Bob Ike’s blog

I had a COVID test last week Thursday!  The real deal where they stick a test tube brush up your nose halfway to your brain and give it a good scrape.   I got hit so hard by some bug in the middle of the night Tuesday, I told enough to the triage nurse the next day to tick off enough items that she referred me to the COVID hotline nurse who got me an urgent appointment in COVID respiratory clinic.  The Nurse Practitioner who saw me thought I just had a strept throat, but did the swab anyway.  Weeks ago I had set up a Zoom get together for some of the Vicksburg High class of ’70 (46 emails on my list, 10-12 have been signing in).  I was feeling crappy enough that morning I had my doubts I’d be much of a participant.  I sent out an email to the 46 telling them this, and mentioning the COVID stuff.  I took my first penicillin later that afternoon and felt enough better by 7 PM to take part in the Zoom.  My friend and VHS classmate Jim Northam’s invite list – for the small party at his lake house he’s throwing instead of the 50^th reunion we were supposed to have the night before – looks a lot like my Zoom list.  Some intending to go to his party are sensitive about this communicable disease stuff.  One – Forrest – even emailed me (something he never does anymore) on Friday to ask about my test results.  I assured him that both the strept and COVID tests were negative.  I began to worry that perhaps some of the other guests might not be so forward with their concerns, but nevertheless uncomfortable with the situation.  For them, I constructed a placard with my COVID test results on one side and “CLEAN” in big letters on the other.  Forrest was not completely placated by my placard, sure that I was still going to give him whatever it was I’d had.

I’m all better, still with some penicillin to finish.  I was pretty limp Saturday afternoon after several hours in that withering July sun, but mercifully it got cooler by evening and I perked up.  One consequence of the illness was I went 48 hours with no alcohol other than some sips of wine while Zooming.  Bug had totally taken away my tasted for beer.  Some bug.  Think how thin I could get if I could isolate that active principle.  Happy to say I’ve totally recovered on that front.

The bioassay has been incubating for 6 days now, and there have been no positives.  All of Northam’s guests are as well now as before. So I wasn’t carrying some killer culture-negative superbug ready to wipe out my friends despite my sign, test results and penicillin.  That’s good.  These are all special friends.  The old ones are best.  So glad they’ll all get to grow a little older.

I’m taking the lazy way out today, letting some other writer tell you something I think you’d like to know. I’m still not good for much after some bug hit me so hard Monday night to tally up enough points to earn a COVID test, the up the nose with a test tube brush kind. But I feel so much better after just 2 of the penicillins the NP prescribed me for what she thought was a strept throat, I think the only COVID stat I’ll be adding to is “number tested”. I get my results later today.

Steve Hayward, a political writer not a physician or scientist, wrote today in Powerline about a study reported yesterday in Lancet in which the investigators scrutinized COVID stats from 50 countries, seeing how they relate to population demographics in those countries, and to the government policies in each country. I’ll let Mr. Hayward tell you the details, but 3 things that struck me were: 1) it hurts to be rich and fat (“ Increased mortality per million was significantly associated with higher obesity prevalence and per capita gross domestic product (GDP).“), 2) border closings and lockdowns did not have an effect of COVID mortality, and 3) smoking could be protective, which I’d written about before (https://wordpress.com/block-editor/post/theviewfromharbal.com/448). Of no surprise was their finding that recovery rate were better in countries with better health care systems.

Since many of our leaders are itching to do it all over again, maybe we should look at what we did the first time and not repeat our mistakes. The Lancet study is a start. https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/07/were-the-lockdowns-effective-at-all.php

For those of you who want to straight to the source, here ya go: https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S2589-5370%2820%2930208-X

With this pandemic you never know what the next piece of news will be, or what part of the world it will come from. Every once in a while it’s good news, and todays item is very much that. And we shouldn’t be surprised it originates from that little sliver of the Levant on the Mediterranean that houses a lot of the smartest people in the world. Thank God for Israel. The Israelis don’t claim all the credit for today’s feat. They had help from Mt. Sinai, the one in New York City.

Not that I can come close to getting into the head of a scientist at Hebrew U. or Mt. Sinai, let alone duplicate the workings there, but I think it went something like this:

1. coronavirus infected lungs accumulate fat
2. cells stoked with fat support more efficient replication of coronavirus
3. drugs exist to reduce fat accumulation
4. let’s do the experiment!

Despite what those emails you get say, there aren’t any drugs to keep you from putting on fat. But attempts to develop drugs that alter lipid (fat) metabolism have going on since cholesterol was declared a problem. Since 1976, when the Japanese biochemist Akira Endo of the Sankyo Company isolated a factor from the fungus Penicillium citrinum which he identified as a competitive inhibitor of 3-hydroxy-3-methyl-glutaryl-coenzyme A reductase (HMG-CoA reductase), we’ve had some pretty good drugs for this. Dr. Endo’s compound, which he named compactin or mevastatin, was the first statin to be administered to humans. It took 20 years to prove them safe and effective, and in 1996 Lipitor was released. The first cholesterol drug was clofibrate (Atromid-S), which increases the activity of extrahepatic lipoprotein lipase (LL), thereby increasing lipoprotein triglyceride lipolysis (fat breakdown!). Chylomicrons (the form fat takes to float around in your blood after you absorb it) are degraded, VLDLs (very low density lipoporotein, fat and protein complexes that can get into cells) are converted to LDLs (low density lipoprotein), and LDLs are converted to HDL (“good” cholesterol!). All the ‘DLs carry triglyceride (fat), but density goes up as triglycerides are pealed or eaten away. Where did it come from? Well, in 1954 J. Cottet of Paris reported that farm workers exposed to an insecticide which was sprayed from the air over fields in the region of Clermont-Ferrand in France became ill and were found to have remarkably low plasma cholesterol. This insecticide (phenyl ethyl acetic acid) had been developed by the agricultural division of Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI). A chemist in ICI, Jeff Thorp, recognized the potential of this substance and synthesized an analogue, chlorophenoxyisobutyrate (later called Atromid-S or clofibrate). Thorp contact Michael Oliver of the University of Edinburg to gauge his interest, which was substantial. A few years with rats, then with any normal folks hanging around he could cajole to get the dose right (no review boards in those days), then finally into clinical trials in 1964. The first big trial, conducted under the auspices of the World Health Organization, was a disappointment, with excess non-cardiac deaths and gallstones being problems. Although it never received FDA approval, clofibrate was the only cholesterol drug around in the 60s and early 70s. Other safer and more effective agents were developed and Atromid-S was taken off the market completely in 1978. Fenofibrate (TriCor) was developed by Groupe Fournier SA of France, patented in 1969, came into medical use in France in 1975, and was approved by the FDA in 2004. Its mechanism of action is basically the same as clofibrate’s. While its use to lower cholesterol has mainly been supplanted by the statins, there are some patients with high cholesterol whose main problem is with triglycerides. For them, TriCor is the drug of choice. It also lowers uric acid, and is used off-label in some difficult-to-control gout patients. I have prescribed it for that purpose myself. The problems with gallstones and excessive non-cardiac death have not emerged.

Funny how what goes around comes around. A chemical made to kill pests gives rise to a drug that lowers cholesterol mainly by breaking down fat which then shows it can break down the fat in lungs on which our biggest pest of the day is feeding, killing said pest! Take that Mr. Corona! We’re gonna get you one way or another!

https://www.jpost.com/health-science/hebrew-u-scientist-drug-could-eradicate-covid-19-from-lungs-in-days-635028

Oliver M.  The clofibrate saga: a retrospective commentary.  Br J Clin Pharmacol. 2012 Dec; 74(6): 907–10.

It always used to be ten, that being the length of the pole with which you wouldn’t want to touch the ugly girl in school.  But ever since the CDC started making announcements in February about what we need to do to protect ourselves from COVID-19, it’s been six feet we’re to be kept apart, 2 good arm’s lengths of a pretty tall person.  WHO, lording over the rest of the world, mandates only 3 feet of separation (a meter, 39.37 inches, actually).  But where are they getting this stuff?  Well, it turns out they’re not totally making this up.

The obvious notion that respiratory illness is spread by droplets containing the bug emitted by the infected person dates to an 1897 report by Carl Flügge, a German bacteriologist and hygienist.  Engineer William Wells of Harvard reported in 1934 on the travel of droplets containing the most important respiratory pathogen of that day, tuberculosis. He used a very simple calculation to conclude that large droplets travelled about 3 feet but no more than 6 feet before falling to the ground.  He also discovered that small droplets were too light to succumb to gravity so could travel even further.  This informed the WHO’s guidelines.  The CDC leaned on more recent research, conducted after the 2003 SARS outbreak (COVID-19’s full name is “SARS-CoV-2”; it’s a very closely related coronavirus).  16 investigators coordinated by the CDC, but flung as far as Singapore, Taiwan, China and Thailand, looked at passengers who had acquired SARS on 3 long distance flights carrying known infected patients (https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa031349).  One flight carrying 315 passengers from Hong Kong to Taipei contained one passenger who only got sick later and did not infect anyone else.  In a flight from Hong Kong to Beijing, surprise, it was riskier to sit close to a SARS patient, with 8 of the 23 passengers who were seated in the same row as the patient or in the three rows in front of him becoming infected, as compared with 10 of the 88 passengers who were seated elsewhere (relative risk, 3.1; 95 percent confidence interval, 1.4 to 6.9). It is notable that 56 percent of the passengers who became infected were not seated in the same row as the index patient or in the three rows in front of him.  Of course, there’s no better place to promulgate an airborne infection than the cabin of an airplane with its pressurized non-circulated air. In a flight that followed from Hong Kong to Taipei, 4 of the infected passengers from the previous flight were among the 246 aboard.  Of 166 later interviewed, only one got sick (fever and cough) but tested negative for SARS. But there’s your 6 foot rule.

Dr. Bourouiba of The Fluid Dynamics of Disease Transmission Laboratory at MIT found that a good cough or sneeze can propel droplets as far as 23-27 feet (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2763852).  Yikes!  And that cloud can stay airborne for quite a while, even wending its way through air circulation systems.  More reason to get outdoors as much as possible.

Just last month, 6 authors on behalf of the COVID-19 Systematic Urgent Review Group Effort (SURGE) published in Lancet (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31142-9/fulltext) “Physical distancing, face masks, and eye protection to prevent person-to-person transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19: a systematic review and metanalysis”.  They identified 172 observational studies across 16 countries and six continents. Transmission of viruses was lower with physical distancing of 1 m or more, compared with a distance of less than 1 m; protection was increased as distance was lengthened.  Face mask use could result in a large reduction in risk of infection, with stronger associations with N95 or similar respirators compared with disposable surgical masks. Eye protection also was associated with less infection.

So, yep, getting farther away and putting up barriers seems to help protect.  But only this guy is really safe:

Sad state.  Me, I’m for as many to get infected as soon as possible to build up that herd immunity.  In the meantime, let me propose a couple of theme songs for this issue:

It’s a cliché by now, but stay safe.

Anthony Stephan Fauci, M.D., Head of the National Institutes for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), is a hero to many. Not me. But once upon a time he was. Just as I was entering Rheumatology (’82), Fauci had been publishing the results of his breakthrough treatment of the rare, sexy, and serious rheumatic disease polyarteritis nodosa. In affected patients, medium sized arteries, like the coronaries that supply the heart or the renals that feed the kidney, would become inflamed, often block up, and sometimes rupture, with sheer misery from the ongoing systemic inflammatory response followed by organ failure and death all too commonly. Corticosteroids could dampen the inflammation, but the doses needed were so massive as to leave the patient wracked with the complications of steroid excess: profound weight gain, weakened muscle, bones and skin, diabetes, hypertension, and susceptibility to infection. Fauci added an old chemotherapy poison – cyclophosphamide (Cytoxan), derived from mustard gas (yes, think WWI) – which knocked back the blood vessel inflammation much more effectively. Docs had been doing this now and then for 2 decades, but Fauci had the patients and organization of the NIH behind him, culminating in a nice New England Journal paper (N Engl J Med 301:235–238, 1979 https://www-nejm-org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM197908023010503). The “Fauci regimen” is still used for vasculitis, although some newer biologics, like rituximab, have begun to replace it. Many articles followed and there was a slim book with coauthor Thomas R. Cupps that became the bible for treating vasculitis.

I’ve never met Dr. Fauci, but I must have heard him speak. He used to be everywhere in rheumatology. But my friend Deb from Barnes has. She’s 4 years behind me so we never overlapped as house officers. As a 4th year medical student from Louisville, she rotated for a month at the NIH. Dr. Fauci was her main attending. Deb found him to be an excellent teacher, but was “intimidated by his intellect”. Deb towered over him (she’s 5’10” to his barely 5’7″), and couldn’t help but notice how he was turned out sartorially. In the NIH of the early 80s, everyone “dressed like janitors”, except for Deb’s attending. He showed up to work every day in a fresh 3 piece suit, his Phi Beta Kappa key on proud display. I guess dressing for success worked, as not long after that he left the world of vasculitis and jumped on the AIDS bandwagon. Immunosuppression – doing it and dealing with the complications – was what he was all about anyway, so why not look at it from the virus’ point of view? He quickly was placed at the top of his new institute – NIAID, funded for 2020 to the tune of $5.89 billion – and is into his fourth decade on the job. His training and experience is in immunology not infectious diseases, although he certainly bumped up against viruses in his time with AIDS. I wish they would trot out his boss – the esteemed future Nobel Prize winner and head of the NIH Francis Collins, once of U of M and a serious, devout and thoughtful doctor.

Once of my favorite writers – Victor Davis Hanson of Stanford’s Hoover Institute – has a piece today that begins with his take on Dr. Fauci. The whole piece also gets into presidential politics and racial issues (https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/05/an-industry-of-untruth), but I paste in below just the section on Dr. Fauci and coronavirus.

Viral confusion

Unfortunately few in authority have been more wrong, and yet more self-righteously wrong, than the esteemed Dr. Anthony Fauci. Given his long service as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and his stature during the AIDS crisis, he has rightly been held up by the media as the gold standard of coronavirus information. The media has constructed Fauci as a constant corrective of Trump’s supposed “lies” about the utility of travel bans, analogies with a bad flu year, and logical endorsement of hydroxychloroquine as a “what do you have to lose” possible therapy.

But the omnipresent Fauci himself unfortunately has now lost credibility. The reason is that he has offered authoritative advice about facts, which either were not known or could not have been known at the time of his declarations.

Since January, Fauci has variously advised the nation both that the coronavirus probably was unlikely to cause a major health crisis in the United States and later that it might yet kill 240,000 Americans. In January, he praised China for its transparent handling of the coronavirus epidemic, not much later he conceded that perhaps they’d done a poor job of that. He has cautioned that the virus both poses low risks and, later, high risks, for Americans. Wearing masks, Fauci warned, was both of little utility and yet, later, essential. Hydroxychloroquine, he huffed, had little utility; when studies showed that it did, he still has kept mostly silent.

At various times, he emphasized that social distancing and avoiding optional activities were mandatory, but earlier that blind dating and going on cruise ships were permissible. Fauci weighed in on the inadvisability of restarting businesses prematurely, but he has displayed less certainty hedged about the millions of demonstrators and rioters in the streets for a month violating quarantines. The point is not that he is human like all of us, but that in each of these cases he asserted such contradictions with near-divine certainty—and further confused the public in extremis.

In terms of how the United States “fared,” it is simply untrue that Europe embraced superior social policies in containing the virus. The only somewhat reliable assessments of viral lethality are population numbers and deaths by COVID-19, although the latter is often in dispute.

By such rubrics, the United States, so far, has fared better than most of the major European countries—France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Spain, Sweden, and Belgium—in terms of deaths per million. Germany is the one major exception. But if blame is to be allotted to public officials for the United States having a higher fatality rate than Germany, then the cause is most likely governors of high-death, Eastern Seaboard states—New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Connecticut in particular. They either sent the infected into rest homes, or did not early on ensure that their mass transit systems were sanitized daily as well as practicing social distancing.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, more than any other regional or national leader, is culpable for decisions that doomed thousands of elderly patients. He did not just suggest long-term-care facilities receive active COVID-19 patients, but ordered them to take them—knowing at the time that the disease in its lethal manifestations targeted the elderly, infirm, and bedridden.

Then in shameful fashion, after thousands died, Cuomo claimed that either the facilities themselves or Donald Trump were responsible for the deaths. In truth, in the United States, the coronavirus is largely a fatal disease in two senses: the vulnerable in just four states on the Eastern Seaboard that account for about 12 percent of the nation’s population but close to half of its total COVID-19 fatalities, and/or patients in rest homes or those over 65 years old with comorbidities.

Why are there currently spikes in cases among young people in warmer states and those of less population density in late June? No one is certain. But one likely reason is that millions of protestors for nearly a month crammed the nation’s cities, suburbs, and towns, shouting and screaming without masks, violating social distancing, and often without observant hand washing and sanitizing—most often with official exemption or media and political approval.

The period of exposure and incubation is over, and the resulting new cases—for the most part asymptomatic and clustered among the young—are thus no surprise. Still,  what is inconvenient is the rise in these cases—given that the Left either had claimed its mass demonstrations would not spread the disease, or, if they would, the resulting contagion was an affordable price to pay for the cry of the heart protests.

Perhaps, but the real cost of four weeks of protesting, rioting, and looting was to undermine the authority of state officials to enforce blatant violations of the quarantine. Obviously, if some can march with impunity in phalanxes of screaming, shoulder-to-shoulder protestors, while others are jailed as individuals trying to restart a business, then the state has lost its credibility with people and they will simply ignore further edicts as they see fit. Now what adjudicates quarantines are the people’s own calibrations of their own safety.

Mismanagement of the virus? There have been four disastrous official policy decisions: sending patients into rest homes; allowing millions en masse for political reasons to violate state mandates on masks and social distancing; retroactively attempting to reissue quarantine standards that their advocates and authors had themselves earlier de facto destroyed; and consistently issuing pandemic alerts solely on the flawed basis of new positive cases, without distinguishing those who were asymptomatic, or who were infected and recovered without ever being tested, or who were asymptomatic and tested positive for antibodies, or who were only briefly ill, recovered, and by no means still a case-patient.

Sorry if I seem to be getting lazy by just posting other’s articles. I’ve posted several times about Plaquenil and Mr. Corona. Me, if I were on the front lines, I’d be taking it just like President Trump is. But this study, conducted by our neighbors at Henry Ford in Detroit, didn’t focus on that aspect. What is it that people have against old, cheap, available and safe?

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/trump-touted-covid-19-drug-hydroxychloroquine-works-according-new-study

Those whining lupoids and rheumatoids are just going to have to share. We’ve got a life-and-death pandemic here. Plus cook up those vats, Sanofi-Aventis, Covis and Concordia!

I’ve written about this before. But this is getting ridiculous, bordering on false religion.

Scott Morefield in Townhall today weighed in quite thoroughly and intelligently https://townhall.com/columnists/scottmorefield/2020/07/03/the-most-powerful-argument-against-forced-universal-masking-that-you-wont-read-in-the-establishment-media-n2571794

Hall and Oats sang it well

Happy Independence Day. Be

I’ve found the link goes to an article in which half of a key paragraph is blocked out by an advertising bar I sure couldn’t purge. So here’s the unadulterated text:

Anytime things go from widely disputed to sudden, virtually-overnight national “scientific consensus,” it’s probably a good idea to be a wee bit skeptical. So it goes with the forced universal masking issue. We’ve obviously run quite the gamut on this, from being told not to wear them at all while the pandemic was at its peak — and everyone and their neighbor was crowding and swapping moisture particles in Lowe’s and Walmart aisles across America — to the now almost cultlike, lockstep message from politicians, the media and every leftist still too frightened to come out of their basement that not wearing masks in every possible setting is pretty much the equivalent to stabbing grandma in the heart. 

It’s all a farce, of course — absurd theater forced upon us by people who would have probably believed in witches a few centuries ago. Now that the Karen-caucus has managed to browbeat most Republican lawmakers and even President Trump into some degree of at least verbal submission, they apparently expect the rest of us rubes to take their word for it and follow along. They think if they condescendingly say the words “I wear the mask to protect you and you wear the mask to protect me” enough, everyone will mindlessly obey. And if you don’t, they want to use the force of law to punish you severely.CARTOONS | HENRY PAYNEVIEW CARTOON

No, the ongoing, relentless, unceasing crusade to force every American to wear masks to “stop the spread” of coronavirus isn’t about to end anytime soon, if ever. Even with deaths declining, they keep the pot stirred up with panic porn about spikes in new cases and hospitalizations in southern and western states. Nevermind the fact that the so-called “surge” in hospitalizations in Texas turned out to be, as Fox News medical correspondent Dr. Marc Siegel noted, mostly people getting “elective” surgeries that had long been delayed due to coronavirus. So yeah, if you’re a dishonest media hack I guess you could call those “coronavirus-related.” However, the reality isn’t what the media panic-inducers want to convey, which is probably why you thought the hospitals were getting filled with actual, life-threatening COVID-19 cases until you read this.

As far as whether or not masking actually works to “stop the spread” of coronavirus, I can point to studies (assuming – and this is a big assumption – that Big Tech allows them to remain online), and the masking proponents can as well. We can go back and forth on the potential long-term dangers posed by non-medically trained people wearing, breathing through, touching and constantly fiddling with veritable Petri dishes for several hours a day (I’m right, they’re wrong, but whatever …). We can even debate whether forced-masking is truly an infringement on personal freedoms (it is) or discuss the validity of the view, popular among many go-along-to-get-along Christians these days, that masking is somehow the key to “loving your neighbor” (it’s not).

Does masking work? (Maybe.) How well? (Hard to say.) Is it 100 percent safe? (Doubt it. Even assuming you’re getting enough oxygen, how can breathing in your own germs all the time be ‘safe’?) Does God say one must put on a face diaper to properly “love your neighbor”? (LOL Uh, no.) Should freedom-centric societies force it on their citizens who aren’t obviously sick? (Hell no!) Certainly, we can argue over any of those issues and maybe never come to an agreement. I’ll admit it has become a politicized issue. Either position can sound convincing when considered without looking at the other side, and people generally have by-and-large made up their minds before even weighing the other side of their own view.

However, what most advocates ignore is one key observation that makes forced universal masking an insane and unnecessary policy choice in most situations, and that is this: even if masking worked, wasn’t dangerous at all and was not seen by millions as a pernicious tool of social control, I see no valid reason why we would want to stop the spread of the virus at this point. 

There, I said it. The most powerful argument against universal masking is that it could in fact work to slow the spread of coronavirus. Please stay with me. I’m not saying we shouldn’t protect those who are vulnerable to the virus. Had we properly protected those in nursing homes, for example, we could have saved half the people who actually have died from this thing. Nevertheless, the facts are these: the virus is spreading at a rapid rate, but deaths have not spiked and have even decreased. The average age of those who are getting it is significantly younger than it was two months ago. And we’re not sure about this yet, but it also seems to have mutated into a weaker version that is more transmissible but less lethal than the version we saw in April.

The fact is, for all the suffering COVID-19 has caused among the elderly and immunocompromised, the actual death rate currently stands at less than half a percent and is declining rapidly as antibody studies come to light. The CDC recently estimated that 10 times the known cases have likely had the disease already and recovered. That’s probably a lowball estimate, but it equates to upwards of 10 percent of the U.S. population. As young people spread this seemingly milder version around while older folks take precautions, we’re ever closer to reaching herd immunity, which one recent study said can be attained with as little as 43 percent contracting the disease. That may still be a few months away, but in all honesty, it could be our only way out of this. They keep talking about vaccines, but no successful coronavirus vaccine has ever been produced and there’s little reason to think it will be now, nor that anything they roll out this quickly will be truly safe anyway. 

So, if we aren’t overwhelming hospitals and people aren’t dying in droves, community spread is actually a good thing, especially when most cases are either mild or asymptomatic. Yes, it would take several months to get any degree of herd immunity, but that would surely be better than living forever like we’ve been living the past three months, no? What’s the alternative, living with this virus on the prowl for years, even decades? Masks forever? Endless, rotating shutdowns? The end of mass gatherings and sports? And if Democrats win, God forbid, an ever-encroaching police state hellbent on using this virus to torment us and our liberties until their Bolshevik dreams become a reality?

Dr. Scott Atlas, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and the former chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center, also made the case during a recent Fox News appearance: “We like the fact that there’s a lot of cases in low-risk populations because that’s exactly how we are going to get herd immunity, population immunity. When low-risk people with no significant problem handling this virus, which is basically 99% of people, get this and they become immune … they block the pathways of connectivity to more contagious, older, sicker people.”

Truly, is there any logical reason why those who are elderly, immunocompromised or even frightened about the virus couldn’t wear a mask that really protects them, like an n95, and let everyone else live their lives? Like it or not, herd immunity could be our only way out of this mess, our only way back to any sense of normalcy. The quicker that arrives, the safer those truly vulnerable to this epidemic will be.

t

As our neighbors the Oldanis and us stood six feet apart from each other in their front yard several sunny afternoons ago, we couldn’t help but gripe a little bit.  None of us is really like that, and we’re all managing to have a pretty good time these days despite COVID.  Beer helps, as it always does, and the Oldanis enjoy their brew almost as much as Kathy and I do.  But such behavior has consequences, not just the calories that would accumulate if we didn’t walk everywhere.  No, it’s a space problem: the ever enlarging corner of the garage where the empties go.  By Governor Whitmer’s Executive Order 2020-21 (COVID-19) https://www.mlive.com/public-interest/2020/03/read-michigan-gov-whitmers-entire-coronavirus-stay-at-home-order.html

can and bottle returns were among those commercial activities suspended as she determined that they are not necessary to sustain or protect life.  You can still buy booze in our state, thereby sustaining and protecting our lives, to be sure.  But our empties have sure piled up.  As of May 28,  Michiganders are sitting on about 500 million returnable cans and bottles worth $50 million https://www.mlive.com/news/2020/05/michiganders-pile-up-50m-in-unredeemed-can-bottle-deposits.html.

Tom had a solution.  I’ll tell you about it in a little bit.  But first more about the empties.

Of the 10 states with bottle return programs, only Michigan shut down its program completely.

Come June 15, Michiganders will be able to start taking their bottles and cans back https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/more-sports/michigan-reopening-bottle-returns-starting-june-15/ar-BB14Tsrd.  Of course, there will be restrictions: only 250 containers ($25) per day per person, and returns can only be to bottle return facilities housed at the front of the store or in separated areas and serviced by reverse vending machines, meaning they require little person-to-person contact.  The stores selling you the beer and pop have of course been keeping all those dimes.  What happens to that?  It turns out that stores always collect more deposits than they redeem.  The Department of the Treasury requires them to keep track.  There’s even a term for that difference, the “escheat”.  And guess who gets most of that?  The state snags 75% to spend on “environmental programs” while they let the poor store owner keep the rest, a token of appreciation for handling all those empties.  That $50 mill may seem like a big number.  But there was nearly $394 million in deposits charged and $350 million collected in 2018, the latest publicly available numbers.

Here are the numbers for the Ike/Clark household.  As of this morning, we’ve accumulated 704 cans and 39 bottles.  236 are 16 ouncers, and the total capacity of all the containers is 9,860 ounces.  Figuring the IPAs we favor have about 200 calories per 12 ounce serving, or 164,333 1/3d since the can ban.  That’s 1264 beer calories a day for each of us.  Being that my jeans still fit like it was March 23, and my sweetheart looks the same, that’s a lot of walking.  Putting numbers to the garage space problem, my neatly arranged stack occupies 24 square feet of floor space.  But space is not flat.  Reaching a height of 3 ½ feet, that’s 84 cubic feet.  To compare, a conventional full size kitchen refrigerator, which is almost twice as tall as my stack, runs about 53 cubic feet.

The Oldanis have a different pastime: horses.  Not riding, but caring for them.  Their son, Keegan, now a Nebraska sophomore, began to volunteer at the local horse rescue shelter at the advice of his sister Kaelan, a recent UofM aerospace engineering grad.  He and his parents now go at least weekly to Starry Skies equine rescue and sanctuary www.starryskiesequinerescueandsanctuary.com, one of the largest equine rescues in Southern Michigan where they divert equines from the slaughter pipeline, from abuse cases, or from police seizures.  Sometime during the shutdown, someone at Starry Skies got the idea of converting those piled up empties into cash for the horses.  So they accept donations of empties, planning to sit on them until the Governor rescinds order 2020-21.  Payday is a little over a week away . Early afternoon today, Tom and Kara loaded up their truck and off it went.

Now I and especially Kathy, who has always been fond of space, which after all is the final frontier.   Kathy and I saw it as way to free up 84 cubic feet are reveling in our reclamation.

I know we could have been $75 richer had we just waited 9 more days.  But now we have a little more space right now and the horsies are going to get a little more help.  I think we made out o.k.  We’re having a beer to celebrate.