COVID<\/a> virus and a few things about it that you may or may not know or find interesting.<\/p>\nOh, and I realize that many people out there do not believe COVID even exists.\u00a0 But I\u2019d just say, it\u2019s ok to believe it exists and still feel that governments over reacted or conveniently used it for whatever purpose they may have.\u00a0 I believe everyone is entitled to their opinion of the viruses mortality rate or even if it is the cause of people getting sick, but to deny its existence is a bit extreme to me.\u00a0 To suggest it\u2019s mortality rate is likely much, much lower than it is reported to be is not ridiculous, since it\u2019s highly likely many people that got it never reported it at all.\u00a0 That would completely invalidate the stats on mortality rates since the higher the number of cases the lower the mortality rate.\u00a0 And for people to suggest that having almost zero cases of the seasonal flu reported this last year means that everything was reported as COVID is also entirely plausible.\u00a0 Although an equally valid argument can be made that the same preventative measures that were supposed to knock down the spread of COVID also knocked down the spread of the seasonal flu.\u00a0 The reality is we will never know the true number of cases or mortality rate.\u00a0 But for the purposes of this article let\u2019s at least imagine that COVID in fact is a new strain of the SARS Corona virus.\u00a0 By the way, new strains of viruses are happening daily, well, actually hourly or every minute.\u00a0 New strains of viruses and bacteria happen constantly from mutations.\u00a0 Almost all mutations result in viruses that don\u2019t survive but every once in a while you get a new strain and it has slightly different characteristics and that\u2019s happening all the time.\u00a0 Fortunately only rarely do they affect us.<\/p>\n
The first thing let\u2019s look at is the difference between COVID and the regular seasonal flu.\u00a0 This question seems to come up a lot and I\u2019ve heard just about every possible poor answer out there.\u00a0 In my opinion, and it\u2019s not so humble so I didn\u2019t say that, the complete chaotic handling of the COVID pandemic could have been avoided if governments had just been truthful and accurate about the virus from the beginning as we learned about it.\u00a0 But if you mix year long lock downs with economic destruction and taking away of people\u2019s freedoms with the same people not really seeing the impact of the virus, you get understandable divisiveness and rioting and all the other crap that\u2019s hitting the fan right now.\u00a0 Said another way, if you take people\u2019s freedoms and livelihood away from them but many of them don\u2019t even know someone who\u2019s had COVID, never mind died from it, what should we expect to happen?!\u00a0 If a third of the population had died from COVID then people would request lockdowns and not fight them.\u00a0 By the way, MERS, which is another Corona virus that caused an outbreak in 2012 in the Middle East, had roughly a 34% mortality rate.\u00a0 That is, if you got MERS, you had a one in three chance of dying. \u00a0 That is a virus that would warrant a potential lockdown in my opinion.\u00a0 But when the mortality rate from COVID-19 is less than 2%, I think it\u2019s understandable that many people believe the reaction to the pandemic was worse than the pandemic itself.<\/p>\n
So, what is a virus?\u00a0 Both COVID and Influenza (The Flu) are different types of viruses.\u00a0 They have a lot in common but some things that are quite different too.\u00a0 One of the challenging things is that they cause very similar symptoms. So symptomatically it\u2019s difficult to easily identify which one you may have.\u00a0 There are some differences though, for example, the regular strains of influenza do not make you lose taste or smell but at least some COVID patients report this to be a symptom.\u00a0 There are some other key differences too.\u00a0 The Flu spreads faster.\u00a0 But according to current statistics, it appears as though COVID is more dangerous.\u00a0 Another analogy I like to use is that The Flu is like an airplane and COVID-19 is like a car.\u00a0 They\u2019ll both get you places but the airplane is faster (spreads faster) and being in a car is a little more dangerous (COVID has a slightly overall higher mortality rate).\u00a0 The Flu affects kids and adults of all ages and can be deadly at any age.\u00a0 COVID-19 appears to have almost no impact on children that get infected and has by far the largest impact on elderly people with co-morbidities (other health issues that make them more vulnerable and less able to handle a virus infection).\u00a0 So, if you look at cross sections of the population, for example healthy people under 50 years old, the Flu is far more dangerous.\u00a0 But if you look at people over 70 with health issues, COVID-19 is much more dangerous to them.<\/p>\n
The first thing to note is viruses are not bacteria.\u00a0 So they can\u2019t be treated with antibiotics.\u00a0 Penicillin and other antibiotics have no impact on a virus.\u00a0 The best analogy I can think of to describe a virus, and you\u2019ll discover in this article that I\u2019m the king of analogies, is to imagine a beach ball that has a bunch of hypodermic needles sticking out of it.\u00a0 Viruses are uber simple beings.\u00a0 They really can be imagined to be a hypodermic needle and they even act like one.\u00a0 When they bump into a cell in your body they literally stick into it (or realistically bind to it).\u00a0 Sometimes you\u2019ll hear scientists talk about the spike or spike protein when talking about the vaccines, but we\u2019ll talk about vaccines later in this article.\u00a0 That spike is the needle part of the virus and it\u2019s what \u201cpunctures\u201d your cells.\u00a0 It also is made of protein and proteins are made up of amino acids and when those are strung together they also make up the blueprint code of DNA and RNA that makes you unique.\u00a0 So when you hear the term \u201cspike protein\u201d it\u2019s referring to the material that your body can recognize on the needle part of the virus.\u00a0 So, when this spike\/needle punctures your cell, the virus injects its own DNA into your cell.\u00a0 I won\u2019t go into how cell division works and how DNA and RNA work together to replicate the cells in your body, you can go find your old 12th grade biology text for that!\u00a0 But what basically happens is your cell is fooled into thinking that the virus\u2019 DNA strand that it shot into your cell is something that your body should make copies of. \u00a0 Basically your cell is hijacked and your own cell starts making more viruses, copying the viruses DNA over and over.\u00a0 Your cells become virus factories!\u00a0 So, you can see how it is difficult for your immune system to fight something like that because first it has to recognize that the virus is actually not part of you.\u00a0 And that isn\u2019t easy if your own cells are making it.<\/p>\n
This hyper production of viruses is happening in your body over a short period of time and a key point is when your body recognizes this virus thing isn\u2019t supposed to be there.\u00a0 That\u2019s when your immune system kicks in and figures out a way to recognize it.\u00a0 The way it does this is by \u201clearning\u201d some part of its DNA strand that makes it unique.\u00a0 DNA that is in the nucleus of every cell in your body, is made up of molecules called amino acids.\u00a0 There are four types of these acids used as the building blocks for DNA.\u00a0 They are nicknamed A, C, T, G for the first letters in their name, adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), and thymine (T).\u00a0 All of the DNA that makes you who you are is stored in every cell of your body regardless of whether that cell is in your stomach, your eyeball or toe.\u00a0 The order of these letters is the code that makes your eyes blue, your hair brown, etc.\u00a0 For example, let\u2019s say that the code string of letters for blue eyes is AAGTCAGG on some strand of DNA in your cell\u2019s nucleus.\u00a0 Someone with brown eyes might have the gene that has the code AAGGCAGG on it and that one single change of the code makes an entirely different color of eyes.\u00a0 It\u2019s pretty fascinating really!<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s get back to the virus.\u00a0 Let\u2019s say the protein that makes up the COVID viruses spike (remember the needle part of the beach ball) has a code of TTGCA.\u00a0 Maybe that\u2019s the part that your body eventually recognizes as foreign or maybe it\u2019s another code for a different part of the virus.\u00a0 But ultimately, your immune system will recognize some part of the viruses code and seek out to destroy it.\u00a0 The immune system is an amazing thing, but sometimes it also can be a bit of a drama queen!\u00a0 That is, it can over react.\u00a0 It may fire up the internal stove and make your body temperature go way up (create a fever) seeing if that will help kill the virus.\u00a0 Or swell up and add a lot of mucous to lung cells to prevent easy entry by more viruses.\u00a0 But a high fever can kill you or at least damage your organs if it\u2019s too high for too long.\u00a0 And reactions by your lungs can lead to viral or bacterial pneumonia.\u00a0 There are a lot of reactions your body may have but some of them aren\u2019t always helpful and in fact can make things much worse.\u00a0 In the case of COVID, the data seems to show that it\u2019s not the virus itself that causes people to die, it\u2019s almost always pneumonia.\u00a0 When you get pneumonia your lungs can\u2019t exchange oxygen from the air into your blood very well and what happens is your blood oxygen level begins to drop.\u00a0 If it drops too far your organs begin shutting down.\u00a0 Ultimately, that is almost always why people die from COVID-19.\u00a0 It\u2019s not the virus directly that kills people, it\u2019s the inability to get oxygen into their blood because of pneumonia, which really was triggered because of your immune system\u2019s over response to the disease.\u00a0 People that get the disease but don\u2019t get sick or only a little bit sick, generally have an immune system that didn\u2019t go into drama queen mode and their body stayed healthy enough to fight the virus and destroy it.\u00a0 So, contrary to the main stream media\u2019s demonization of anti viral medications and treatments that focus on fighting the pneumonia while your body deals with the virus, those treatments work!\u00a0 My wife, who is a doctor, just went through having COVID along with almost everyone in her immediate family!\u00a0 Thankfully everyone made it through it.\u00a0 But I firmly believe that was because, like me, my wife believes that the key is to keep an infected persons blood oxygen level as high as possible, use anti-viral medicines that have been proven over decades to be very effective in helping your body\u2019s immune system fight viruses and then weather the storm as best as possible.\u00a0 The bottom line, if the person who is infected with COVID-19 can keep their blood oxygen level up, they are almost guaranteed to live and their body will fight off and become immune to the virus, at least for some period of time while the antibodies (the guardians that watch for that same virus showing up again) continue to be produced by your body.<\/p>\n
Please note, the following statement is my personal opinion based on the data I\u2019ve seen and in no way is based on anything more than speculation.\u00a0 I believe that healthy young people who did die from COVID were treated improperly.\u00a0 It appears as though many cases where healthy people died from COVID it was when they were also intubated.\u00a0 Intubation is when, generally as an extreme measure, a tube is stuck down into your trachea (the windpipe tube to your lungs) to provide oxygen directly rather than using an oxygen mask.\u00a0 There are two issues I have with intubation.\u00a0 One is that any time you stick foreign things inside your body you increase the chance of infections.\u00a0 And two, intubation is a delicate procedure that requires extreme caution on the amount of pressure the oxygen is pumped into your lungs with.\u00a0 It is extremely easy to over pressurize the tubes to the point of rupturing your very sensitive oxygen exchanging alveoli lung cells.\u00a0 My personal belief is that, as sad as it seems, many people who died from COVID-19 that were intubated actually died from improper intubation. I read nurses accounts of many cases where the hospitals were so busy that interns were doing the intubation procedures and heavily over pressurizing the settings because they didn\u2019t know better.\u00a0 They may have inadvertently done the damage that killed an otherwise healthy patient who would have recovered if he had been treated properly.\u00a0 Again, that is pure speculation though, so let\u2019s get back to the facts!<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s talk a bit about vaccines.\u00a0 Nothing in the last year has caused more division among people it seems than whether one should be vaccinated or not.\u00a0 Let\u2019s try to keep this discussion to the facts and not make it political!\u00a0 The first fact is, properly made vaccines work.\u00a0 For example, almost no one gets polio anymore because the vaccines wiped out the disease almost entirely from the civilized world.\u00a0 In the early days, vaccines were made with what amounts to a weakened version of the actual virus.\u00a0 That is, a bunch of beat up viruses (obviously that\u2019s a simplification) are injected into a person and their immune system figured out it\u2019s a foreigner and combats it effectively since it doesn\u2019t have the strength to actually cause the disease.\u00a0 At least not normally.\u00a0 There are of course are cases where a weakened virus was strong enough to actually give the vaccinated person the disease.\u00a0 But this was rare enough to be easily outweighed by the threat of the virus itself.\u00a0 Over time scientists got better and better at weakening the viruses so this became less of an issue.\u00a0 And then one day some seriously smart scientist came up with the idea of using mRNA strands as the vaccine.\u00a0 It\u2019s actually a great idea although it too has had some bad press over the past year.\u00a0 But without diving into the details of how tRNA (transfer RNA) and mRNA (messenger RNA) work, let\u2019s just say they are the factory workers who make the copies of DNA so your cells can divide and refresh your body cells.\u00a0 So when you get an mRNA spike protein vaccine what you are really getting is a shot that has the building block strand of the spike (we said it was TTGCA in our example above) and that\u2019s it.\u00a0 So the vaccine can not give you the disease because it\u2019s not giving you a weakened version of the disease, it\u2019s only giving you a strand of the code that makes up the virus.\u00a0 Here comes another one of my world famous crappy analogies!\u00a0 Let\u2019s say you didn\u2019t want baseball players (they represent the virus) on your yard.\u00a0 So you taught your pit bull guard dog (your immune system) that it should attack baseball gloves.\u00a0 For weeks you rewarded your dog every time it attacked a baseball glove.\u00a0 Your dog doesn\u2019t know that the baseball player is the ultimate target, it doesn\u2019t even know what a baseball player looks like.\u00a0 But it\u2019s learned to hate baseball gloves!\u00a0 So, unfortunately for the next baseball player in uniform and wearing his glove steps into your yard!\u00a0 Your dog is going to rip off his glove if not his whole arm making him a useless baseball player.\u00a0 This is how the mRNA vaccines work.\u00a0 They never introduce the actual virus into your body like in the early days, they only train your body to recognize a part of the virus.\u00a0 In the case of the COVID-19 viruses it is generally the spike\/needle part.\u00a0 The moment the virus enters your body it is attacked because your immune system knows it\u2019s a foreigner immediately.\u00a0 So the virus doesn\u2019t get the head start it would have had if your body had to figure it out first.\u00a0 That is why, when infected with the actual virus, after being vaccinated, your body has a much better chance of becoming less sick or not noticeably sick at all.\u00a0 Of course, nothing is perfect and some people\u2019s immune systems didn\u2019t get the memo, and didn\u2019t create the proper antibodies to recognize and destroy the spikes on the virus that the vaccine was supposed to warn them about.\u00a0 But in general mRNA vaccines make logical sense.\u00a0 Of course if a variant mutation of the virus occurs and the spike changes a bit, your body won\u2019t recognize it and the vaccine will have been useless against the variant.\u00a0 But if the virus mutated but kept the same spikes then your body will destroy it because it recognized the spikes.\u00a0 So that\u2019s why the vaccine works against some variants but not others.<\/p>\n
Now having said that, I am perfectly empathetic with people who don\u2019t want to be vaccinated by a trial vaccine.\u00a0 In theory, the mRNA vaccines make sense and should be safe.\u00a0 But there just hasn\u2019t been enough history of this one to have any data supporting their safety.\u00a0 So anyone saying they are perfectly safe just can\u2019t say that.\u00a0 Because no one knows yet.\u00a0 The odds are very slim that there could be any long term adverse effects, but the odds are not zero.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s tackle another highly debated topic with just the facts.\u00a0 Masks!\u00a0 This one is quite simple and feel free to take the facts and apply them to yourself and your family as you see fit.<\/p>\n
If COVID-19 was an airborne virus it would be bad.\u00a0 But fortunately it\u2019s not, it can only travel from one person to another in liquid.\u00a0 That is, to get it you have to kiss someone with it or they would have to sneeze or cough on you and the droplets would have to land on your eye, nose or mouth or be quickly transferred there.\u00a0 And viruses are small.\u00a0 Almost all the masks people use today are made of materials that have space between them far bigger than the virus.\u00a0 Someone said it was like throwing sand at a chain link fence, some of the grains will hit the fence but 99.9% will pass right through.\u00a0 Having said that, the masks do stop a fair amount of the droplets.\u00a0 So if you cough with a mask on, other than the droplets that blow out the sides of the mask, at least most of the direct forward droplets would hit the mask and stop.\u00a0 But if a droplet of someone\u2019s spit lands on your mask and it contains the virus, the moment you inhale and the droplet evaporates, you are sucking those viruses right through and it\u2019s like you aren\u2019t wearing a mask at all.\u00a0 So in practicality, the masks DO help prevent someone who has COVID-19 from spreading it to some degree.\u00a0 Whatever droplets we\u2019re stopped from potentially spraying onto someone by the mask was helpful.\u00a0 But it in no way prevents you from getting COVID from someone else because if someone sneezes on your mask, you may just as well not be wearing one because you\u2019re sucking those babies in as if the mask didn\u2019t exist.\u00a0 So I\u2019m not saying masks are useless, just that they only prevent someone who already has the disease from spreading it but doesn\u2019t do anything for people that don\u2019t have it.\u00a0 But since we may be carrying the viruses without knowing it there is an argument for wearing one.\u00a0 Personally I hate the masks and because I have to travel a lot I have had 37 COVID tests as of the writing of this article and they have all been negative.\u00a0 So I really hate wearing them.\u00a0 But I do understand that at some point I could be a carrier so I follow the rules like a good little boy.\u00a0 But at some point we either trust the vaccines are effective or we don\u2019t and we need to drop the masks and become human again.\u00a0 Personally I prefer the countries that don\u2019t have mask mandates like Nicaragua and spend as much time as I can there.\u00a0 There the government decided to let people make their own personal choice on wearing masks.\u00a0 If you want to you can, if you don\u2019t want to you don\u2019t have to.\u00a0 When I\u2019m in Nicaragua I don\u2019t wear a mask because if people want to protect themselves from me then just don\u2019t hang out with me.\u00a0 And if I\u2019m in a meeting, where others are concerned about it, I will put a mask on during the meeting out of respect for them and for the possibility I have contracted the disease and they can\u2019t willingly avoid me!<\/p>\n
Finally, one last point I\u2019d like to make about viruses in general that may help you sleep at night.\u00a0 Viruses are everywhere and mutate to create new strains constantly.\u00a0 But being a successful virus is hard!\u00a0 Viruses are parasites and they need a host to be successful.\u00a0 If the virus kills the host then it ultimately dies out too. Especially if it kills the host too quickly before it can spread to a new host.\u00a0 That\u2019s why extremely deadly viruses like Ebola are actually somewhat more easily contained and have never had global outbreaks.\u00a0 As sick as it sounds, the virus is too deadly too quickly to be truly successful.\u00a0 It kills its hosts before they can often even come in contact with someone else for the virus to hop onto.\u00a0 Viruses don\u2019t think, they have no brain, they just accidentally mutate.\u00a0 Something, such as radiation or some other factor, causes one strain to mutate and almost every time the mutation makes the virus unviable, aka it dies. Once in a while though a mutation results in a version (strain) that is more deadly or spreads more easily or goes from droplet to airborne, etc.\u00a0 But it\u2019s just as likely that the new strain, if it survives the mutation, will be less harmful, not spread as easily or the best option for us would be if a new strain had little or no impact on the health of humans but had enough similarities to the existing strains that it helped us to teach our immune system about it.\u00a0 That is, if a harmless mutation version that had the same spike on it as COVID-19 became transmitted in an airborne manner, it could spread through the entire global population and basically immunize all of humanity against any strain with that same spike.\u00a0 In fact, a human version of that could potentially be built\u2026but let\u2019s not give Wuhan any ideas, I think they\u2019ve done enough for one century!<\/p>\n
Patrick Hiebert<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\nPartner \u2013 EcoVillages
\nwww.EcoVillages.Life<\/a>
\nDesigners of amazing eco-sensible, sustainable communities
\n\u2026and part time weird science guy!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"So, what is a virus?\u00a0 Both COVID and Influenza (The Flu) are different types of viruses.\u00a0 They have a lot in common but some things that are quite different too.\u00a0 One of the challenging things is that they cause very similar symptoms. So symptomatically it\u2019s difficult to easily identify which one you may have.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":308,"featured_media":44979,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false},"categories":[26540,3],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[35652,35658,35651,1870,35654,34829,26726,35661,30340,35655,1855,35649,35660,35653,35659,1793,35656,35657,21396,35650],"acf":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/covid-19-for-dummies.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44975"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/308"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44975"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44975\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44981,"href":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44975\/revisions\/44981"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44975"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=44975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}