Just the Facts Please

By the time anyone reads this, our Chief Executive’s April 23 Coronavirus Task Force Briefing remarks/questions/ suggestions to Dr. Deborah Birx and the Department of Homeland Security scientist William N. Bryan concerning the possibility of injecting chemical disinfectants and UV lighting into the bodies of COVID 19 patients might be old news. The President’s “what if” questions followed Mr. Bryan’s presentation of data showing the effects of heat, humidity, sunlight, and disinfectant on COVID 19 on hard surfaces. I found Mr. Bryan’s presentation interesting. What I found more interesting was Mr. Bryan’s and Dr. Birx’s reactions to the President’s questions. They did not answer the questions directly.

Children and adults forced to function in unstable environments where substance overuse, (the American Psychiatric Association’s latest diagnostic label for substance and alcohol abuse), emotional abuse and raging behavior, often avoid conflict by giving indirect answers, trying to change the subject, or just going along to get along. Unfortunately, rage and bullying can feel powerful both to the bully, and to onlookers who vicariously feel the power displayed by the bullies they like.

Good decisions require good information.

Since the daily briefings began, I have watched Governor Cuomo in the morning, Onondaga County executive Ryan McMahon in the afternoon, and, in the evening, the President’s task force. When I watch the Whitehouse briefings, I watch them on FOX News because FOX News provides uninterrupted coverage even when the briefings morph into non-COVID related campaign rally-like opinionating complete with personal attacks on individual reporters. I listen not because I like what I hear; I just want to hear for myself what the President says and how he says it.

Back in 2004, I completed a FEMA course: “Emergency Program Manager – An Orientation to the Position.” I did not complete the 40+ individual modules that followed, but I do remember learning that, in any emergency, effective emergency program management involves maintaining good communication from and to crisis areas to ensure adequate help and supplies get to where they are needed. Floods and fires create immediate visible results. Pandemics commencing with silent animal to human transmission in China, and then to Europe and then to everywhere else is a little trickier to spot. Early on, COVID19 looked like a bad flu.

In one of his early task force broadcasts, a presentation given from a long executive table, the President asked Task Force leader Dr. Anthony Fauci if a flu vaccine could help. Dr. Fauci said no. The President followed up by asking if perhaps a “solid” vaccine might help. Dr. Fauci said no. Dr. Fauci was not present on April 23 to say “no” when the President asked about injecting disinfectants into the body. No one said “no.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci’s life work includes involvement with HIV and AIDS treatments, Ebola and H1N1. A couple of articles that I read mentioned that, in 2016, Dr. Fauci warned that open air, wet meat markets with their bloodletting and guano dripping were disasters waiting to happen. While there are some international COVID conspiracy theories floating around, most science reporting suggests that COVID 19 originated in Chinese horseshoe bats.

I thought about titling this piece “Year of the Bat.” Bats are interesting mammals. Bats pollinate. Bats eat mosquitos. In the USA and NYS, humans endanger bats by carrying fungi on their shoes while spelunking. The fungi cover the bats’ noses somehow signaling them to awaken from seasonal hibernation before nature is ready to sustain them and the bats then starve. Sometimes, humans love nature to death. Like many species, bats suffer loss of habitat due to human encroachment. Bats hibernate in familiar places, sometimes in groups, sometimes alone. Bats can carry rabies. Bats avoid human contact if they can.

While bats are not the enemy, bats carry many of the viruses most feared by epidemiologists. Some scientists believe that bats might be the only mammals who can live with hideously dangerous viral loads because, perhaps via high body temperature, perhaps because they can fly, bats seem able to control inflammation.

In humans, immobility, lower social status, economic uncertainty, lack of autonomy, poor diet, poor air quality, and emotionally volatile environments create stress. Unrelieved stress can lead to physical inflammation. Inflammation, left unabated, depresses the immune system. Depressed immune systems leave people vulnerable to illness. Going forward, it might be a good time to reduce personal stress by changing how we interact within our individual spans of control.

Locally, in one of his daily briefings, County Executive Ryan McMahon reported that he knew social distancing could prevent COVID19’s spread because, in the days and weeks following Onondaga County’s implementation of social distancing, the county’s rates of Influenza A and B had notably decreased.

Can we agree accurate information is good for us?

Let us not shake on it though.

Debra Merryweather