Editor:
I recently visited Prairie Creek State Park and found it to be more overcrowded than I had ever seen it to be in many years of going there (NCJ Daily Online, July 30). Trails had numbers of people passing each other and most were not wearing masks. I strongly would recommend that the number of people in the park be limited.
On the way home we were going to stop in Trinidad but found it to be so jammed with tourists that we quickly changed our minds. The parking lot at the state beach was absolutely packed, the stores were all open and all packed with people. Few people had on masks; social distancing was impossible. It is no surprise that the COVID numbers have gone up.
Tourists are pouring in and nothing is being done about it by the town of Trinidad or the park system. Congress and our president are busy giving money to corporate interests and the Pentagon, so people are desperate to keep stores open and money coming in and people will die because of that.
Is there nothing that our political leaders can do to protect the county from the massive influx of tourists who are bringing the virus with them and don’t seem to find it necessary to even wear a mask?
Sylvia De Rooy, Indianola
This article appears in Best of Humboldt 2020.
I’ve noticed that most cars in our area have license plates from other counties and states. It worries me.
While I’ve characterized , almost certainly correctly, if I do say so, the US citizenry’s response to this pandemic as Medieval, it’s the unwarranted politicization that has brought us to this demented level.
We now know that the virus is aerosolized, and that large, heavy-breathing shouting grouping is a significant method of infecting others.
The original 2 meter distancing to allow larger particles carrying this virus remains insufficient when active or vehement.
Another fact about the virus is that although gaining entry to epithelial cells which express an important homeostatic receptor, that receptor is highly expressed in vascular (endothelial) and other tissues. the virus poses its greatest injurious power, yes, due to induced extreme immune response, which itself increases effects that may be or become chronically damaging, as well as increasaing cardiac and vascular, not to mention likely neurological events, all leading to lifelong or lengthy compromised physical and cognitive difficulties.
It’s more than a short “cold-like” disease, and the most Medieval among us have become, in effect, accessories to that injury, death, and possible significant shortening of lifespan in others.
I was shocked that the “lockdown” was so short, as the purpose or intent was to stop the communication of the disease.
The cautionary limits of quarantining and any mandatory reduction in spreading the plague were too short. We KNEW by March, that COVID had an asymptomatic period during which the virus was most prolifically spread (in part due to the higher activity level of asymptomatics).
researchers had begun to detect variable persistence in the affected.
Any future necessary lockdown MUST be of sufficient length to actually prevent transmission for a period longer than its persistence in almost all individuals.
es, other organisms can “catch” and/or form a reservoir for SARS-2, but this should increase our consensus resolve to prevent transmissible disease.
About seven significant threats have occurred because humans are too tightly interconnected in too dense populations, in the past couple decades or less. I remind you that the human population within a single lifetime, exploded worldwide by about 4x.
There will SURELY be more, if we AGAIN fail to individually and as communities, to firmly close avenues of transmission.
We will become again as diseased as primitive ignorant Medieval populations, should we remain as sociopathic toward others, and as determined to be and live in ignorance.