UPDATE: 2020 MAY 18. As of today, there are more than 80,000 Americans DEAD from the COVID
Finding your way
What is the point? I mean, we are living in some crazy times! Who would have thought that in this year, TWO THOUSAND AND NINETEEN HUNDRED YEARS, yes, 2019! (and if you are a Christian, let's also add "IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD" -- who would have thought that a self-admitted sexual deviant, a known pervert and wife-cheater, four-time bankruptcy filer, and Fake Charity peddler: is now THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
And the people who put him there? Self-Proclaimed Christian Evangelicals.
That's right. God's own people. Or so they claim.
So --- YOU --- will have to find your way and fix this anomaly with the rest of us.
Intermittent Fasting
I started "intermittent fasting" back in late September 2019 because my PCP (Primary Care Provider) told me to try it in order to wean myself out of rice (Asian Staple Food). I was also trying to do a fast-loss weight experiment as I was trying to fit into my tuxedo/suit for my friend's wedding in October.
I started the intermittent fasting with a simple method of pushing myself not to eat for as long as I could muster the hunger craving. I drank a lot of water instead. When I wake up each day, the first thing I did was drink a whole water bottle of water (500 ml. or 17 Fl. OZ). Then I push myself not to eat anything throughout the whole day, but instead kept on drinking just the water, always finishing up a whole bottled water in one setting, about every hour.
By about the six hours, having drank about 6 bottles of water each hour, you start to feel different. Of course, you are going to the bathroom more, but I also try to not succumb to the urination urge right away. Maybe wait about 15-20 minutes before succumbing to the urination urge. At 6 hours, I am ready for my first solid food. Instead of eating a full meal, I ate figs ( about 3-4 pieces).
It is amazing what the body can endure. At this time, your body actually loosens up and relaxes. It senses that you have food, but not a lot, so it also adapts. You settle back into your work or whatever you are doing. An hour after , again I drink my bottled water. Now the fasting is in full swing. We have reached almost 8 hours: one bottled water each hour plus 3-4 figs at the 6th hour mark. On the 10th hour mark, I eat 2-3 figs with half-a-bag of
POINT OF NO RETURN. In, Italy, the principle they settle upon is utilitarian. “Informed by the principle of maximizing benefits for the largest number,” they suggest that “the allocation criteria need to guarantee that those patients with the highest chance of therapeutic success will retain access to intensive care.”
The authors, who are medical doctors, then deduce a set of concrete recommendations for how to manage these impossible choices, including this: “It may become necessary to establish an age limit for access to intensive care.”
Those who are too old to have a high likelihood of recovery, or who have too low a number of “life-years” left even if they should survive, will be left to die. This sounds cruel, but the alternative, the document argues, is no better. “In case of a total saturation of resources, maintaining the criterion of ‘first come, first served’ would amount to a decision to exclude late-arriving patients from access to intensive care.”
In addition to age, doctors and nurses are also told to take a patient’s overall state of health into account: “The presence of comorbidities needs to be carefully evaluated.” This is in part because early studies of the virus seem to suggest that patients with serious preexisting health conditions are significantly more likely to die. But it is also because patients in a worse state of overall health could require a greater share of scarce resources to survive:
“What might be a relatively short treatment course in healthier people could be longer and more resource-consuming in the case of older or more fragile patients.”
THIS IS WHERE WE ARE NOW. In Italy.
What is happening in America is a slow-burn of the same fire. And it will be too late.
Here is a perspective for you from someone who know what she is talking about:
"This is why universities are closing and gatherings of 1,000 people or more are being cancelled. This is why we are discussing this so much.
This is what a public health potential emergency looks like.
This is what a public health potential emergency looks like.
I've said this before in messages, but I am going to say this now: If all goes well with Public Health and anti-terrorism, NOTHING happens. We go merrily about our business not knowing what was stopped and how hard the medical professionals, policy people and security professionals work every day to make sure we are unaware of their jobs. We don't know how hard they work, and what prevention looks like, until something happens.
Well, something is happening. And we better consider following the professionals' advice on how one contains the something. We have not appreciated their work enough before. We better now.
Two weeks ago Italy had 322 cases and all was fine - they could treat all of them.
One week ago, Italy had 2,502 cases, and they could keep up.
Now, they have 10,149, and triage for who gets a ventilator and has a chance to survive is happening.
It's math, my friends. It's not a conspiracy.
I'll do some math here:
America's largest city, New York City, has 8.3 million people. Let's say 25% of them get Covid-19 (actual estimates are that 40-60, even 70% of us will get it in the next year, because there is no immunity to it nor available vaccines). But for math purposes, we will say 25%.
2 million NYC residents get Covid-19:
1.6 million (80%) have a cold, basically. Stay home. Recover. All good.
300,000 (15%) require some medical care. May even require a hospital stay.
1.6 million (80%) have a cold, basically. Stay home. Recover. All good.
300,000 (15%) require some medical care. May even require a hospital stay.
100,000 (5%) need serious medical care - maybe even a ventilator.
I just googled this: NYC has 62 hospitals. Let's say they each have 30 ventilators (some may have more, some may have less). That's 1,860 ventilators. Some are already in use for flu patients, after surgeries, other illnesses.
The key here, what Public Health Professionals are trying to do, is to fit that 100,000 people who will need more care into the 2,000 or so available ventilators and still provide care for other conditions and procedures. To do this, they are asking us to not gather, and to stay home. Even if we are not personally at risk of being part of that 5%, we can still spread it to those who are.
This is not hysteria. This is preparedness and math.
Please don't call it hysteria. Please know choosing who lives and who dies is not a place we want to get to here. And it is happening elsewhere, now, where countries are 2-3 weeks ahead of us with Covid-19.
If we do this right, this will not happen. And some will say "see, it was nothing!"
And if we do this wrong, this is where we will get. And then we will prove to those who didn't believe that yes, it really CAN get this bad, even in first world countries.
No one wants to prove that.
