CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) – The old ways of tracking COVID no longer work. Most testing takes place at home, so unless someone tests positive and shares it with public health officials, they don’t know. Most people who have COVID handle it as if they have the flu. They stay home for a few days, and resume normal life when they feel better.
There’s only a public record of their illness if they are so sick that they are hospitalized. In Marathon County, it’s believed that there are no COVID hospitalizations right now. The data isn’t as readily available as it was a few years ago.
But our public health officers are not resting. They’ve been testing sewer water to track COVID. Human waste indicates if someone has COVID, so daily samples at the sewage treatment plant can track if COVID is more prevalent or less prevalent in parts of the state. This, if you stop to think about it, is a wildly inaccurate way of measuring COVID levels since we don’t know how many people use the toilet each day. “Ah… I was constipated yesterday, so I was double or triple-sampled.” You ate a salad for lunch yesterday, so your bodily waste wasn’t tested at all.
And public health officials concede that most strains of COVID in the United States are so mild that most people don’t even know they have it. So why would anyone take a booster or a vaccine? To protect themselves from something they’re unaware of?
Joe Biden suggested earlier this month that he may ask Congress for funding to develop an all-in-one shot. One jab for rubella, mumps, measles, the flu, and COVID. No thank you to any of that. You’ll use your ability to choose which vaccinations you take. Protections against malaria isn’t controversial. The shot has been given for generations; its safe. But the flu shot isn’t even effective from one year to the next. The COVID vaccine isn’t really a vaccine at all. It delivers its DNA payload differently than a vaccine. It’s actually a therapeutic.
And Biden says he’d want to require everyone to take the witches-brew shot. In case you forgot the lesson of 2020, at the height of the COVID panic: this isn’t really about a virus, it’s about controlling you and me.
Chris Conley
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