Hi David… thanks so much for the note, and the questions. You mentioned that you’ve “not been sick” since you moved to Pagosa six years ago. Congratulations on that.
You’re wondering if the media, and the public health industry, is accurately reporting the COVID situation in Archuleta County, and in particular, if the reporting about “outbreaks” has been accurate.
San Juan Basin Public Health defines an “outbreak” as “two or more confirmed cases of COVID-19 in a facility or (non-household) group with onset in a 14-day period.”
There have been a couple of “outbreaks” of COVID infection at Pagosa Peak Open School, our local charter school, and I suspect there may have been “outbreaks” at our regular schools as well. (I hear about the PPOS outbreaks because I’m on the school board there, and because my granddaughters attend school there.)
But I’ve heard of no serious illness resulting from these “outbreaks.” The kids typically get a slight fever and maybe a runny nose. Or no symptoms at all. Among children, it seems a lot like “outbreaks” of the common cold.
When I lived in Juneau, Alaska, we had a cemetery downtown with graves dating back to the 1880s. There’s one section of the cemetery where there are a dozen small headstones — young children, who all died around 1918, when Juneau had a population of just a few hundred people.
I presume these children died from the ’Spanish flu’.
It makes me think… about the effects of a ‘real’ pandemic… one that’s killing not just old people but also our precious children. As far as I know, COVID has not killed any children in Archuleta County, even though our population is much greater than Juneau’s was, in 1918.
I can’t confirm that, however.
As a member of “the media” for the past 17 years, it’s my opinion that the media is not “spinning” the stories for any kind of self-interested purpose, but rather, they are quoting statements from so-called experts, because it’s too time-consuming to dig independently into this very complicated story. And ‘most’ of the experts — not all, but most — are on the side of vaccinations and mask-wearing.
In the Daily Post, we’ve shared both sides of the debate, and I think the SUN has also shared both sides, mostly in their Letters to the Editor section. There are definitely two sides to this particular story. Maybe more than two sides.
According to the data being shared by San Juan Basin Public Health…
https://sjbpublichealth.org/sjbph-data-dashboard/
… it appears to me that the number of daily cases has been fairly steady, ever since mid-December… mostly averaging fewer than 5 new daily infections, with some “ups and downs”. I see no obvious evidence that vaccinations have reduced the number of reported infections overall, nor do I see evidence that the arrival of the dreaded Delta Variant has made an obvious change in the infection rate.
SJBPH does not post the number of hospitalizations… so we don’t know if these continuing local infections are serious, or inconsequential. I consider that to be a weakness in their reporting.
According to a July 21, 2021 story in the Wall Street Journal (one of those media outlets you might be worried about), the CDC has tallied 335 “COVID-related” deaths among children under the age of 18, in the U.S.
The article also states:
Yet the CDC, which has 21,000 employees, hasn’t researched each death to find out whether COVID caused it, or if it involved a pre-existing medical condition.
That number of childhood deaths, 335, seems to be driving an effort to vaccinate children.
My casual research suggests that most of those fatalities occurred in children over the age of 12. But it appears that our national health industry is now pushing to have children under the age of 12 vaccinated with an experimental drug. (“Experimental” in the sense that fully scientific, long-term studies of the benefits and dangers have not yet been performed… with an emphasis on the problem of “long-term” dangers.)
Certainly, the media has an obligation to report facts, when they are available. In the case of the “COVID pandemic”, certain types of information that appear to be “facts” but aren’t really “facts” have made their way into the nation’s news media… on both sides of this controversial issue.
How to report, in such a climate? Sharing both sides is a good idea.