March 2020

They tell us that COVID is less dangerous than the flu, but then the military makes announcements like this:

Beginning 13 March, Navy Recruit Training Command (RTC), the Navy’s boot camp, will suspend guest attendance at graduation ceremonies to prevent any potential spread of COVID-19 to either Sailors or Navy families.
Graduations themselves will continue, and will be live-streamed on Navy online platforms, including our Facebook page.
Commander, Naval Service training command, which oversees RTC, will continue to monitor the situation and consult with medical experts to decide when it is appropriate to resume guest attendance at graduation ceremonies. There are currently no confirmed cases of COVID-19 among recruits, and RTC has robust screening processes in place for those who arrive each week.
This action is being taken out of an abundance of caution, to both ensure the welfare of Sailors and that RTC can continue its essential mission of producing basically trained Sailors. RTC Recruits impacted by this change are being authorized to call home to directly inform their loved ones.
Liberty will be cancelled for graduates of RTC. They will report directly to their follow-on assignments. Liberty or guest access at those locations will be at the discretion of those commands. Families are encouraged to contact their recruits following graduation for details. We cannot speak on behalf of the commands they will be reporting to regarding their liberty policy.

Corona is either not a threat, or is really bad. Who do you believe? Someone is lying.

A month ago, an illegal immigrant killed a family of four. The investigation is done, and he is getting a traffic ticket. This is what sanctuary gets you. We need a metaphorical wall.

My ARNP son has told me that the facility where he works is running out of N95 masks. So they are issuing one mask and a paper bag to each employee. They are to keep and reuse their mask as necessary.

He is convinced that this outbreak will be the same as all of the other scares: SARS, Swine Flu, Avian Flu, Ebola, etc. He is blaming the media for whipping the country into a frenzy.

I am not so sure. At this point, the freezer is full, and I am pretty sure that we have all of the supplies we need to last more than a month in quarantine without having to dig into the freeze dried foods. I have a large box of N95 masks in storage that I bought a couple of years ago during one of the previous virus scares.

It isn’t just food, Make sure you have toilet paper, feminine hygiene products, and needed medications. The best news here is that all of it is stuff that you would buy anyway, so it won’t cost you more than normal, you are just buying all of it in advance.

Just in case things get much worse, don’t overlook security for when the redistribution warriors decide to go midnight shopping. 

As more information has come to light, it turns out that yesterday’s post was incorrect. The COVID patient was correctly categorized as to his location. The post has been deleted.

Nearly two years ago, I stated that I was against the so-called “Red Flag Laws” because they would be abused by ex girlfriends and ex-wives to get revenge against men. It turns out that I was correct. 

According to the CDC, there are 153 confirmed cases of COVID 19 in the US, with 11 fatalities: 10 deaths in Washington state, and 1 in California. That works out to a 7% fatality rate, which represents a very large increase over the 2% rate we have been give up to this point. This means one of a few things:

1 The other nations are not reporting correct figures with respect to their cases versus fatalities.
2 This illness is far more deadly than we are being led to believe.
3 There are far more than 153 cases in the US, but we aren’t catching most of them.
4 The US strain is somehow more deadly than the one in the rest of the world.

My son is a nurse practitioner. Because he just began working for his employer within the last year, they move him from hospital to hospital to fill in where needed. We works 10 and 12 hour shifts for 7 days, and then takes two weeks off. For the next few days, he will be working at three hospitals that are closer to my house than they are to his, so rather than making the hour and a half drive back to his house, he will be staying with us.

While he was here, we got into a discussion about the corona virus. He says that for the past week, his emergency room has been seeing dozens of people each day who are displaying the symptoms of some sort of cold- what medical people refer to as Flu Like Symptoms (FLS- also known colloquially among those same medical people as “Feels Like Shit”) The problem with FLS is that these symptoms are felt by people with a lot of different illnesses- the flu, Herpes, Hepatitis, and yes, the corona virus. These people, having seen the media stories about nCOV 19, are demanding to be tested for it.

The problem is that not one of them meets the criteria for being tested. The CDC is in charge of that, and they have set very specific criteria for who is to be tested. If a patient doesn’t meet the criteria, they cannot be tested. This is done EXACTLY because if a person doesn’t meet the criteria, they don’t have corona, and the CDC doesn’t want the testing labs to be overwhelmed by people who do not have the virus.

This panic illustrates the real hazard with nCOV 19. The real hazard is fear induced panic, and the people demanding that the government (or the medical field) do something. It doesn’t matter if the something that is being done is actually effective- just that they are doing something. We see this all of the time, which is the reason why we have to suffer through the Kabuki Theater of security everywhere.

So what I decided to do is prepare my household for the possibility of widespread travel bans and quarantines. We went to the big box store today and upped our semi-perishable stores. I added 40 pounds of meat to the freezer, along with other supplies: toilet paper, canned vegetables, cleaning supplies, feminine hygiene products, and more. I now have on hand enough food for three weeks before I have to dip into the freeze dried foods. Other than that, I cannot think of anything I am missing or in need of.