how long do they have to be held over a surface in order to be effective?
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Finally,
as a corollary of my above concern, I wonder about the extensive use of
ventilators and the attendant intubation that Covid has occasioned. Our
government officials were criticized for not having enough ventilators on hand
when this pandemic hit. But any treatment involving intubation should be used only
as a last resort.
My
mother was subjected to weeks of intubation in the late 1980’s and no medieval
torture could have been worse. Nothing could have wracked the body so
thoroughly - all to no avail. People have suggested that current intubation
practices carry less risk of infection and injury than they did in the 80’s.
But I’m not sure that’s true. The intubation process itself and the need for
suctioning introduces myriad opportunities for infections such as pneumonia to
be introduced into a patient. The likelihood of lung, tracheal, and other
tissue damage is also considerable.
It
seems that doctors felt pressured to DO SOMETHING when patients presented at a
hospital with the Covid virus. They were eager to demonstrate that they were being
pro-active, and so they automatically put patients on ventilators and intubated
them. But I doubt that was necessary or helpful in a large percentage of cases.
I’d
like to ask:
►Have
follow-up studies been done to determine how effective ventilators and
intubation have been or can be in treating people with viral congestion? Has
the use of this treatment been declining as the Covid virus persists and as
evidence of some of its counterproductive effects has accumulated?
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There
are any number of additional questions that could be asked. Have
epidemiologists sequenced the DNA of the virus? If so, have they tracked the
path it has taken through countries and host creatures? Is it as prone to
mutating as the HIV and common cold viruses are?
The
politicians and doctors who break into regular TV programming to give Covid
up-dates hardly ever address any of these more interesting issues. These
individuals, such as Dr. Fauci, have generally been immunologists, dealing with
the effects of the virus on individuals. Perhaps epidemiologists who deal with
the broader demographics of a disease could add some insights to the news
updates, although so much of the research done by these big-picture scientists
is retrospective – a charting of information after-the-act. But it seems there
is so much more that both kinds of scientists could be telling us besides repeating
the need to wash and distance. I want to get to know the virus in a much more precise,
scientific way.
Every
virus has a unique personality and profile and causes unique kinds of damage to
its victims and to society at large. The pandemic of 1918 that killed between
20 and 50 million people worldwide had devastating consequences even beyond that
immediate death toll. It is often called the “orphan-maker virus” because it primarily
killed people in their prime, people who were new parents between the ages of
20 and 35. That influenza germ didn’t kill its victims directly. But it had the
power to provoke such a strong immune response that people died from their
bodies’ own reaction. In that way, it was like rheumatoid arthritis, multiple
sclerosis, and other autoimmune diseases. You died of the cure as your body
attacked good cells as well as germ cells. So that earlier pandemic tended to selectively
kill people whose immune systems were the most robust.
A
friend of mine told me that his father was an orphan of that earlier disease
storm. His father was born in Russia which was hit particularly hard by the
epidemic. When both of his father’s parents died of that “Spanish flu,” he
became one of thousands of orphans who were adopted out to families in the U.S.
and Canada. That was before the day of background checks. Children were
automatically sent to almost every family offering to adopt.
As
a forlorn 6-year-old, my friend’s father was put on a boat and traveled to
Canada in steerage. It was a particularly rough crossing. The main things the little
boy remembered about the trip were the heaving waves and the fact that almost
all the passengers were sick most of the way. After landing in Canada, the boy was
sent by train to the plains of Saskatchewan where a Mennonite farm family took
possession of him. As with many children adopted under these circumstances, he had
been sought primarily as an extra pair of hands to help with farm work. He’d
been brought over not for love but for labor. He ran away as soon as he got old
enough to make his own way in the world.
Many, many orphans experienced that kind of Dickensian childhood as a result of the 1918 pandemic. The people who live through this pandemic will undoubtedly have their own, different stories to tell.
