I Met A Real-Life COVID-19 Denier Yesterday

I was coming home from my essential worker job yesterday and I stopped by the C-Store. There was a guy at the counter in his mid to late twenties talking to the clerk also in her twenties. I could overhear enough to tell he was talking about the virus and the economy. He did not have a mask on.  When I made it up to the counter to pay, he moved out of the way.  I had my mask on.

After I had paid for my stuff and was walking out the door, he held the door open for me. Of course, to walk out I had to step within two or three feet of him.  I smiled under my mask as I knew he was testing me to see how I would react.

I stepped outside and turned to him and thanked him for holding the door open. He seemed surprised. Then he proceeded to tell me how that mask I was wearing would not protect me from the virus because it was not an N-95 mask. I told him I knew and that I was wearing it to protect other people not myself. He said but it is not thick enough material to protect anyone.

I said that is not the idea. The idea is to stop the droplets from spraying if I cough or sneeze. He seemed to think about it and nodded his head in an affirmative matter.  Then he said you know this is all a great big hoax. Those numbers they are claiming are not real and then he walked off to his truck.

I was left dumbfounded. The guy was nice enough in his mannerisms and I could tell he was sincere in his beliefs from his conversation with me and what I overheard with the clerk but I just do not get how a seemingly normal-looking person of at least average intelligence could develop such a bizarre belief.

What a dummy. 

Kinda makes you half way wish he'd get a taste of the C-19 himself.  I said half way, 'cause I never wish ill on anyone. 

The other day going to Walmart I realized after I got there I'd forgotten my mask.  I went on in, hung my head down like a scolded puppy, did my best to "distance", follow the arrows, etc.  Now I keep it in my car.  

Around here most people seem to have abandoned the masks since Trump started talking about reopening.  The number of cases in my rural area are increasing. People should be wearing masks more than ever.

President Trump is not the only one talking about reopening. Talking about and actually doing it are two different things.

I live in a heavily Trumptard county. Three Republican congressional candidates are attacking one another, with every ad based on the protagonist's total loyalty to Trump and his opponents' straying from the faith.

We have had only four cases, and no deaths. This is a quite elderly county--which is one reason why it's dead-red--and there is exactly one badly underfunded local hospital. If CoVid ever gets here, it'll cut through the population like a scythe.

Two trips to the grocery store in the last week. Each trip, I counted the first hundred people, masks or no masks.

Last Monday: 7 out of 100 were wearing masks. Today (different store): 3 out of 100. ALL store personnel were wearing masks, and many cashiers worked behind plastic shields as well.

The befuddled maskless seniors made NO effort to social distance. They would stand in the middle of aisles, musing about their selections. I had to stand there and wait; to pass them would have been to come within a foot of them.

And like you, Mark, on both occasions, I overheard numerous conversations about how this coronavirus thing is nothing to worry about and it's just a Democratic hoax.

Outside in public areas, I go for walks and I have to describe a path like walking along the edge of a saw blade, as maskless people walk straight toward me, oblivious.

I want to hope that all this blissful ignorance isn't because everybody here has overdosed on the Trump kool-aid, but...Jesus.

The number of actual Covid deaths is open to discussion. Is it accurate? I have no real idea if it is or not? They are not swabbing all that meet their death. Lots of various reasons for calling the deaths Covid related. Hospital funds and reimbursements being one of the reasons. 

The consensus among medical professionals and scientific people is that the cases are being vastly undercounted as people are dying in their homes and people are still dying in the hospitals without ever getting a test because of the lack of test kits. The "lucky" ones get tested post mortem.

The only folks that I am aware of that are saying we are overcounting are right-wing conspircy kooks.  If Trump weren't so incompetent we would have enough working tests and more accurate numbers.

Tonight on Washington Journal, two different callers had episodes of unusually serious sickness after traveling in December and I think January or February, got sicker than they ever had been in their lives.   They asked if they might have had Covid before it was becoming recognized.  The expert is the head of Infectious Disease at UAB, and he gotten Covid-19, suffered horribly though never into full respiratory failure.  Anyway, he said this is something we are starting to hear more about, folks who got sick and recovered before the news came out.

Also, a man called in, his neighbor had come to his door, collapsed on his front porch.  He and his wife helped the guy into their car, took him to the hospital.  Turned out the neighbor had the virus and his wife did also.  The man calling in said neither he nor his wife had any symptoms yet.  They'd been tested but results not in yet.  The expert said this is another version, persons having a significant exposure, possibly not becoming sick with it.  The expert said if it had been 14 days or more since that event, then the man was likely out of the woods, if he even contracted the virus, which the expert said was like 90% possible.

Bottom line, a lot of different scenarios.  And, they are seeing cases where fever didn't happen.  So don't assume just because you didn't have fever that you didn't get the virus, if other symptoms were present.

New/more info coming out.

If they get a working anti-body test, it will be really helpful to know who already had it.

I've had this suspicion that FAR more people have or have had the virus than the reported statistics for some time now.

That means that our national efforts should have been focused on treatment and testing long ago. But testing seems to not have been a priority of this administration. Boasting about testing, yes. Actual testing, hell no.

National experts are saying we can't safely open up the country until we have a testing capacity of 5 million a day. We have about 2% of that now. I have a feeling that people aren't going to wait.

However, there's some hope. In Gawhgia and other states that have said "release the hounds," people are apparently being very tentative and cautious. It might be that many people, even Trumpers, aren't listening to the deadly rah-rahs spewing forth from the governor's mansion.