Is social media killing people or are they simply choosing suicide by Covid?
Well, here we go again.
Coronavirus infections are rising in every state, as of this writing the Dow Jones has dropped a whopping 850 points, and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
The last time I saw these kinds of numbers it was March 2020 and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newsroom, where I was working at the time, was about to shutdown until further notice.
I felt bad then. I feel even worse now because this didn’t have to happen.
After nearly a year in lock-down, life was starting to look more and more like “normal’’, if you were vaccinated, the experts told us to feel free to unmask even inside with others who’d been vaccinated, and we were starting to return to our workplaces.
I, for one, was looking forward to returning to my church.
Maybe a special birthday gift in October, I told myself.
Instead the stock market is plummeting and thanks to the very contagious Delta variant, new Covid-19 cases are up nearly 70 percent from just a week ago. That’s about 30,000 new cases a day.
In a State of the Union interview Sunday on CNN, Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy said nearly all coronavirus-related deaths in the U.S. are among the tens of millions of people who have not been vaccinated.
Days before President Joe Biden said social media platforms like Facebook are “killing people” with misinformation surrounding the pandemic.
Although it didn’t take long for the president to back-peddle some, not many people I know would disagree with that assessment but it looks more like social media-assisted suicide to me.
The only difference is death from coronavirus won’t be free from pain and suffering, like say, physician assisted suicide.
Months before retiring early this year, I wrote a piece about the importance of wearing a mask and why refusing to do so put us all on a slippery slope.
At the time Paula Cannon, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine, blamed our reluctance on “imperfect statements” followed by changes in recommendations as we learned more.
“The larger reason was that people deliberately used that as an excuse, not listening and using the ‘confusion’ as a reason to not follow guidelines they found inconvenient,” she said.
By July 2020, that was no longer the case. The science was clear. Countries that had mandated mask wearing and social distancing, that took time reopening, had not only flattened the curve on infection, they were experiencing a continued decline in both cases and deaths.
But I digress.
Cannon told me something I will never forget. Coronavirus death isn’t a good death. The virus and medical interventions brutalize your body, she told me.
“Being intubated is like an oral rape,” she said. “A pipe is thrust down your throat to feed your lungs. It’s so painful that anybody who is conscious would fight to keep it from happening. You die alone hooked up to a machine. You get to FaceTime with your family if you’re lucky. You experience terrifying hallucinations. So the people who say you gotta die of something. Coronavirus wouldn’t make anybody’s top 100.”
That was enough to send me sprinting to get the jab the moment vaccinations became available. My husband, too. It never entered my mind that President Trump’s Operation Warp Speed was part of some grand scheme to hurt me, to track me or change my DNA as so many are arguing.
But here we go again.
Instead of silly arguments over the efficacy of masks, we’re questioning the validity of vaccinations that have been proven not only to be safe, but effective and life-saving.
Just as our refusal to wear masks put those around us, including loved ones, at risk of getting Covid and dying, refusing to get vaccinated does the same.
And again, the science is in. The coronavirus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is clearly a pandemic among the unvaccinated. They now make up more than 95% of new hospitalizations.
You know what really saddens me? Not that grown folk are refusing to be vaccinated but that their decision puts children for whom there is no vaccination available and who have no say in the matter at greater risk for infection.
Plus, Cannon said, unvaccinated children can spread the virus to other family members and friends, including those medically vulnerable family members who might not be able to get vaccinated for health reasons.
Imagine having to tell a kid he infected grandma and she died, Cannon said. “Who wants to put that type of burden on a kid?”
I hope no one.
And yet, the misinformation keeps flowing and people just won’t accept the science. It doesn’t even matter that many of the people feeding them the information, the Fox News team immediately comes mine, are themselves among the vaccinated.
“I’m really not sure what arguments can reach people anymore if their minds have been so indoctrinated to think this is not serious, that they are not personally contributing to the problem by not getting vaccinated and putting their kids at risk,” Cannon said. “I did see one meme I like — it said smallpox and polio were not eradicated by herd immunity due to everyone getting infected, they were only eradicated by vaccines. And of course the willingness of our parents and grandparents to do their part and accept them.”
Exactly.
The way I see it people are playing Russian roulette with their lives and that of their children.
I mentioned physician-assisted dying which stems from the basic idea that it is terminally ill people — not government or politicians — who should make their end-of-life decisions and determine how much pain and suffering they should endure.
Death by coronavirus doesn’t even allow for that. As Cannon put it, it’s brutal. President Trump won’t tell you this but thanks to him and Operation Warp Speed, death by coronavirus is now preventable - Delta variant be damned.
Think about that.
