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Happy Anniversary
FEBRUARY 5, 2021
AIKEN-AUGUSTA’S MOST SALUBRIOUS NEWSPAPER • FOUNDED IN 2006
We are all about to observe our first anniversary with the worst partner of all time. Remember this front page? Yes, it was exactly one year ago this week that the I Medical Examiner and countJUST THE FLU? S less others around the world started to notice a stranger lurking outside our doors, trying to pry open our windows at night, doing everything it could do enter our lives. YOU’RE INVITED! In effect, we have all been CHECK OUT ALL THE NEW COLORS & STYLES FROM HEALING HANDS SCRUBS kidnapped and forced against our will into a relationship with this stranger. We want a divorce! All of us! Alas, these things take time. Of course, there are still those who refuse to recognize this unholy union even though they’re in it. We see them in stores to this day, walking right past all the signs that say masks are required for entry. They walk across the same ground everyone else does, the ground that now holds the bodies of some 450,000 Americans who were, with a few exceptions, alive and well on this very day one year ago and had no plans to do anything but keep on living. Yet the deniers persist. Perhaps you heard the news this past weekend about the protesters who temporarily shut down one of the largest COVID vaccination sites in the nation. Demonstraters at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles forced the site to be closed for nearly an hour on Saturday, Jan. 30, confronting people waiting in line with claims that the pandemic is a scam and the vaccine is both unnecessary and dangerous. It makes you wonder what it will take for some people to acknowledge that COVID-19 is
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FEBRUARY 7, 2020
AIKEN-AUGUSTA’S MOST SALUBRIOUS NEWSPAPER • FOUNDED IN 2006
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ome people think the flu is nothing more than the sniffles, maybe a headache and some body aches thrown in. Guess what? Most of the time they’re right. Even symptoms of the headline-grabbing coronavirus are in most cases nothing that would give you nightmares: runny nose, sore throat, watery eyes, headache, coughing, sneezing (see page 3), mild fever and body aches. Most people with coronavirus think they have nothing more than an ordinary cold. All of that makes the following figures seem completely illogical: the 2014-2015 flu season killed around 51,000 people in the U.S. alone based WHAT IS CORONAVIRUS? on CDC estimates. 2015-2016 saw The name comes from the surface about 23,000 flu-related deaths, folprojections of the virus that look lowed by 38,000 in 2016-2017. Final data is still pending for the 2017-2018 like a royal crown or solar corona. The viruses were discovered in the and 2018-2019 flu seasons, but the early numbers are 61,000 and 34,000, 1960s, and were behind previous respectively. That’s well over 200,000 flu outbreaks like SARS and MERS. deaths in the U.S. alone in just the past five flu seasons, an average of more than 41,000 deaths per year. How does something whose symptoms seem no worse than a common cold end up killing people by the hundreds of thousands?
How flu kills If we put ourselves into the mind of a killer (let’s go with a lion), our target of choice will be the weak and vulnerable. Easy pickings. That is our first clue to how and why flu kills: by preying on the weak. That could be the elderly or the very young, including infants who have yet to be fully inoculated. The same strain that might barely slow down a strong and healthy young adult could have devastating consequences for someone in infancy, in their 80s, or who for whatever reason has a weakened immune system. Every year, however, people who had been the very picture of health days before die suddenly from the flu. How does that happen? It should be noted first that, despite the alarming numbers above, death from the flu, even the current coronavirus, is a highly unusual event. Even Please see JUST THE FLU? page 3
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real, and that the basic precautions recommended by public health experts are legit. We’ve gone from 60 million cases worldwide on Thanksgiving Day to well over 100 million in late January. In the United States, confirmed cases on Thanksgiving Day were well above 12 million. Exactly two months later (on Jan. 27) that number had more than doubled, exceeding 25 million. The U.S. death toll has grown similarly: it was over 262,000 on Thanksgiving, and on January 27 it was almost 428,000. To put that another way, it took more than 9 months to reach 262,000 deaths, but in just the past two months another 166,000 have died. If we are at war against this pandemic, as some people have said, we’re all troops, whether we like it or not. In a worst-case scenario, it’s a kill or be killed situation. Maybe we’ll escape the COVID bullet, but it makes sense to improve our odds by taking every possible precaution available. On this first
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anniversary it’s instructive to think back to some of the rosy predictions we heard, like the then-president saying we’ll get things open again by Easter. Maybe he was right. After all, he never specified what year he was referring to. Maybe he meant Easter 2022. We might be able to break up with COVID and end this abusive relationship sooner by listening to the recommendations of public health experts. Get vaccinated as soon as you’re able. Before then (and after), keep wearing masks, keep avoiding crowds, keep hand sanitizing. And keep hoping there is no second anniversary. +
to find your fit!
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