Health during Covid
If balance is a sign of health, then we’re dreadfully ill
Yes, we urgently need to ‘talk about health’, what it is and how to keep in a prolonged pandemic. After all, our lives are now dominated by fear, our freedoms are trampled, and our sense of community fractured because of a virus and the flawed messaging our dear leaders engage in.
If you have weighed the risks and decided against the vaccines, you are now excluded from all the fun stuff as well as gyms and pools that might help you to keep your health. I am one of these people. Against the odds, I am quite healthy, thanks to a lifetime of obsession with health. I strongly believe that the vaccine mandates get it wrong because we’re not all the same. Every body is unique, literally. And the choice of what we inject into our bodies must be our own, period. Any government that steps over that line by mandating vaccine ‘passports’, feeds fears of an imminent takeover by tech ‘solutionists’ who will entrench the digital toolkit as the default option for solving any and all problems. As the social commentator Evgeniy Morozof points out, …it is much easier to deploy solutionist tech to influence individual behaviour than it is to ask difficult political questions about the root causes of these crises. I believe that this is the underlying fear that drives so called ‘anti-vaxxers’ as well as normal, everyday skeptics, like me, who question the wisdom of the vaccine passports. There is more at stake here than is obvious. It is nothing less than the health of your body as well as the body politic.
One-size health advice never did fit all, though the promise of individualized e-health via biometric monitoring is currently the latest and greatest thing that global leaders, like Klaus Schwab, are waving in front of us. With books like Covid-19: The Great Reset, now a dated book from last year, a post Covid agenda is laid out though I could not actually discover anything evil in it. Schwab even quotes the historian Yuval Noah Harari at length. Harari warns against allowing our bodies to be monitored in real time by an innocent sounding digital bracelet with all your health information stored and sent to a digital health data base linked to your social security number. This could easily be done by building on the systems of vaccine passports, which do not respect your right to privacy. Up to now, our health information was protected by privacy laws that are fraying under the onslaught of the pandemic. But as Harari points out, it is now possibly for our government to know how we think and feel via the new science of biometrics. It’s a type of granular control that, while very efficient, may not be in your best interests, after all. Too much power in the hands of big tech and big government cannot be healthy, argues Harari as Schwab intones, ‘we will have been warned’. Indeed, we have.
As far as I am concerned, my health is my own business; it becomes the business of the state only when I can no longer cope on my own. But beware: as Walter Cronkite once observed, America’s health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system. The pandemic has held up a no-fun-house mirror to its failings and problems, which unfortunately, have become a political as well as scientific bone of contention. Which is why I believe in going back to philosophical basics. Let’s try to define what health actually is.
Defining Health
But where to begin. Health is such a huge, complex topic that we tend to leave it to the professionals, the doctors, the public health officials and the big drug companies who have so kindly provided us with experimental ‘vaccines’, opioids and other blessings of civilization. I think the pandemic offers a rare chance to rethink and redo health on a personal as well as public scale.
First, I propose that we take back control by defining what it is, for ourselves, for our bodies, our minds and even the body politic. After reading, thinking, and talking about what that might be for weeks, I have come up with this: Health is a state of balance.
Balance, in healthspeak, is also known as homeostasis. The Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary definition goes like this: the process by which a living thing or a cell keeps the conditions inside it the same despite any changes in the conditions around it.
And how many of us have managed to ‘stay the same’ during this time of Covid? I would hazard no one who is still alive. Apart from the contested death rate, which The Economist thinks is higher than previously thought; while other experts deny this and claim it’s been inflated, how is our physical health? Not good, in fact much worse than before it all began.
Due to fear, boredom, and anxiety, many began hitting the bottle rather harder. Others simply converted their worries into nervous eating habits, snacking on junk food, or simply eating all the time, with predictable results. The rates for obesity and just being overweight, simply ballooned. and they were already out of control. This is a health crisis that the progressive left has declared off limits, calling it ‘fat shaming’. Well, right back at you, darlings. If you can’t talk about something that might kill you, then you’re guilty of helping people die, albeit in the PC correct fashion.
The fat and the furious
Yes, we need to talk about fat, where framing is everything. Canadians are now 40 percent fatter than they were two years ago. In the USA, two thirds of the population are either overweight or obese. The ‘slim nations’ are led by the Japanese and the Koreans, followed by the Swiss and the Norwegians, with the other European nations existing on a 20 percent spectrum. These are the facts and it’s time we faced them honestly. But we make it hard.
This morning, September 24, the CBC published one of those articles about young women learning to ‘love their bodies’ and embracing something called ‘body positivity’, even though they are obese. I wish we would stop publishing this kind of thing. Note to CBC: how about some stories about loving our healthy bodies, instead. When you frame the fat issue as an aesthetic problem or a psychological issue, you’re not being helpful. This article, by someone called Naheed Mustafa, does mention in passing that fat is a health issue, but there’s nary a word about the high correlation of fat to the Covid death rate. One can think about fat and body image through the lens of health instead of looks. It is a choice, but we’re not doing much to help women, indeed anyone, with what is essentially a complicated medical problem. We’re doing quite the opposite in BC. I am now barred from my twice weekly pool sessions but allowed to eat at junk food places. It’s government policy, courtesy of the sainted chief medical officer, Dr Bonnie Henry, who has published two books about herself and her heroic exploits in public health. She is famous for telling us all to be kind. I just wish she would follow her own advice.
You’d think that once we realized that being overweight or obese is at the top of the scale for Covid deaths, a more than token effort to help the desperate would be underway. But no. there has been a shocking silence; a total lack of any coherent public plan to help the anxious, the overweight, the drinkers, the stressed out.
Though there was one notable exception.
Way back in April 2020, It was none other than Boris Johnson, Britain’s shaggy PM, who emerged from a near fatal encounter with the virus and proclaimed: I was too fat! He then proceeded to put his best PM foot forward by demonstrating how to keep the fat off. He was seen running briskly in the park, with his dog, Dilyn, every morning. He also made a less impressive effort to lure his citizens away from their beloved crisps and other junk food by limiting TV ads and making restaurants list calories. But mindful of ‘progressives’, he did it gingerly and almost apologetically, promising not to be too ‘nanny state’ about it. He knew they wouldn’t sit still for that, the weighty Brits, who statistically aren’t quite as fat as their American cousins.
The predictable upshot was that everybody kept getting fatter. And dying of Covid.
Here is some hard recent data, published by the US Centre for Disease control, July 1, 2021. In a peer reviewed study of 540,667 seriously ill Covid patients struggling in 800 hospitals during one year between March 2020 and March 2021, the strongest risk factors for dying from Covid were underlying conditions such as hypertension, disorders of lipid metabolism, obesity and diabetes, and anxiety. Here is the link:
https://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2021/21_0123.htm
Lipid Disorders means you have high blood levels of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, fats called triglycerides, or both. If you have high levels of these substances, you’re at increased risk for developing heart disease. They can lead to other problems, like metabolic disease. Both are lifestyle diseases linked to your insulin system, which gets overwhelmed by a diet high in sugars and carbs. And that leads directly to diabetes. Being fat is not about calories; it’s about your hormonal household, driven mostly by insulin and glycogen overproduction. This system goes awry when people consume a ‘normal’ western diet, heavy on sugar, processed foods, and carbohydrates, all of which spike insulin. If you do this for years, you become insulin resistant, and then diabetic. Some people have resilient systems and can get away with it. But more can’t. They look at a cookie and gain weight. Or so it feels to them. which in turn leads to metabolic disease. And once you have that, you’re simply no longer healthy, you’re overweight or obese and a new virus can clean the floor with you. Exercise, or rather the lack of it, is also a driver.
I actually used to be one of these people and woke up one day to discover I was prediabetic.
That seemed insane; I have always ‘watched my diet’, exercised and didn’t drink much either. However, It was a losing battle because I didn’t realize that I had insulin problems and was eating the wrong diet for me. This is the big aha moment: one size diets never fit all. The only way to stay slim and healthy and alive is to figure out exactly what your body can metabolize. This is not an easy task. For one thing, you should know what your insulin levels are. But when I asked for that test, I was told that ‘we don’t consider that necessary, and even when I offered to pay for it, the answer was NO. In desperation, I turned to Drs Berg and Ekberg; whom I call The Keto Doctors. They have millions of followers on YouTube, and I adapted their Keto wisdom to my needs and also began intermittent fasting. This regimen, while not exactly easy, has worked for me. I lost about 30 pounds and kept it off, at least so far. And I’m ancient, don’t forget. I managed to do this on my own; the so-called health care system did nothing for me.
Since the pandemic began, there is more general interest in healthy Keto and intermittent fasting, but it is still a fringe thing. People worry if it’s safe or even effective. All I can say is, find out for yourself. You are unique, your body’s requirements likewise. Take charge of your weight. Move! And beside this, read the research on vitamin supplements, especially Vitamins D3 and C. If you have low levels of those vitamins, you are at higher risk of dying from Covid. Again, this is not being advised by our official public health people. They only make rules about how to stay away from your loved ones and get experimental vaccines. Nothing else seems to matter to them.
Comparing health care outcomes
You could say that globally, public health care outcomes are completely out of balance. And you could also say that no matter what the method, the international charts of Covid infections tend to follow an almost identical pattern over time. At this moment, Israel is at the forefront of information about the effectiveness of vaccines because they did a more thorough job of vaccinations earlier than any other nation. And the news is mixed; nearly 40 percent of their Covid cases in hospital are double vaccinated. Though they don’t seem to get as sick as the unvaccinated. It’s the only thing we know for sure about the vaccine efficacy. Vaccines do not stop transmissions, which is odd. The expectation was that they would and thus usher in ‘freedom day’. That never happened, alas. And after about six months, you need a ‘booster shot’, now freely available in Israel. The question of whether this is safe or sustainable is not being asked. Not yet.
If you want a fascinating look at how the ‘health care system’ in the US failed its citizens during the first year of the pandemic, I have a great book for you: The Premonition, a pandemic story, by Michael Lewis. Yes, that ML, who wrote The Big Short, among other terrific books. Here he delivers an absolutely scathing account of the Center for Disease Control. As he tells it, this august body is an uncaring as well as rigid bureaucracy utterly unfit for getting in front of a pandemic. During last year, they demonstrated this repeatedly, ignoring pleas for help from the States’ Public Health officers as well as innovative private health companies, one of whom had developed a fast, simple test procedure when Covid tests took more than a week to return results. They weren’t interested. The only thing that they might be good for, according to Lewis, is publishing after the fact statistics, which they are doing. What they have failed to do is address the deep chasm of distrust that exists between the people of the United States and their government institutions. Indeed, they have demonstrated that distrust to be well founded. One of the richest countries in the world, with scores of highly trained scientists and world class health companies, failed to help its citizens when they really needed it.
For comparison, there is Sweden, at the other end of the Covid spectrum and from the beginning, a place where the authorities and the population worked together to solve a health threat like no other. They never had lockdowns, simply advisories, and they never closed their schools. And in the end, a year after they began this much maligned system, they are in a better place than just about any other nation as far as death rates, Covid infections and the health of their economy is concerned. They are now ready to remove the last concerns about social distancing at the end of this month. This could only happen because Swedes have a high degree of trust in their government, and the bureaucrats trust the people to be intelligent and responsible. This is a case of beautiful public private balance in action. Of intelligent and transparent medical messaging, the likes of which we in North America can only dream about. In a world of bitterly divided Covid opinions, the Swedish State Epidemiologist Angers Tegnell, has become so widely admired that you can get a tattoo of his head! Here he talks about what makes Swedes different and why the controversial ‘Swedish Model’ is now more widely accepted. Maybe we should follow it during the next pandemic? https://unherd.com/thepost/anders-tegnell-sweden-won-the-argument-on-covid/
Here in Canada, we hover somewhere between those extremes. We have a supposedly better, one payer system, funded by federal taxes but run by the provinces. And in every province, they have had their own contradictory mess of rules, advisories, lockdowns, and ways to count Covid ‘cases and deaths. The Commonwealth Trust released a study in August of this year, which compares and contrasts the overall performance of all wealthy countries against the US system. https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2021/aug/mirror-mirror-2021-reflecting-poorly
Key Findings: The top-performing countries overall are Norway, the Netherlands, and Australia. The United States ranks last overall, despite spending far more of its gross domestic product on health care. The U.S. ranks last on access to care, administrative efficiency, equity, and health care outcomes, but second on measures of care process. Well, I guess that’s better than nothing.
Canada ranks higher than the US, but is nowhere near the top line countries. It is stuck in the middle ranks on just about every outcome. While the death rate here is lower than in the USA, I doubt this is because of our superior system. Rather, it’s because the personal health ---and weight---of the average Canadian is less out of kilter. That is why fewer Canadians, per capita, succumbed. But we don’t talk about this; it would be fat shaming.
Before I sign off, I want to attach a checklist of what to do if you get Covid and don’t wish to end up in the hospital with staff that think you a fool or worse for not getting vaccinated in the first place. The doctors who compiled it, like Dr Peter McCullough, are high profile dissenters to the reigning method of simply letting people go home until they are sick enough to require hospitalization. We do that here in BC, and I consider it a form of malpractice.
There is one other thing we should talk about and that is our mental health, also quite out of balance, but that is for the next post on this pandemic series that I never thought I would write.