Government Fear is the thing to fear the most.

Covid 19. The Wuhan Virus, Kung Flu, the CCP Virus – it is certainly “big news” and it has certainly shut down the normal operations of a good part of the planet.

I am not a virologist or a medical anything. Closest I have ever come to being a medical person is working in IT at a Hospital. However, I do have a fair amount of recent unwanted knowledge and experience with health care which does give me a view on the way this virus is being handled.

Back when this started to get on my radar – same as for other people I guess – back at the end of January and beginning of February I was fairly in-synch with the view going around that we needed to head off the sudden tsunami of sickness that would sweep away the Health Care industry if the virus was anywhere near as bad as it looked like it might be.  We needed to slow the rise, we needed to give ourselves time to ramp up services so that when the sequestration was over – two weeks – and the infection started barreling through the populace – our front line people would have what they need to deal with the demand.

But some areas were slow to respond, some didn’t respond some got to it later than others. So now we have opinions all over the place. The one thing we have not had, just making an observation here, is an overwhelmed medical system. Though NY came close, I think.

But now we have a rotating random series of lockdowns, mask mandates, partial closures and so on with no real rhyme or reason.

But what we still have are many vast reservoirs of uninfected people. There are approximately 365 million people in the USA, 8.2 million reported “cases” (don’t know if a “case” is a positive test or positive symptoms). That means that there are over 300 million uninfected people.

The first question that comes to my mind is – have the resources to deal with a flood of virus cases been put into place? Has the vast amount of money that has been spent put us in a safer position? Because unless we UN – lock we are going to run out of money.  If there is no functioning economy, things are going to get progressively worse and a LOT of people are going to be deep in the fiscal doo-doo.

The trouble we face right now is that politicians and pundits alike have not stated what they consider to be a manageable level of infection rate? No-one that I have seen – and thanks to lock-down I have a lot of time to read and to check online and on video – has stated what they consider to be the acceptable level of infection that can be managed.

This means that they are free to act upon their own “whim” or how they perceive it will benefit them the best.

The simplicity is that there is a virus, it is going to infect people until an effective vaccination is developed and there is no guarantee that this holy grail will be found in a swift and timely manner.

Government leaders have to make decisions – unfortunately those decisions mean that some people are going to die. Let’s be straight here – people die every day. They die from infections, injuries, illness, malfeasance and accidents. The Government and the Civil Servants cannot change any of that.  But still the Government Leaders and the Civil Servants keep scurrying around trying anything to avoid making a decision which they may be called to account for. So they keep picking out courses of action where they try to fend off “infection”. All the time knowing that the infection is going to show up every time people start intermingling after been sequestered.

The Government needs to be transparent in its actions. It needs to state how many seriously ill pandemic patients the system can deal with. Then it needs to track back from that to how many “positive tests” will result in that number of serious cases and that needs to be set as the public threshold. Simple, and tough. Please note that the large majority of patients requiring serious care actually recover – even those who are most at risk.

The Government needs to be the thing it fears the most.

Transparent.