Very rarely do I speak for Beacon of Speech partner Ted, but we are going to pull the curtain back here a little bit on our website production. As of 5/8/22, Ted doesn't do social media and he only owns a flip phone.
Back on January 25, 2020, we at Beacon of Speech helped sound the alarm about Covid: We're All Going to Die Anyways. 2 days after posting that article on the website, Ted and I recorded our last full Beacon of Speech webcast on YouTube: Beacon #122. We only mentioned the Covid article in passing.
We are located in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio. We weren't on the ground in China, we simply followed right-leaning news websites that didn't want to talk about Trump's impending impeachment and British websites that were more interested in the coming plague instead of American Politics.
In March of 2020, the first Covid cases began popping up in the area. Almost immediately my school district, and the rest of the schools in the state of Ohio, pulled the plug on in-school education. Because the pandemic coincided with my kidney stone surgery, when I would have actually been able to return to work, in-person, was a grey area.
I began working from home in April of 2020 and returned to my desk full time in July of 2020. My school district returned to 5 days a week, in-person schooling, in the Fall of 2020. I have documented this more thoroughly in other articles.
For 2 years, I continued the blog while the video aspect of our endeavor went on a hiatus. For the past 2 months, Ted and I have been have been meeting and discussing re-booting Beacon of Speech. (Well, that and watching the Get Back miniseries.)
In a candid moment last week, Ted confided in me, "I'm angry, when Covid hit it was like no one cared for anyone but themselves."
I wrote this in July of 2020 and it may be the truest paragraph I have ever written:
These are the facts today, July 1, 2020. Everyone in this country wants YOU to work. EVERYONE in this country wants to buy the stuff they want from WalMart. THEY don't want to work and be exposed to the virus. THEY also do not want to be told what to do and what not to do. That sums up America today in 4 sentences. Those 4 sentences that are basically opposites.
Ted went to work everyday at Iron Mountain throughout the pandemic, every single day. He never missed a day of work and Iron Mountain was one of the last companies in America to implement social distancing and mask policies. During Covid, literally no one cared about Ted. His boss worked from home at every possible opportunity and threatened his workers with dismissal if they didn't come to work in person. In the Summer of 2020, I asked Ted what Iron Mountain's Covid policy was when delivering to buildings.
He chuckled, "this is gonna make you laugh. Our policy is that if you feel unsafe walking into a building, to please call a supervisor. They treated Covid like it was a toxic cloud that you could avoid."
For 2 years this went on. Every time he went to a closed (for the day) business or was informed that employees were working from home, he seethed just a little bit more. "Don't Americans realize SOMEONE has to work?"
So imagine his aggravation THIS WEEK ALONE.
Apple Workers Resist Returning to the Office. Why can't the Apple workers return to the office after their 2 years working remotely due to Covid? Racism. (Really? Yes really.)
We've Not Seen the Worst of Covid - Bill Gates. He said this while promoting his book about Covid, flying across America on his private jet.
This Room is Like a Horror Film. Washington Post writer laments that going to a gala is "insanity" in the Covid Era.
Oprah Winfrey Slams Federal Court. Oprah revealed she didn't leave her mansion due to Covid fears for a year.
During the height of the Pandemic, local Covid "truther" Mike Trivisanno died right before one of his afternoon shifts. When the media asked for cause of death, they received an answer of "none of your business." Maybe I should ask his estate about the link between Covid and heart events?
Listen, in the state of Ohio there were 2.7 million Covid Cases. There were just over 38,000 deaths. That comes out to a 1.4% death rate. According to the Annals of Transitional Medicine, the death rate for the first wave of Covid in China, (outside of Wuhan) was supposedly 1.41%.
But if you do a deep dive into the numbers, you'll notice that 90% of deaths due to Covid, at least in America, were in citizens 50 or over. Ted's 50th Birthday coincided with the first wave of Covid.
So if you would have extrapolated the number of Covid deaths in Ohio at the beginning of the pandemic-
Like I said earlier, I have a day job, I am not an infectious disease doctor. But the Governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine, appointed Amy Acton the director of the Department of Health in 2019. She was privy to preliminary numbers that weren't released to the public. But we are going to speculate as to what she saw. If Ohio had 11 and a half or so million residents, and assuming everyone got Covid, Acton could multiply that 1.4% and, viola,160,000 dead citizens, or about the population of Dayton.
She also would have had models that said: Assuming 1 in 4 Ohioans got Covid, that would be about 40,000 dead Ohioans, which is exactly what happened. 3 months after Covid broke, Acton was chased from office by very loud protesters who often showed up at her home.
What Acton didn't know from her models is that Covid primarily struck the old, and that people really didn't care if their grandparents died.
If you're screaming that you were put out of work because your restaurant closed, you didn't look very hard for another job. Every grocery store was hiring, every WalMart was hiring, hell, our district ran out of sub teachers and dropped the requirements of a Bachelor's Degree to teach for 2 years. Work from home jobs were all filled.
Why am I so amped up about this? Everyone else has had their say. There's no headlines from Ted's point of view. Ted wasn't an essential employee, the Earth would have continued to spin on its axis if Iron Mountain closed up shop, even for just a month to implement basic social distancing protocols. He kept working because no one made enough noise for him to stop working.
Last week, the World Health Organization estimated that, by excess mortality rates, the death rate in Ohio was actually closer to the Dayton model. It doesn't matter which model was correct, Ted is going back to work tomorrow morning, just as he has for the past 2 years, like Covid didn't even happen.