Virus protection is like layering Swiss cheese armor on top of your body.
Masks are one layer, vaccination is another—distancing, well-ventilated air, and hand hygiene are still more. One hole-filled slice of aged cheese on top of another. The more layers, the fewer holes: Get it?
And misinformation? Oh, well, that’s a cute little mouse eating more holes into those thin slices of stinky goodness.
“It’s a cute little icon, but it drives home a very serious point,” Santa Barbara County Public Health Director Dr. Van Do Reynoso told the Board of Supervisors on Oct. 5. “Misinformation is endlessly harming to the widespread adoption of the layered prevention strategies, just as this mouse eats away at the cheese, so too does misinformation erode the confidence of the public in proven protection methods.”
The misinformation nation isn’t just one mouse nibbling away. It’s a whole army scarfing down chunks of protection against COVID-19. And they ain’t cute mice either! They’re rabid and confused.
Do Reynoso continued her little public relations spiel by saying that people should be sure and rely on “trusted” sources of information, such as the Centers for Disease Control and the California Public Health Department. The only issue is that the moronic mice don’t trust these sources—they don’t trust local government, state government, or federal government sources when it comes to COVID-19—so what else have you got?
We need a misinformation-eating cat to cull the moronic mice scurrying around with conspiracy theories hanging out of their mouths.
They rant about masks at county Board of Supervisors meetings, making overtures based on conclusions that don’t make sense to people with logical minds, such as the lady who was convinced that people with asymptomatic COVID-19 become symptomatic because of their mask.
“How many people have coughed or sneezed and then because of the mask, their next breath breathed the virus deeper into their nose?” she said during public comment on Oct. 5. “How many cases of symptomatic COVID have been caused through self-infection as a result of wearing a mask where the person would not have otherwise have become sick?”
Self-infection, huh?
That’s a new one.
You know what else is new? Testing sites on school campuses. And I’m all for it. The Santa Maria-Bonita School District partnered with Pipeline Medical and Heal 360 to provide free COVID-19 testing for students, teachers, and staff on four of its school campuses.
With the requirement to send people home if they exhibit any symptoms of being sick—like, at all—and not let them come back until they have a negative COVID-19 test, it makes sense.
What I don’t understand is why more school districts haven’t taken advantage of the program yet. Only four districts in the state have signed up with Pipeline to set up testing sites on school campuses.
This should have been a thing before we put students and teachers back on campus with the mandates now in place: Get vaccinated or get tested. Get sent home if you have any symptoms.
Is testing one of the Swiss cheese layers of protection against COVID-19? Because it should be. Layer up!
The canary always dresses in layers. Send comments to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Oct 7-14, 2021.
