The Danger of Secondary Infections

On Monday one of our fellow rant team members, Giles,  told me a story about his granddaughters first 2 weeks in Kindergrten.   She had been enjoying kindergarten immensely but one day last week she told her teacher her tummy was sore.  Her teacher sprinted to the front of the class to hit the big red button that would put the school on Covid 19 DEFCON 1 (ok I may have made that up but I doubt it was any less dramatic).  The young girl was sent home to self-isolate for 14 days.  When her mom got her home, she asked her what was wrong.  Her answer was nothing her stomach was sore because she was hungry.  We are now so hypersensitive that a hungry child can trigger an emergency response plan.  I looked up the symptoms of Covid 19 on health Canada’s website and this is the list I copied from the sight.

  • new or worsening cough
  • shortness of breath or difficulty breathing
  • temperature equal to or over 38°C
  • feeling feverish
  • chills
  • fatigue or weakness
  • muscle or body aches
  • new loss of smell or taste
  • headache
  • gastrointestinal symptoms (abdominal pain, diarrhea, vomiting)
  • feeling very unwell

In the teachers defense abdominal pain is on the list so she did have reason to be concerned.  The problem is that this list does not just describe Covid.  I have created a list below of all the things I could think of that would trigger one or more symptoms on this list.

  • Hunger
  • Eating too much candy
  • Eating too much of anything
  • A hangover
  • Dust
  • Asthma
  • The common cold
  • High blood pressure
  • Low blood pressure
  • Standing up too quickly
  • Being overweight
  • Being severely underweight
  • Poor nutrition
  • Being out of shape
  • Exercising too hard (especially when you were out of shape in the first place)
  • Dehydration
  • Allergies
  • Lack of sleep
  • Lack of oxygen from wearing a mask
  • Stress
  • Stress caused by someone screaming at you for not wearing a mask
  • Food sensitivity or poisoning
  • Any bacterial or viral infection

My medical knowledge is not complete, but it seems to me that on any given day anyone could exhibit one of theses symptoms even if they are in perfect health.  It is a poor screening tool that can’t exclude anyone, but I guess that is the point.  The government wants you to believe that if you have a headache you are going to die of covid.  As we have seen it is very easy to keep people alarmed about this invisible menace.  So invisible it has not infected anyone you know, or if you use this list the converse is true, it has already infected everyone you know.  But for the grace of god all those people would be dead right now, or at the very least suffering from all the long-term health conditions the computer models predict.

When Giles relayed this story to me, he coined the term Covidiocy.  That is when it dawned on me that I have been wrong about the second wave.  I was only considering Covid but we have been dealing with infections of Covid and Covidiocy at the same time.  Health Canada did not have a list of symptoms of Covidiocy so I made my own.

Symptoms of Covidiocy

  • Irrational fear of hungry children
  • Wearing a mask and face shield
  • Wearing a mask while driving alone in your car
  • Wearing a mask while having sex
  • Wearing a mask when not compelled to by threat of government violence
  • Tourette like screaming at people not wearing masks
  • Unwavering belief in the wisdom of politicians
  • Deification of public health bureaucrats
  • Belief that the most effective treatment to cold and flu season is unemployment
  • Insisting on being tested for a virus when you have no symptoms
  • Willful denial of reality
  • Inability to understand numbers larger than 10 or smaller than 1

While we had our first ripple of Covid we had a significant first wave of Covidiocy.  During our second smaller ripple (echo maybe) of Covid we have had a tsunami of Covidiocy.  It seems Covidiocy infections are somehow inversely proportional to Covid infections.  I shudder to think of how much damage we will see when the Covidiocy peaks after people realize covid has been gone now for 5 months.