Views from the Outside

 Of all the responses to the rona, the most dramatic was the "lockdown".  I put lockdown in quotes because while most people stayed home, a large minority of people never locked down.  Retail, trades (such as plumbing, electrician, HVAC) and home improvement never locked down. Health care settings partially locked down as elective surgeries were delayed. There is no doubt that the lockdowns caused significant personal, social and economic distress.  Whether they did any good for the virus is debatable, which undercuts the rational for doing the lockdowns in the first place.  If the first principle of medicine is to "do no harm", the harm part must be considered before the benefit.  In previous posts I mentioned exercise, diet and vitamin supplements.  In each case, the benefit was modest, but the harm was negligible.  In the case of the lockdowns, the benefits are negligible to modest (maybe) and the harm was enormous.  It is my contention that most of the hell we w

 I wanted to get into the specific non-pharaceutical interventions that were put in place around Novel Coronavirus, but I decided that it might be helpful to start with another viral outbreak that's not quite so "novel". The annual season of illness known as "cold and flu" season. To start, every year starting around November the incidence of colds and the flu increases in the United States.  In fact, the nasal congestion and cough associated with the cold is so characteristic of the winter months, that the disease took it's name from the cold weather of winter and many people think that the cold (disease) is caused by the cold (weather). Of course, the cold is caused by any number of viruses, including coronaviruses.  However, if the cold is not caused by exposure to cold weather, there is still the question as to why it is so prevalent during the winter months.  There are a number of possibilities. During cold weather, people spend more time together indoo