MMeM, S16E9 – Masks

Well, this global pandemic has gone just about as horrible as anyone could imagine. No one has ever experienced anything like this. Tired of sheltering at home yet? Me too. I created a simple bookmark app for my iPhone of that Johns Hopkins tracking site back when the global infection count was 67,182.

That’s the total that my icon shows when I press on it to see that the total now is 926,442 for the US and 2,877,487 worldwide. UGH!  Deaths for the US are now 53,184. Where are those annual flu statistic historians citing its annual death rate? The CDC said that for 2018-19 there were 34,200 deaths in the US from influenza. Hello? Where are you false alarmists now?

To summon my inner Chandler Bing, “Could we BE anymore unprepared for this?” As for the officials running this $#!+ show, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them standing in the Rose Garden dressed like Plague Doctors.

This was done back in the 1600’s by doctors because they thought that disease was spread through horrible smelling-diseased air. The noses of the beak of the masks were filled with flowers and potpourri type materials to “mask” the bad smell and make the air “safe” to breathe.

I don’t know, seems about as logical as our response 600 years later. We’ve got leaders proposing sunshine, putting cleaner in our blood, and “predicting” err tweeting a MIRACLE end! Wah-LAH!

I’m trying to live like everyone else and just survive literally and figuratively. I’m typing along on my new laptop that I had to get so I could meet standards for having to work from home for 5 weeks now. It’s not like we didn’t have any notice of this since about November 2019. Now we have a toilet paper shortage and, wait what year is this again? 1656? No, that year the Plague only killed 145,000 people in Rome and Naples, Italy.

This is 2020 and 151,318 is the death toll for the top 6 countries (US, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, UK).

So, in 1656 they beat us with fewer deaths and they didn’t have any reported toilet paper shortages.

Plague masks. Had to be the bird-beaked (tweet tweet) plague masks.