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More virus blather

Anyone who’s following the coronavirus (and I assume it’s most of you) has seen this map. It’s updated once or twice a day with the most orthodox numbers. I’m putting it here so I have a handy bookmark. Most people probably don’t go upstream to find it’s put out by Johns Hopkins. They write more about the details of what they’re tracking here.

So far, I’m heartened by the fact that cases outside mainland China haven’t exploded yet. My chances of surviving a lung bug this year are not awesome.

That’s an odd thing, too. This chest bug I caught; we’ve talked to people all over Britain who clearly have the same lurgie. It’s starts like a normal cold, but a nasty, productive cough lingers for months. Mined turned very ugly; more like a mild pneumonia, really. It’s not hard to imagine this thing carrying off someone otherwise weakened.

Clearly it’s not a normal cold. I wonder what the public health threshold is, that makes the authorities take notice, take samples and identify this particular bug as a thing with a name and a history?

When I was a teenager in rural Tennessee, a bunch of us came down with a bad one. By ‘us’ I mean teenagers — I don’t think any other age group was affected. So the medical establishment decided it was mononucleosis. Because teenagers.

Not a single one of us tested positive for mono — and I suspect most of us were tested, because it was a long one. In my case, it started with painful sores inside my mouth. To this day, I sometimes have a flare-up of mouth sores when my immune system is low.

Why didn’t they try to identify it for real? I guess because there was only one death (if I recall correctly, a fifteen year old girl who fell asleep on the couch and never woke up).

Sometimes I think an illness has to be some scientist’s pet bug to get any attention.

January 28, 2020 — 8:22 pm
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