Two Videos of People with COVID-19, from Early 2020

These are videos from April 2020. I’m writing this in January 2022. We’re still in this pandemic.

That dude had diabetes and a load of snacks. That’s going to make his blood thicker, which impedes the ability of blood to deliver oxygen to the fingertips and toes. That’s why diabetics lose their toes.

He thinks preventing gatherings isn’t worth it. OK, that’s straight up nuts to me. Preventing gatherings is what you do during an epidemic.

His anti-lockdown attitude got him a lot of press coverage in March 2020, as a COVID-19 survivor who was against shutting down.

Now, as of January 7 2022, we’re at over 800,000 dead, and going through our largest surge yet. Society here is a lot more “opened up” than it was during this initial surge.

Meanwhile, some other countries have seen far fewer deaths from COVID-19. China – 4,600. New Zealand – 51. Taiwan – 850. South Korea – 5,900. Australia – 2,300. Japan – 18,000. Vietnam – 33,000.

Vietnam isn’t doing that great, but it’s a poor country of 95 million people. California, possibly the wealthiest large place in the world, has a population of 40 million people, and around 66,000 deaths from covid.

Our covid response has been such an abysmal failure that people across the political spectrum have lost hope and are fatalistic, assuming that “we’re all going to get it,” and “sars-cov-2 will become endemic.”

They opine about their “freedoms” and “rights”, without noting that these rights rest on a foundation of good health.

Americans talk about “individualism”, but cannot tolerate solitude, and insist on gathering together in groups to commune with each other, even if it means spreading disease. Individualism, it seems, is partially about exacting random biological violence against others.

Unable to cope with what looks like global failure, Americans are blaming China for the pandemic, and violently lashing out at Asian people. (In Asia people are angry at China, but I doubt that it leads to random verbal and physical attacks.)

This video is also from March or April of 2020, when the disease wasn’t understood:

A recap of March 2020 from the South China Morning Post: