The Fall of the House of Covid

Many are trying to prevent it, until they can make either capital or political gain out of it, but it’s going to happen anyway.

This virus is going to kill people and it will keep killing people for quite some time. This cannot be prevented, no matter how hard you shout at and villify the current or any future government. It’s a virus. You cannot just make a law against it and expect it to comply.

It now seems that the ‘reinfection’ that has been widely talked about is just false positives. PCR is ‘polymerase chain reaction’, and put simply, if you have a tiny bit of DNA or RNA, the machinery will make many more copies of it until it’s at a high enough concentration to be detected and analysed. I’m not going into the details, if you’re not a microbiologist it’ll just make your eyes cloud over. Science is repetetive and fairly boring most of the time, every scientist knows that.

When I worked in food borne disease, food poisoning and food spoilage, there was often talk of ‘making it modern’ by using PCR. However, PCR has a major flaw in that application. It detects DNA. Sure, it’s more sensitive than our culture methods but our culture methods do not detect dead cells. PCR does. It detects fragments of DNA and RNA, It will detect the remnants of one single Salmonella in a piece of chicken but it will not tell you if the chicken was rife with disease or if there was just a fragment of one dead cell on it. Culture tells you if they are alive.

So it is with a virus. Remaining fragments of dead virus could be hanging around in the mess it’s left behind after it’s gone. After infection (and by all accounts this one makes quite a mess of your airways especially if it gets bad enough to need hospitalisation) there are going to be a lot of your smashed cells, and virus bits, strewn across the battlefield of your airways.

If reinfection happened then those reinfected would get sick again. If they don’t (and it appears they don’t) then it’s probably just battlefield residue the test is picking up. PCR cannot distinguish between active and dead and it will detect extraordinarily tiny amounts..

Think of it like an actual battle where your side has killed every last enemy, but your generals see the prone uniforms and insist the enemy is still there and you have to keep firing. That’s a PCR test. A culture test would ask ‘are they still firing back?’ A PCR test does not.

So currently it is likely that you get immunity after suffering this virus. Well, you might not suffer, you might not even know you had it, but a test will show its presence even if your immune system has already smashed it. Something else to add to the ‘tests are pointless’ list. An antibody test is more useful, it will test whether you have immunity.

There is a treatment. A cheap one. Hydroxychloroquine, antibiotic and zinc. It has been poo-pooed because Trump said it and also because it doesn’t make anyone rich. You really want to stake your life on your ideology? Hydroxychloroquine is an old antimalarial drug that has become a generic. It’s very, very cheap. Many, many people who travel to malaria risk countries use it every year. A few develop side effects, but then some people suffer an allergy to tonic water. Most people are fine.

There is also an expensive treatment, an antiviral that costs $1000 per pill. That’s the one being pushed by those who will profit from it.

Zinc sulphate supplements are very cheap. Zinc is often depleted in older people and worth stocking up on. It helps with wound healing and breaks cytokine storms. Long term use of the supplement can cause anaemia so it’s really only something we old buggers should take when there’s a risk.

With all this, a lot of people will still die. It’s horrible but it will happen, no matter what we do. None of us will live forever, under any government or health regime. Life is a risk every day. If there is no risk, it’s not life. It’s just existing.

The ‘flatten the curve’ idea behind lockdown led many to believe that this would save lives. It will and it won’t. The area under the two curves is the same. Same number of infections from this virus, same number of deaths. Flattening the curve means the medical side won’t get overwhelmed over a short period so they can cope. That means we avoid excess deaths due to an overstretched health service and won’t have to ignore all other diseases while the virus runs its course. Something the NHS has only just started to realise.

There has been much criticism of the Nightingale hospitals having few to no patients. If we had not had the lockdown they would likely be overflowing. This is not touted as a ‘success of lockdown’ but as a ‘failure of government’.

China hid away the virus for so long they had to quickly make emergency hospitals out of stacked portakabins. Italy had no time to prepare so they were overwhelmed. The UK saw it coming and prepared Nightingale hospitals before they were needed (they still might be) and the USA has made the mistake of dismantling some of their temporary hospitals before this is over.

Lockdown, in my view, was done at the right time. Boris didn’t want to do it at all and many people, even those who don’t want to admit it, wish he hadn’t.

If he had done it sooner, as hysterical toddlers like Piers Morgan say, people would have looked around and said ‘Fuck all is happening, this is silly’ and it would have failed in a week. Now he is being villified for doing it too late by people who are already going stir crazy and claiming the lack of mass graves proves they are right.

The lack of mass graves proves Boris was right. This lockdown hits the poorest hardest, those who only get paid when they show up for work. I am astounded that many places are laying off cleaners in a time when cleanliness is vital but then people, especially managers, aren’t too bright. That’s why Boris didn’t want to do it. He was railroaded into it by those who are now complaining about it.

Lockdown cannot be sustained for much longer. I give it another week at most. Boris knew this. The Brits will not be contained for long. The Americans, even less so. However, it has achieved its aim – to slow the spread so there is no massive peak as in China and Italy. When lockdown is relaxed the virus will spread but we now have all those emergency spare hospitals to deal with it. We have had time to stock up on PPE. They have, you know. The Panorama thing was bollocks. It was, like most things on the BBC, a Leftie hate-fest. It’s not even the government’s job to source PPE, it’s the job of the thousands of idiots paid to be NHS procurement managers. Most of whom are lefties too.

People are dying not because of Boris and the Tories (could be a good band name) but because of the lefties who care nothing for lives lost as long as they can make a point. Who would you trust with your life in this situation? Happy to become a statistic so the Lefties can bring down the government?

Then we have nicotine. You know, it’s a good thing ASH and their ilk weren’t around long ago or you would not now have niacin in bread and most of you would be suffering pellagra. I have delighted in telling people that niacin is nicotinic acid and that it’s in bread and other foods to get them addicted. Doing my bit to raise the average IQ of the planet.

It looks like nicotine, an ACE2 blocker, reduces your chances of catching the virus and makes it less bad if you do. It needs research but who would dare? Any research suggesting a positive effect of nicotine and the Puritans will end your career.

We need to know if this is true, we need to know how long nicotine blocks those receptors, do we have to take it hourly or daily? Should we all be vaping or using Snus? Which is best, does it work at all?

I have a feeling we will never know because the Puritans would rather we died than admit they are wrong.