PELICANS AND THE CORONAVIRUS OVERREACTION

While in Florida recently, I watched pelicans dive swiftly into sparkling blue water to snare fish. As I watched, someone told me that pelicans go blind from repeatedly hitting the water, facefirst, with such force. And then they die, because they can’t see and catch fish.

I’ve taken, read and empirically observed some Biology. So when I heard this, I thought, “How did pelicans survive as a species if this was true?”

I just looked it up. It’s not true.

Pelicans: a misconception of how they die | Stray Magnet | Helping Lost, Stray, and Abandoned PetsStray Magnet | Helping Lost, Stray, and Abandoned Pets

I had the same intuitive reaction at the much-hyped beginning of the Coronavirus “pandemic.” Humans, like pelicans — like every species that humans haven’t killed off — are survivors. We’ve proved it by surviving.

Diseases— especially airborne SARS diseases —are self-limiting. If it were possible for an infectious disease to kill so many people, 7.7 billion of us wouldn’t have been around 12 months ago, when the socially, psychologically and economically destructive “two weeks” of lockdowns began. 7.8 billion of us wouldn’t be here a year later.

Over its history, and on a population-wide basis, humanity hasn’t been saved by hospitals or vaccines. These have aided only a fraction of the populace. By far, the biggest increases in human life spans were driven by pre-vaxx improvements in nutrition and sanitation over a century ago; if people have enough good food to eat and a reasonably clean, nonviolent environment, they tend to live a long time. Additional, and more incremental, increases in life spans from the 1960s-2020 have been chiefly driven by a sharp decline in smoking rates, from 50% in the early 1960s to 15% today. Smoking takes 10 years off a life.

Under normal circumstances, some some old, sick people die. That’s how life is. The number of deaths has increased only marginally during the past 12 months; most of those said to have died from — really with — Coronavirus were already very old, ill or obese. At worst, Coronavirus might be said to be “pulling forward” deaths in those populations by a few weeks or months.

Normal life must go on for the 99.9% healthy/under 65, who survive infection without any medical intervention. And for nearly as high a percentage of those over that age. Despite Conronavirus, the United States has added over one million people in the past year, while the world has added 80 million. Any uptick in mortality in the past year will be offset by a commensurate decrease in mortality in the year to come.

The sky isn’t falling because of Coronavirus. It never was falling.

And locking down healthy people hasn’t helped. It has only victimized hundreds of millions of the young/healthy.

But as with pelicans, misinformation abounds.