In an article by Chico Harlan and Stefano Pitrelli titled “Medieval Europeans didn’t understand how the plague spread. The response of the citizens of Florence, Italy wasn’t so different than ours,” I learned what I had thought I’d learn.

Not much in human nature has changed.

One of the worst plagues hit Florence in 1348 some 672 years ago, and when Harlan and Pitrelli recently went there to study it, what they found were the incredible similarities between that ancient, less medically informed time and now.

They discovered that borders were closed, strict rules were put in place —“but only some people paid attention.” They also discovered “there was a proliferation of conspiracy theories where outsiders and minorities were blamed.”

Inns and workshops were closed and some people shut themselves in while others ventured out with herbs, spices, and masks. As the plague continued and death counts went higher, others held fearless denial dinner parties that were attended by fewer and fewer people.

Ironically, the only thing that seemed to work in 1348 was to flee the cities and go to the countryside. We’ve seen exactly the same exodus occurring from our major cities.

One of the challenges of escaping to rural Western Pennsylvania is the proliferation of nonbelievers. It seems their personal philosophy is, “Don’t wear a mask.”  Sure, they still buckle their seat belts, threw away their cigarettes, and are avoiding those 200 calorie cans of soda, but now they walk smugly into public gatherings and say, “I don’t believe in masks. This is just the flu, and it would go away by November 4.”

?They also boldly look at those people scowling at them and say, “America is a free country, and you sheep can do whatever you want.” Then they go on to say, “I’m not wearing a mask, and I’m not going to socially distance myself from anyone.”

Several of these nonbelievers have gone into work and powered their way through what they thought was a little touch of the flu. At work, they spent the day close-talking with everyone and kept their required masks either firmly below their chin or at least below their noses like a bad pair of tighty whities.

?Some of them have held parties for their twenty closest friends to watch football games together while serving finger food and drinks that their unwashed fingers prepared.

?When their cough got very deep and they began feeling like the hydraulic lift at the local Mack truck garage, they went to the doctor without a mask and were quarantined in the parking lot until someone in a hazmat suit came to their car and stuck a Q-tip-type device all the way through their nose and practically up to their brain.  Not long after they found out they have COVID, but they still believed it would be long gone by November 4 because those nearly 220,000 dead are just skewed statistics.

?They then are told the place where they work had to close for business because everyone was exposed to COVID.  Oh, and that party they held? It’s turned into a super spreader event.

?So, now the school district has had to close, too because of one misnformed decision to take no precautions.

?If this were a true story, we would be outraged. Well, guess what?  It is a true story.?

?Here’s the worst part. We don’t know if some of those folks infected by Mr. Super Spreader are even going to live. Did you read that?

?Grandad’s Malibu, the Weber grill and his house might truly be “passed along” to those who survive, but the lives and treasure we’ve lost from collateral damage is a hell of a price to pay for more things.

?Wear your mask.  Seriously. Surgeons, RNs and techs do all day every day.

Washington is not focusing singularly on this virus as the enemy. COVID-19, SARS-2 Coronavirus should be a unifying factor for our country. Our political leadership is not seeing this tragic pandemic as a way to help us move our public health response more efficiently and quickly to accelerate our efforts to provide economic relief to all of those who need it.

Instead of working together for us, they are working overtime on tactics to divide Americans even more. Democrats are being portrayed as evil pessimists while Republicans are being identified as anti-virus militants, the liberators of our depressed economy.

Under the “Are you kidding me?” category: According to the AP, more than 70 people tested positive for coronavirus since the April 24 rally at the Wisconsin state capital. Michigan is working on legislation that may limit the carrying of AR-15s inside the State Capitol building.

Also in Michigan, a security guard was shot and killed by a family for attempting to enforce the “you must wear a mask policy” before entering an open establishment.

Several weeks ago, a lawsuit that may or may not go anywhere was filed against Fox News for violating the Washington State Consumer Protection Act because their national celebrity broadcasters falsely stated multiple times that the coronavirus is a hoax. At the same time, even though we all know the virus can be deadly 14,000 heroes have signed up to be voluntarily infected to assist in vaccine studies to help expedite the creation of a vaccine.

What do we know about this disease? Obviously, not as much as we don’t know.

Physicians in London, New York and elsewhere have reportedly seen an increase in children suffering from symptoms emulating Kawasaki disease with inflamed hearts. They have also identified numerous other unusual symptoms including the weakening of the heart muscles and disrupting its critical rhythm.

COVID-19 attacks kidneys so seriously that now, instead of a shortage of ventilators, we are seeing a need for more dialysis equipment. Besides the attacks to our nervous system that destroys taste and smell, the disease sometimes makes its way to the brain. If that’s not enough, 20 to 45-year-olds are suffering 50 percent higher than average numbers of strokes or are dying from blood clots due to inflamed blood vessels.

According to an article by Lenny Bernstein and Ariana Eunjung Cha, “It can begin with a few symptoms or none at all, then days later, squeeze the air out of the lungs without warning.

It picks on the elderly, people weakened by previous disease, and, disproportionately, the obese. It harms men more than women, but there are also signs it complicates pregnancies.”

We also have seen articles like this in the CDC where “the effects of COVID-19 suggests a disproportionate burden of illness and death among racial and ethnic minority groups.”

Throughout this, however, our president is continuing his battle against the Democratic governors by saying they are holding their citizens hostage while at the very same time due to an outbreak of COVID-19 in the West Wing of the White House, three of America’s top health professionals are quarantined in their homes.

So, we have to ask: What’s at stake here? Manufactured political divisions are now impacting aid for states as well. This is not a red or blue discussion. The opponent here is not us individually, not members of any party. The victims are members of the human race caused by the real enemy, COVID-19.

No one wants the economy to remain closed. Governors on both sides are attempting to balance the death-over-money equation, but the necessary arrows for the COVID quiver have been slow to arrive, and the needed instruction and supplies from the federal government have become an economic stand-off.

We all want freedom from our enemy. Stop the politicizing, and stop feeding these political war games, or we’ll die.

Things are gonna change after COVID

According to the medical examiners, the primary underlying conditions leading to death in the victims of this pandemic are hypertension and diabetes, chronic conditions brought on by environment and diet.

The fact that COVID is disproportionately impacting marginated communities should not be a surprise to anyone. A healthy public depends upon diet through fresh, healthy foods which are more expensive and in “Urban Food Deserts” almost impossible to find or afford. Plus, health is also related to the environment (think Flynt, Michigan), and sustainable employment.

We have produced so much vulnerability in the U.S. through our current circumstances that analyzing this disaster without properly taking into consideration our pre-existing health care crisis is, in itself, a crisis. Would we scrutinize this differently if we looked at our current system more holistically?

We have huge disparities in both our healthcare system and our public health system. We have been preparing for another pandemic since 1918, yet we were woefully unprepared for even the most basics of PPE, available ventilators, and ICU beds.

In an article titled “Disasters, Capitalism, and COVID-19” by Vincennes Adams, Naomi Klein describes disaster capitalism as a form of economics that responds to disasters in ways that promote “free-market, for-profit, corporate solutions.” She says, “It may succeed in creating company profits but ultimately fails in terms of democracy, fairness, and justice.”

She describes the Hurricane Katrina disaster as being caused, in part, by the privatization of the Army Corps of Engineers and the oil industry’s erosion of protective wetlands. The highest death tolls, financial, and material losses affected the most vulnerable social and economic groups. During the recovery, private sector contractors rewarded themselves richly while ordinary people were left to make it on their own.

I’m watching this same phenomenon unfold today with Community Health Centers across Pennsylvania as they try to get the needed Personal Protection Equipment. Wealthier health systems, States, and the Federal Government can buy the large quantities required to meet the corporate criteria for these purchases while the marginalized become further marginalized.

Why aren’t the flu, viral colds, heart disease, cancer and diabetes deaths considered disasters? It’s because of the immediacy of death with COVID. The author suggests: “Imagine how U.S. health care institutions and government responses might change if cancer, heart disease, and diabetes were framed in the same language and sense of urgency as COVID-19.”

According to the author, It’s because these diseases are “an outcome of allowing corporations to sell deadly, heart-disease producing foods and barely regulating cancer-causing chemicals at all.” This country has always had a very hard time determining the differences between the value of corporate profits vs.human life.

The article references a “pandemic industrial complex,” which, like the military industrial complex uses the disaster to form a framework in which government and financial resources are mobilized to leverage free market investing in the next big outbreak.

Global warming has contributed to fires, floods, hurricanes, and now unique viral mutations. The new prognosticators of these disasters are computational and zoonosis biologists, epidemiologists and geneticists.

What they have been able to point out to us is not necessarily the coming disasters as much as the pre-existing vulnerabilities, and they’ve been able to do it in ways that also predict capitalistic disaster as well.

If our population were more health conscious, had better access to health insurance, and was less influenced by the free capitalism that continuously promotes products that are detrimental to our health, a disaster already created by a capitalist free market, would this be a different set of analytics?

Is COVID-19 the disaster, or is our real United States disaster the lack of a functioning health care safety-net for our most vulnerable? The primary question we should be considering is: can we change that future for our kids and grandkids? Wuhan, China reopened today after 10 weeks, but nothing is the same.

This is getting serious

What do mountain goats, woodpeckers, and football players all have in common? Head butts. Why is it that a woodpecker can pound his head millions of times and not suffer from debilitating brain injuries, and while, we’re at it, what about rams? Heck, even their name identifies what they do.

There have been numerous studies of woodpeckers to attempt to determine what the differentiator is relative to brain injuries and their natural assignment of beating holes in trees with their beaks. These beaks, if you haven’t noticed, are attached to their heads which is where their tiny little brains hang out.

Woodpeckers have to peck pretty hard to get the bugs and insects they’re after. It was originally believed they had a special bone-like, foam material between their brain and their skull, but after dissecting a few deceased woodpeckers, according to MIT professor, Lorna Gibson, it was clear they did not have any foam lining. She and several other scientists dug in and found woodpecker facts.

The woodpecker is absolutely the headbanger of the bird world. They also peck to profess their love and to layout their territory. Their pecking speed would absolutely produce a concussion for a human. They bang their beak at 15 mph between 700 and 12,000 times a day, at up to 20 times per second. That, my friends, is a lot of pecking.

They have thick, strong neck muscles which contract just before their bill hits the surface. This allows some of the force to dissipate down through the bird’s body which protects the bird’s skull from the full blow. They also have unequal upper and lower beaks which lowers the force of the peck from hitting the brain.

Another shock absorber is their tongue. Woodpeckers have tongue supports that wrap around their brains, and work as a safety harness. Plus their brain weighs only two grams and is tightly fit in the skull.

That configuration keeps the brain from banging around inside the skull. Because their tails help brace them against the tree and their toes also are built to brace them, you can say they’ve found the proper pecking posture.

In spite of all the protections Mother Nature provides for them, woodpeckers do get brain damage, but they also have an accumulation of a protein called tau which actually protects them from suffering from neurodegenerative diseases like the chronic traumatic encephalopathy that our football players get.

Because of these studies, all kinds of technological and safety advances have been implemented in sports equipment, but it is believed that the presence of tau in woodpeckers is a protective adaptation, because in moderation, it works to stabilize brains cells.

Tau is typically found in human patients with brain diseases ranging from Alzheimer’s to traumatic head injuries. Consequently, it is now up to scientists to discover why tau is good for woodpeckers and how that protein can be adapted to protect football players and others from brain injuries.

Rams, on the other hand, typically bash their heads together at a speed ranging from 20 to 40 mph without injury. How do they do it? Rams have strong, flexible horns that absorb much of the shock of the collisions, in addition to a physical anomaly that slows the blood flow from the head to the body.

Scientists studying football players in Colorado discovered that football players at higher altitudes had 30% fewer head injuries. Their hypothesis is that higher altitudes increase the volume of fluid in the cerebral venous system which provides another layer of protection.

So, maybe the solution is to equip football helmets with horns, to genetically modify the players’ toes, tongues, neck muscles and cerebral blood flows, to make sure only those players with smaller brains take or give the hits, and for goodness sake, to move all of the teams to the mountains.

Or maybe we should study the impact of tau?