Movement. As I understand it–and reliable statistics are between difficult and impossible to come by–the single largest predictor of a bad COVID outcome is inactivity; and obesity is on the short list following it, with the two being obviously connected.
As I understand it, third hand from the friend of a friend who works in a hospital, if you are under 65 and in a hospital, one look at you would tell most people you watched every episode of Game of Thrones, quite possibly more than once, and certainly that you have a well worn couch at home littered with Doritos and probably spilled diet soda or beer.
When you look at some of the nations that have done particularly well, like Finland or Japan (16,000 deaths in a population of 123 million or so, which works out to 1 person dying in 7,875, or about 1 person dying there for every 15 who died here, with us being about 1 in 512, and climbing very slowly) you will find low rates of obesity, and relatively high rates of at least basic activity. I think you will also find low rates of Vitamin D deficiency, due either to national policy, as in Finland, or high rates of fish consumption, as in Japan.
It is really obvious beyond the need for comment, in my view–but seemingly not so, since even after a year not just our airwaves but our message boards are filled with patent nonsense–that all undangerous, non-intrusive, simple, common sense measures should have been employed at the outset of all this.
Fauci should have told people to exercise and lose weight, and eat more fish.
And a year ago I read countries in Europe that eat more fermented vegetables do better. We know these are good for the digestive tract, upon which vastly more depends than we realized until recently, so what would or could that hurt?
As I continue to point out, WE HAVE NO PROTOCOL FOR EARLY TREATMENT. None that I know, although I assume most doctors have come up with their own personal protocols. But if you get diagnosed with COVID, I think most will say “oh, that’s too bad. Stay home and keep an eye on it, and call me if it gets worse”. Obviously, a percentage of cases DO get worse and get hospitalized, and then they have very expensive (read profitable, presumably) treatment like Remdesvir.
But Zinc and Vitamin D are necessary human elements. They are absolutely necessary for health. Why not say “take this amount and no more”, and possibly “let us do a blood test to see how you’re doing, so I can prescribe a corrective from a position of data”?
I know I keep saying the same things in slightly different ways, but it baffles me how all the governments of the world have adopted this hysteria in response to a virus that mainly kills people well past working age, and which is less dangerous to everyone else than a bad flu year.
As they say in the Great Barrington Declaration, pulling the bandage off and making it all go away is and always was as simple as locking up the elderly (who in our country at least tend to be in Geriatric Ghettos) and letting the thing rip everywhere else, again ideally after making basic suggestions about supplementation and activity.
If freedom survives, if honest articles are written about this time 5-10 years from now–or 30-40–this time will be seen as one in which the world was driven mad by Madison Avenue applied uniformly and aggressively to authoritarian politics and private profit. We were DRIVEN into witch hunts, DRIVEN into mass hysteria, fear, paranoia, and despair, over nearly nothing; and even our supposedly educated classes by and large fell for it.
This virus is not nothing–real people have died real painful deaths–but it is also not something which warranted more than a small, small fraction of the misery which has been inflicted on the world by our sundry governments.