Coronavirus: Here Goes Slightly More Than Nothing

A few weeks ago, I considered writing a few posts about the Coronavirus, or COVID-19. I have specific skills in this area, and have unique insights that I've not seen elsewhere. I didn't for a few reasons:

• I'm still recovering from my brain and eye damage, so typing anything is difficult. Moreso anything scientific. 
• The above fact is severely depressing, due to my former life as a highly-technical science beast.
• Who would listen to me anyway? Only a few of my friends and former coworkers know of my qualifications (e.g. Master of Science; 20+ years of experience, training and experience in many relevant areas in security including but not exclusive to: risk treatment and pandemics; and I even used to clean hospices in order to protect AIDS patients from other illnesses) and even they are not immune to the "my opinion is more important than fact" disease.
• I'm not willing to identify myself by name on this page. After all, I am a woman on the internet and this is not my first rodeo. However I shut down my professional security blog last year because my recovering brain could not handle the upkeep. This is my art and hobby page, for fuck's sake!

But there is another reason I haven't put my neck out. It is the typical security problem. If you see a risk, treat it and you are successful, then people say there was never a problem. Remember Y2k? People today claim that it was a "non-issue"* because the worst-case scenarios did not happen. However they didn't happen because people worked very hard and companies put millions of dollars to make it a "non-issue." It is like when I worked in Information Technology (IT). When a service such as wireless became unavailable, people would say "why do we even have you here if you can't keep it working?" But if everything always worked perfectly they would say, "why do we have you here, nothing ever needs fixing."

If security and health professionals reach out to help and it is successful, people will just figure we over-reacted. If we do nothing it is more likely statistics will be worse, and we'll be blamed for not helping. Neat.

However, waiting for someone else to say something useful hasn't been fruitful. The Trump Administration is actively suppressing action and information, and we're not getting useful information from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) or any other United States organization. We're just told to wash our hands, don't touch our faces, and now to practice social distancing. Oh by the way, keep supplies on hand for a possible quarantine. It is no wonder people are hoarding toilet paper and hand sanitizer. The general population isn't informed, not reassured by official channels, and let's face it, they're not particularly bright. Uninformed, scared people make bad decisions.

So I'm stuck at home, torturing my fatigued brain through report after report from around the world. Despite my current state, my default programming is to learn, and so I literally cannot prevent myself from digging into this mess. I'm reading things like doctors in Italy having to decide who to lives and who dies because there are not enough respirators to go around. Then I go on social media and people that I KNOW in the United States are saying stupid and dangerous shit like "oh it's not even as bad as the flu, just go about life as usual. The media is blowing this out of proportion." Or dismissing it as "only a problem for old and sick people." Nice. And as a not-young sick person, fuck you too.

I'm no stranger to these kind of dickbags. It's the same flavor of  "everyone who eats gluten free should die because I'm too emotionally unstable to see those words on a cereal box." I'm barely paraphrasing. And the common, "you eat gluten free? You know only celiacs need that"- implying that celiacs are more rare than unicorns, while also dismissing all of the other medical conditions that need to avoid gluten. I don't understand this line of logic: Only a certain kind of person needs to worry about something, YOU PERSONALLY don't worry about it, so therefore any person on Earth who worries about it is foolish? How can you admit that the individual exists in one part of a sentence, then dismiss that those people need to be considered in the last? Mind. Blown.

Someone is wrong on the internet. This cannot stand. So I'm going to write a few small blog posts about this over the next few days.

I will use facts, and reason. So I'm sure no one will read it. But fuck it. I intend to write things like 1) why you need to take precautions, 2) what those precautions need to be and HOW to do them - and I'm not just talking about hand-washing, and 3) what to do once you or those close to you are sick. What is vastly uncharacteristic for me is that it is unlikely I will cite anything, and there may be typos and unclear statements. I can barely type a paragraph and read it. If this ends up being useful I will try to recruit someone to help me. But as much as I would like to be useful, I'm not willing to give myself brain damage in the process. Major brain fatigue is my limit! If my doctors and occupational therapist knew I was doing this they'd smack me. But in the arm, because the last thing I need right now (other than the Coronavirus) is another brain injury.

* I am quoting former Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek at a security conference I attended in 2013. He told a room full of security professionals that the efforts and money invested to avoid Y2k problems were all wasted because it just happened to be a "non-issue." He loudly laughed at the foolishness of anyone worrying about Y2k. That moment proved definitively that looks cannot kill because the audience would have vaporized him on the spot.