You Can’t Choose The Cards, But You Can Always Play The Hand You’re Dealt
You Can’t Choose The Cards, But You Can Always Play The Hand You’re Dealt
April 27, 2020 · by The Escape Artist · in Health & Happiness · 10 Comments
There is something missing from the debate on Covid-19.
As far as I can see, most of the news and related debate involves looking for someone to blame.
China, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump and the World Health Organisation all make excellent pantomime villains (the choice of which to blame depends largely on your political biases).
The problem with The News is not its bias. The problem is the media pretending to be unbiased. When you control the editing and publishing, you can control what gets seen, heard and discussed.
We all have our biases. As someone who writes a blog based on the idea (partly tongue-in-cheek) that we are living in a Matrix-style Prison Camp created by big corporations, big government and the Deep State, I was struck by this tweet promoting a communist regime from a globalist bureaucracy pretending to be a health charity:
World Health Organization (WHO)✔@WHO
Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China🇨🇳. 7:18 AM - Jan 14, 2020
The Escape Artist is not above the occasional conspiracy theory or blaming politicians. But my primary focus is always getting my own shit together rather than complaining about the rest of the world like a whiney little man-*.
There are lots of amateur epidemiologists and Covid-19 commentators on the internet. Some want to blame politicians (although fewer than journalists would like). Others (usually intellectual types) see it as a puzzle to be solved and want to read endless scientific papers for intellectual stimulation. One of my friends built his own spreadsheet infection model (!).
What’s missing from the debate is the idea of personal responsibility and what actions we can take to maximise our own health. The News has zero interest in helping you. If you die, well that’s great material for tomorrow’s story. If (like me) you are also young and good-looking, well that’s even better for clicks and ratings.
I just went on the BBC News website and there’s plenty of wallowing in death victim stories but, other than repeating the stay home mantra, no actionable advice on how not to die of Covid-19. This is odd because, as far as I can see, our chances of getting exposed at some point are very high (I’m working on the assumption I’ll get it) and yet if you’re healthy your odds of dying from it seem to be very small. Apparently, most healthy people will be asymptomatic: they won’t even know they had it.
A lot of people have died with the disease. But as far as I can see only a very small % of people have died from it. Its the co-morbidities that kill you (obesity, cancer, stroke, pneumonia, etc etc). Coronavirus is the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back.
The uncomfortable truth is that we were in a self-inflicted Wall-E style health crisis before the current pandemic. We suffer the diseases of abundance and sedentary lifestyles like never before.
The question should be: how much responsibility do we have for our own health? Your health should be your top priority. If you really had to choose between your health and money (you shouldn’t, they are complementary) I suggest you choose your health.
If I believe in helping my readers (I do) the question is what can we do not to die of coronavirus? As someone smart once said:
When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear Thomas Sowell
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