All Quiet on the Western Front
All Quiet on the Western Front
Observations, after two months in reopened Southern California. Everything seems... alright.
The sudden death of an on-the-job UPS driver in Pasadena is being blamed on heat stroke. Temperatures were in the upper 90s that day. The driver was 24. The online news page for the story, which can be accessed via a web search, has a slideshow - the cover image of which is a photograph of the driver in question with his lower face wrapped tight a totally unnecessary mask. This driver was probably Covid-vaccinated.
Upper 90s are not unusual summer temperatures for Pasadena. For example, the same driver would have experienced the same heat his previous 3 summers on the job.
Climate change notwithstanding, temperatures were regularly in the 100s in the summer when I drove for FedEx, in Altadena (the just-upland neighbor of Pasadena). Temperatures were even higher when I covered weekends in Santa Clarita or Canyon Country for a summer, in 2015.
Unlike those pampered, actually-corporate-employed UPS drivers, I spent much of my driving time in vans owned by LA FedEx Ground contract holders. There, the back turns into an oven as (owing to the lack of a wall of shelves) you have to crawl over boxes over and over to find your next drop. Once, a stop in the Canyon Country route was receiving about a dozen giant hard-shelled cases of who-knows-what type of heavy equipment, which I loaded near the sliding door of the Sprinter for early delivery. After cramming the whole van to the brim in the warehouse, said sliding side door got jammed the moment I closed it, owing to the push-back from the hard-shells.
The entire route, 100-odd stops, had to be improvisationally delivered backward from the ranches to Friendly Valley, so that I could unload from the back doors instead. By the time I got to the house with the giant drop, I had already been out in the afternoon sun for hours. I carried all those heavy cases to the side door of the house one by one (no dolly; see above RE not pampered).
I was in my mid-30s.
I did not die of heat stroke.
It’s a ridiculous idea.1
Summer, San Diego
Now that my corner of California (I am no longer in LA, which may be a lost cause2) has finally abandoned the Performance of Emergency, I am better able to get a sense of whether significant health effects from the Covid vaccines are anything like common, out here.
Before (in 2021), one could go out and about and see healthy-seeming people by the dozen or so; but this wasn’t dispositive: Because there were still so few people who were also out and about, there was no way to tell if their healthy-ness was a product of selection bias. They, in other words, could have been the few folks who weren’t silently injured by the experimental gene injections.
Now, almost everyone is out. And among the young, especially, most people seem… just fine.
The Young
At the gym, no one would be confused for a second that they are in some state other than California: More than half of the clientele at any given moment could land a job modeling underwear or as an extra in a war film. You might note that not very many people are on the cardio machines; but this is San Diego; San Diego doesn’t really do cardio.
In several hundred encounters with strangers over the last two months, only a handful of references to recent sudden-onset illness have been dropped. One young man had just had his (entirely pointless, idiotic) booster, and apologized for being out of it. A young woman mentioned being unphased by her second shot, and left wishing for death by her third. This made me wonder once again if California has a high rate of product spoilage due to problems with the cold chain. At all events there was nothing in her tone that sounded like regret.
San Diego is not the place to go to hone one’s powers of imagination, when it comes to the bodies of young strangers. Everything is on display, open for inspection. The youth of San Diego this summer are in the full flower of beauty and health as they are every other year.
Babies
In the same two months, I can only recall having seen one stroller, one bjorn-bound-infant, and one baby at the beach. Make of those abysmal figures what you will.
Children
Nothing appears to be amiss here; but as with the babies, the numbers of children that are out leaves room for question. At the end of the school year, they were visible in large crowds, still wearing masks. Now they appear at the concerts in Coronado and elsewhere. Mostly, they appear fine. A lot are still masked.
Older adults / Elderly
Here, there is a case for either the stress of lockdowns or the injections having taken a toll. But along the north county coast on weekends, the geriatric bar scene rages on as it has always done.
Among those who mention their Covid vaccines, it is usually in the context of bidding for a return to normalcy. It is no longer reasonable to shut down society (it never was), now that I am triple-vaccinated. I have had my three shots, and now I don’t think any special measures should be taken to protect me. These are usually not masking. I have not noticed many references to fourth doses in this context.
Those who are masking, tend to say: “We’ll see what happens this winter.”
Just Another Viral Protein
I am particularly struck by the lack of disaster among the youngest of children. I almost wonder if it will turn out that the Covid vaccines are safer for this cohort than other members of the roster of injections added after 1986.
It may be the case that Covid vaccination carries a risk profile roughly equal to viral infection for every group except teens and young adults. For young children, viral insults are common due to their still-incomplete adaptive immune repertoires; but, at the same time, their suppressed metabolism and abundant capacity for healing ensures that many episodes of tissue, nerve, and heart damage go clinically unnoticed. Meanwhile for older adults, novel viruses accelerate aging, but this is harder to notice amid the noise of aging in general. But for young adults, novel viral challenges - or artificial exposure to a viral spike protein - are more like Russian Roulette. The innate immune system and adaptive immune system are at the height of their powers; but should they fail, the effects will be dramatic and impossible to miss.
All Quiet
Tragedy doesn’t scale, as Stalin is alleged to have observed.
If it really does turn out that adverse events from the Covid vaccines, particularly among the young, are rare, then that merely magnifies the cosmic unfairness for those who experience them.
Everyone in their social groups decided to jump off of the metaphorical bridge into an unproven medical intervention; and yet they were the only ones not rescued by the magic flying mattresses of the body’s powers of healing.
In the novel, Bäumer finally falls prey to the war on an otherwise action-less day on the eve of peace. The day of his death is described, “all quiet.”
The Pasadena UPS driver’s sudden “heat stroke” may prove a similar tragedy of ironic timing, as young Covid vaccine recipients begin to exit the danger window for cardiac complications, moving on to a life where their current lack of interest in the topic of the Covid vaccines is justified.
Or, the toll may only be beginning to mount.
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“Heat stroke” itself is something of which I’ve always been skeptical. Like the notion that sweating cools you “by evaporating.” It sounds like something people who themselves never sweat would think up.
On the other hand, I never tried doing Fed-Ex with a mask on…
At all events, there comes a point in the heat when drinking water ceases to provide comfort. It comes right back out as sweat, but hot sweat, which does nothing to offer relief in the heat (despite being extra good at evaporating!) since you are already drenched anyway. Here the driver is in a state of static heat exhaustion.
This is where the driver wants to think laterally. Take the plastic jug of ice+water that you prepare at the machine in the warehouse every morning, and store it in a cardboard box that has also been stuffed with your FedEx jacket. This is better insulation than a cooler, because you do not let a lot of hot air in every time you take the water out.
Now you have a source of cold water that will last until early afternoon even if it is in the 100s (at which point, if needed, simply shell out for some more cold water at the convenience store, and you are back to square 1). But, do not drink the water. Instead, liberally drip it onto your forehead throughout the day.
Mask mandates may return in a few days time.
People hate anticlimax. What you describe does seem broadly to be the picture. But it’s only “ok” relative to some very extreme and always implausible scenarios. It’s still not at all ok in terms of risk-benefit.
You spoke too soon, the SDUSD just re-instated mask mandates for the school system starting Monday. Go ahead, Libtards, put your duck bills back on and start yelling at your neighbors. Lock ‘em down. Crush the businesses. Go on, see what happens.