The Divine Mr. M

Elon Musk and Yours Truly have a few things in common...

We both had childhood steeped in Sci-Fi, which has profoundly shaped our World View in very similar ways. Makes us both Look to The Future in very radical ways.

We both believe that Accelerating Climate Change has gone too far to be stopped, tho he's dialed back his statements on the subject because he had to get in bed with Fossil Fuel Money to fully get on the Trump Train.

We both have a 'messianic' drive to establish an New Social Order to replace the present collapsing socioeconomic order. Ofc, said 'new orders' are very different at their core, even with some 'procedural overlap'. [see Sci-Fi]

The obvious Big Dif is money. His old man tossed him a few million and said, "Go git 'em." Mine were rather less supportive...yeah, yeah, poor me...

All this gives me an insight into what he's doing. BTW, it's not a unique insight, others see as well. So...

Musk is acting out a classic Sci-Fi trope, the Eccentric Billionaire Genius who fights against the Philistines to Save The World. That's why he's wrecking everything. It's to clear away those he sees as impeding him [the FAA, HHS etc] in his Crusade...and that big ass tax break will help with that, too. Pretty sure he'll fail eventually as he's not really a 'genius'.

Trump doesn't really give a fuck, largely because he's too dim to understand wtf is actually going. He's avoiding prison and is makin' bank. All good...

Even if Musk is somehow stopped, [a military junta, a MAGA upraising] the damage has already been done. The Republic has been badly wounded and will never fully heal.

Personally, the best I now hope for is that our Disability cheques keep showing up...and there ya have.

"All politics is local." ~Tip O'Neal

~I have managed to scrape together some Wisdom in the fifty odd years of my adulthood and that has led me to realize that the most Essential Spiritual Lesson is how one takes Responsibility for one's Powerlessness. That may seem a bit contraindicative, so let me say it again with more emphasis: the most Essential Spiritual Lesson is how one takes Responsibility for one's Powerlessness.

Okay, hold on to that thought, we'll get back to it.

There is a man who has demonstrably saved more souls than Jesus Christ ever did or ever will and most of you have never heard of him. His name is Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov. He is a former lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Force.

On September 26th, 1983, Colonel Petrov was watch officer on duty at the Serpukhov-15 bunker near Moscow, monitoring for a US missile attack on the Soviet Union.

Suddenly, the computer-based warning systems reported several US Nuclear Missiles approaching Soviet territory. Colonel Petrov believed the information to be false and did not alert the Kremlin to the data he was receiving. Given Cold War tensions at the time, such information would likely have convinced the Soviet leadership that the US had launched a first strike attempting to "cut off the head" and they would have launched their forces in the belief it was a "counter-strike", not a first-strike.

In other words, he prevented a global thermonuclear holocaust provoked by a computer glitch. [Source]

That could certainly be a good example of 'taking Responsibility for one's Powerlessness,' but that is actually not my point in relating the incident. I relate this because I believe this event was the key, the turning point, to what has happened globally in the years since.

Clearly, this would have scared the crap out of the Soviet leadership and then their American counterparts once they found out about it. But most importantly, I believe it laid the psycho-political ground work that caused the Soviet leadership to reject the Cold War paradigm and that led to the ascension of Mikhail Gorbachev. And his efforts to reform the unreformable led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“Hold on a minute,” you're thinking, “What does this have to do with the title?” Trust me, I'll get to that.

Many had predicted the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union, most notably Zbigniew Brzezinski, but all those predictions largely cited Muslim demographics as the principal cause and estimated the collapse would take place, well, right about now.

That it came two decades 'too early' badly disrupted American planning on several levels. The key areas of disruption were economic and domestic politics.

The American Economy has been – and largely still is – centered around War Production since World War Two. Having a war that we had been planning to continue for another twenty years or more suddenly just stop threw the war planners and manufacturers into great confusion...and distress. A lot of money was at stake and there was all this talk about a 'post-war dividend'.

The problem for domestic politics was less obvious, but actually more acute. In the later course of The Cold War, The Powers That Be had made alliances with two volatile groups, the Neo-Conservatives and The Religious Right, in order to maintain political control.

With the end of The Cold War, these alliances now become problematic, something that was clearly demonstrated in 1992 with the defeat of George Bush Senior for a second term in the White House and then underscored with the ongoing troubles of the Clinton presidency.

These groups needed to be neutralized and how better than to give them a president they could love who would turn out to be a total dud: Dubya.

Remember pre-9/11 2001? Remember his numbers were in the crappier? Remember “That's My Bush”? He was well on his way to a single term, watched over by a loyal courtier of The Powers That Be: Richard M Cheney.

But Evil Dick was a very resentful man and he had plans of his own.

The vigilance of the Clinton White House regarding Jihadis was defused into wild goose chases after suicide doctors in Oregon and hookers in New Orleans, all in the hope that 'something would happen', maybe on an Oklahoma City scale, and then Dick and Rummy, backed by one faction of The Powers That Be, could proceed with their agenda regardless of what most of the rest of The Powers That Be wished.

We now see how that turned out; two unwinnable wars, the Patriot Act, a global financial meltdown, and the most marketed president in our history. Some days it seems like we've been living out an alternative history scenario. This was not The Future that most of you envisioned ten years ago.

In the context of 'taking Responsibility for one's Powerlessness,' we've done a pretty lousy job, being terrorized and bullied by madmen, ours and 'theirs', into coming very close to destroying our entire country and possibly the rest of global society, as well.

It is out of this decade of madness that both Truthers and Birthers have been born, mirror images of each other, both driven by an existential paranoia and deep seated feelings of impotence, and seeking some reason for that solely outside of themselves. Of course, this type of paranoid thinking is an American tradition, going back to the Masonic Conspiracies of the 1820's.

A key metaphor to explain how this works is the FEMA Concentration Camp meme. Under Bu$hCo, it came from The Far Left. Under Obama, it's now coming from The Far Right. And each is saying exactly what the other said, only the focus has changed, the paranoia simply shifting with 'the party in power'.

That the so-called 'camps' are abandoned military bases 'converted' by KRB, an old Cheney company, is the giveaway; it's a corporate boondoggle. Billions were allocated for “National Security”. KBR ran up some new concertina wire and slapped on a few coats of paint, and 'poof!' new Detention Facilities. If they spent even ten cents on the dollar I'd be surprised. And these joints probably could not keep my cats detained.

But they make a great excuse for freaking out and ranting endlessly about THEM [The Hosts of Evil Motives] and, in the final analysis, really just giving up. “How can I prevail in the face of such concerted evil?” That is NOT 'taking Responsibility for one's Powerlessness.'

This brings us to Shit Happens.

Remember Colonel Petrov? In that situation, there were vast amounts of War Panning and Command Structure in place, set up over decades and costing trillions, and in spite of all that is was only the action of a single, and ethical, military professional that saved the world from a disaster of obscene proportions.

I don't know about you, but that turns my bowels to water. So, yes, I abuse the metaphor, but Shit Does Happen.

Most of us cannot face such a random form of terror.

A sociopath games his way into power and randomly allows nineteen lunatics to kill three thousand of his fellow citizens so he can implement his personal political agenda.

A mass marketing blitz propels a highly charismatic member of a traditional underclass onto the presidency, something that tens of millions of the so-called 'Superior Race' will never, ever have a chance at doing.

No, that is a Loss of Control that is utterly intolerable for all too many people. Even if an Evil Cabal is controlling things, well, shit, at least somebody is In Charge!

Funny thing is, the Birthers have a far better case than the Truthers.

Over four or five years all the various documents could have been switched out. That would be an easy low key operation and in venues where no one was really paying attention at the time.

As opposed to running miles of wire and planting tons of explosives in three of the most heavily trafficked buildings in the world, all in utter secrecy and with not a single one of the large crew of highly skilled technicians ever saying a single word about it.

I'll let y'all 'do the math' on those. But both are just delusions used to avoid the far more frightening reality that no one is really in control, that all too often Shit Just Happens.

That certainly does generate "existential paranoia and deep seated feelings of impotence.” To deal with that level of discomfort, one that makes you want to claw your skin off, that requires a lot of Spiritual Work, which brings us full circle: the most Essential Spiritual Lesson is how one takes Responsibility for one's Powerlessness.

Most do not have either the Patience nor the Willingness to do that kind of Work. They're much 'happier' indulging in the above types of paranoia. Those have a comfortable structure, much like porn does, and to surrender that would cause both embarrassment and a form of withdrawal, too. Like the addict confronted with recovery, an 'old self' would have to 'die'.

One can change nothing in the thrall of such delusions.

To change the world, one needs Power. To understand your own Power, one must acknowledge one's own Powerlessness. That is a relative, not an absolute, state. When you see what you are Powerless over, then you see where you do have Power.

Then, and only then, can you take Responsibility for your own life and begin to change what can be changed...and being in that place is both terrifying and invigorating.

~Even though I am ostensibly Progressive – Pro-LGBT, Pro-Reproductive Rights, Pro-Marriage Equality, Pro-Labor, Pro-Income Equality, etc – I have come to despise The American Left. I'm old enough to remember when we got out into the streets and fucked things up. If the cops came at us, we went at them. We actually believed in Revolution, even if we were a little vague on its specifics.

But now the so-called Left has become a bunch of chickenshit mealy-mouthed whiners.

They've become so 'inclusive' that they don't really believe in anything.

They preach Tolerance, but cannot practice it because everything triggers them.

They rant about Cultural Appropriation when they produce absolutely no culture themselves.

They lament the political violence of the Right, yet demand we disarmed ourselves.

And they endlessly debate and parse every tiny cultural detail and political nuance to death and so render themselves fatally divided and utterly impotent.

Worse of all, they have so become thoroughly Petite Bourgeois in their world view – Everything Must Be Safe And Everyone Must Be Nice, All The Time, Everywhere – that they are now The Perfect Tools of The Corporate Confederacy, not Citizens, but Conscious Consumers.

The American Right is the same in its own way, but it has the advantage of being able to Hate without any need to 'understand' anything beyond its own mindset. That is the great power of Fascism, being allowed to openly hate that which you fear and do so without any shame.

~Up until last Friday, it was a pretty good bet that the GOP was going to take control of The House and Senate again this November. But after the whole SCOTUS Roe v Wade bombshell, that's not looking so certain now. The GOP leadership is doing its best to 'focus on the leaker' and not on the substance of the leak, but I have no doubt they're well aware of what a likely disaster this is for them.

In the military Doctrine of Force Concentration, it is stated that an attacker needs a Force Ratio of three to one over the defender. Ukraine's armed forces consists of 361,000 troops, so the Russians need over a million military personnel in order to secure its outcome. So far it seems the have only committed to 190,000. This is primary reason why they're being checked everywhere. Secondary considerations are the morale of the respective forces and Russia's so-so logistics.

“If you refuse to get vaccinated, then when La Rona catches up with you…stay the fuck home! Ride it out with your ‘natural immunity’ or 'the Blood of Jesus’ or whatever flavor of bullshit you believe. If you don’t make and also your whole family dies, too…well, shit happens.”

Still mad at China’s brutal authoritarian government for imprisoning Julian Assange after his journalism exposed Chinese war crimes.

~

Arresting people for future crimes is called “pre-crime”, and it’s the stuff of dystopian horror fiction.

Violently dominating an entire planet because another country might hurt yours in the future is called “US foreign policy”, and it’s the stuff of mainstream news punditry.

~

Saying a US politician is bad on foreign policy but good on domestic policy is a bit like saying “Yeah my boyfriend murders hitchhikers, but he cooks.”

~

Dominant revolutionary thought consistently fails to adequately appreciate the power of oligarchic propaganda and its ability to manipulate the way people think, act and vote. Until this changes, there will be no revolution.

~

I was upset the Democrats nominated a candidate with a decades-long track record of reactionary warmongering corporate cronyism, but I changed my mind when I learned he has a “task force” where vaguely left-wing voices are allowed to speak words into a hole in the ground.

~

“Obamagate” will not lead to anything. Since 2016 both mainstream US parties have been saying the other party is about to be obliterated any minute now by scandalous revelations, and they’re always wrong. Both parties are pure swamp; you cannot use the swamp to drain the swamp.

If you still believe that one of America’s two mainstream parties is about to be brought to its knees by earth-shattering revelations any minute now, I highly recommend you also take up watching WWE, because you’ll definitely love it.

~

It seems like a lot of people unintentionally conflate
– Dubious information about this virus and its origins
– Very real concerns about increased surveillance and authoritarianism
– Anxiety about isolation/paying the bills/changes for oneself and/or others

…into one big overwhelming anxiety-causing issue. It’s a lot less emotionally overwhelming and much easier to sort through if you consciously break up that big confusing hodgepodge into the separate issues that they actually are, and consider them individually. The concerns are still real, but you can examine them much more rationally.

~

‘May we please have our basic needs met?’

“No. Can’t afford to.”

‘Hey why are you killing all those people overseas?’

“They need killing.”

‘Doesn’t it cost money to kill them though?’

” ”

” ”

” ”

“You’re Russian propaganda.”

~

Sure Democrats are helping to renew and expand Trump’s Orwellian surveillance powers after providing no meaningful resistance to any of his worst impulses, but in their defense at least they screamed “Putin puppet” very loudly for years and years.

~

My position is not that you shouldn’t vote for Biden, it’s that it doesn’t matter whether or not you do. Democratic Party leaders don’t care if Trump wins, so it’s not like you’ll be sticking it to them by withholding your vote. No real change will come from this election either way; it can only come from outside the system.

~

The problems our species now faces are the result of elite sociopathic manipulators using media to exploit human cognitive glitches which enable them to control the fate of the whole. Any analysis of our plight which doesn’t account for this is a flawed, power-serving analysis.

~

Humanity in and of itself is not the problem. The problem is that we sometimes produce humans whose brains lack functioning empathy centers, who use the advantage this gives them over the rest of us in their relationship with mental narrative to manipulate us to get things they want.

What’s required for a healthy world is not human extinction or a mass die-off, but a change in our collective relationship with mental narrative, where we use thought as a useful tool instead of the center of all our interest and attention. This change has always been possible.

People have been writing about the potential in humanity to awaken from the illusory nature of the mind and see reality clearly for thousands of years. What’s different now is (A) our newfound ability to share information and (B) the fact that we are now at evolve-or-die time. And we’ll either make that jump or we won’t. But we absolutely do have the ability and the freedom to transcend our unhealthy relationship with mental narrative which gives sociopaths the ability to manipulate us toward our collective doom.

~

Water doesn’t gradually start boiling; it gets hotter and hotter then suddenly boils.

People don’t gradually leave abusive relationships; it gets worse and worse and then suddenly they run.

People don’t gradually attain self-realization; they look closer and closer at the nature of their experience and then suddenly there’s a radical shift in perspective.

You can’t tell it’s about to happen by appearance.

The revolution will be like this.
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/05/16/revolutionary-boiling-point-and-other-notes-from-the-edge-of-the-narrative-matrix/

BY NOW, the shortage of medical supplies in the United States is a notorious fact. The nation has between 160,000 and 200,000 ventilators; it may need a million. Masks, gowns, face shields, gloves, bottles of hand sanitizer, and tests for the virus are all in short supply.

The shortage has come as a great surprise, because the government has been contracting with private firms to make these supplies for years, and private firms, as everybody knows, will provide more of any product at a lower price than any central planner ever could. Responding to market signals like greyhounds leaping out of the gates, they race after efficiencies, pushing down costs and boosting productivity.

Yet every day brings fresh evidence of market-based inefficiency. To pick only one example, The New York Times reported on March 29 that a medical supplies company in Costa Mesa, California, which had won a competitive multimillion-dollar contract to make ventilators in 2008, had yet to deliver a single unit. How could a private firm fail so spectacularly to meet the public demand?

A hundred years ago, the economist and satirist Thorstein Veblen was pondering a similar question. In his 1921 book The Engineers and the Price System, he noted that the recent war had demonstrated the tremendous industrial capacity of the advanced nations, yet after the war, unemployment rose and production fell, pushing the industrial world into recession. Machines and men stood idle everywhere, to the great detriment of the public. “[P]eoples are in great need of all sorts of goods and services which these idle plants and idle workmen are fit to produce,” he wrote. “But for reasons of business expediency it is impossible to let these idle plants and idle workmen go to work.”

“Business expediency” meant nothing more than profitability, which Veblen thought was not at all the same thing as productive capacity. In fact, the executive’s job was to reduce the latter in order to ensure the former. “[I]t has become the ordinary duty of the corporate management,” Veblen wrote, “to adjust production to the requirements of the market by restricting the output to what the traffic will bear; that is to say, what will yield the largest net earnings.” Contrary to popular belief, corporate management doesn’t spring forth like a greyhound; it dawdles like a Great Dane.

Veblen had a name for this kind of foot-dragging: sabotage. He pointed out that the word itself derives from the French for “wooden shoe” (sabot), and so it denotes “going slow, with a dragging, clumsy movement, such as that manner of footgear may be expected to bring on.” Because profitability required scaling back production to maximally profitable levels, it followed that economic sabotage “is the beginning of wisdom in all sound workday business enterprise.”

Even if the industrial supply chain is more complicated in our day than it was in Veblen’s, it is still possible to catch the economic saboteurs at work. Returning to the Times story, the original bid-winning company was bought up by another, larger company called Covidien, which begged the federal government for more money, shuffled key employees around the firm (effectively gumming up the gears), and then demanded to be released from the contract. As a result, they received millions of public dollars but provided not a single unit. Veblen would insist that this was not a failure of the free market “price system.” On the contrary, the price system had worked according to its basic laws. As industry observers and government officials explained to the Times, “building a cheaper product […] would undermine Covidiens’ profits from its existing ventilator business.”

Who will save our economy (not to mention countless lives) from these vandals? In order to frighten financiers, “absentee owners” of capital, and other guardians of the status quo, Veblen suggested that they should all be replaced by a “Soviet of technicians.” It was the engineers, he argued, who actually knew how to run the factories.

"Without their continued and unremitting supervision and direction the industrial system would cease to be a working system at all; whereas it is not easy to see how the elimination of the existing businesslike control could bring anything but relief and heightened efficiency."

Given the manifest failure of privatizing pandemic preparedness, Veblen’s proposal looks pretty good. Perhaps it is still true, 100 years later, “that there is no single spot or corner in civilized Europe or America where the underlying population would have anything to lose by such an overturn of the established order as would cancel the vested rights of privilege and property.” If so, then it is time for the state to start buying up industries rather than bailing them out and then staffing them with technicians who will run them with an eye to the common good, rather than the interests of shareholders.

But what is the common good, exactly? Veblen’s proposal looks suspiciously like a technocracy, in which a credentialed panel of engineers decides what the public needs. In a pandemic, the public’s needs may be clear enough, but that is seldom the case. The crucial questions — What do we need? Who gets what? Who decides? — have no technical answers. They are open-ended political questions, but Veblen’s proposal lacks a place for deliberative democracy.

This is probably because he put little stock in the wisdom of crowds. Americans believed in the price system too strongly. “This commercialized frame of mind,” Veblen regretted to say, “is a sturdy outgrowth of many generations of consistent training in the pursuit of the main chance; it is second nature, and there need be no fear that it will allow the Americans to see workday facts in any other than its own perspective, just yet.” It would take something really incredible, “harsh and protracted experience to remove it.”

Veblen died in 1929, just a few months before the stock market crashed and the Great Depression began. The Depression was eventually harsh and protracted enough to inspire mass movements in favor of federal involvement in the economy and a new social safety net. In our own day, the government’s response to the pandemic has so far favored capital holders and other members of the “kept classes,” as Veblen liked to call them. It seems safe to conclude, as he did, that “[t]here is nothing in the situation that should reasonably flutter the sensibilities of the Guardians or of that massive body of well-to-do citizens who make up the rank and file of absentee owners, just yet.”

¤

Paul W. Gleason teaches in the religion departments of California Lutheran and Loyola Marymount University. A winner of the National Book Critics “emerging critic” award, he has published reviews and essays in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Point, the Guardian, and elsewhere.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/who-sabotaged-the-american-economy-thorstein-veblen-knows/

He is an inevitable result of a society that overvalues profit and undervalues human lives. If Trump had never been born, we would have some other equally vile sack of excrement sitting in the Oval Office. He is symptomatic of our collective terror and ignorance around the pace of social change. Like God, if Trump did not exist, we would have to invent him.

In terms of the election this year, a vote against Trump is absolutely meaningless if it is also a vote *for* a return to the political and social status quo in which he arose. Any vote that is not essentially revolutionary will only serve to strengthen Trump's position -- specifically because it is the popular longing for a return to normalcy that created his presidency in the first place.

Voting for Biden is not a protest against Trump, it is a fear-based reactionary scramble for safety. As such, it is doomed from the start because all such scrambling only reinforces the political trajectory that has already culminated in Trump's election. Why would the country elect Biden, when we already have a president who embodies everything he stands for but without the cheap and frankly insulting veneer of faux civility?

Joe Biden opposes universal healthcare (he says everyone deserves "affordable" care, which is code for "healthcare should only exist as a side effect of making some asshole a billionaire"); he opposes network neutrality; he supports imperial wars; he supports propping up banana republics to secure resources; he opposes economic security for the working class (again, unless it makes a profit for someone). Personally he is a sex creep and he can barely string a sentence together better than Mango Mussolini can.

If you want to vote for Biden, please do it for the same reason I am doing it: so you can tell the useless liberals and centrists that you did play the game by their rules and we all still lost. Don't do it because you think there's any fundamental difference between Trump's outright fascism and the DNC's fascism-with-a-wink."

- Pango Gillespi

With coronavirus cases continuing to rise in more than 100 countries, the COVID-19 outbreak has been officially declared a pandemic, according to the World Health Organization. As many have pointed out, most people who contract the disease will experience “mild symptoms,” which is good and bad news. On the plus side, the virus is not deadly for the vast majority of those infected. On the other hand, the large number of mild or asymptomatic cases makes the pandemic harder to track and contain.

This is why it’s crucial to pay attention to mild symptoms you may be experiencing and take precautions to protect your health and safety ― and the health and safety of others. HuffPost asked doctors to break down what exactly “mild” means when it comes to coronavirus and what people should know about the symptoms.

What Are Mild Symptoms?

“Mild symptoms refer to similar symptoms that you may experience with a cold or mild flu-like illness,” said Kristin Dean, a board-certified physician and medical director at the telemedicine service Doctor on Demand. “Most people experience a mild form of coronavirus with these symptoms being the most common: cough, body aches, runny nose, sore throat, nasal congestion or diarrhea. In some cases, people who are infected will not exhibit any symptoms.”

Indeed, coronavirus can present as a common cold in mild cases. People may develop a low-grade fever, chills, headache, fatigue and malaise as well.

The incubation period for COVID-19 indicates that it takes 2 to 14 days for an infected person to actually exhibit even mild symptoms. Research suggests that on average it takes about five days.

“An individual may think nothing of these symptoms because they do not significantly change or impact their daily lives,” said Eudene Harry, a board-certified physician in emergency medicine and medical director for the Oasis Wellness & Rejuvenation Center in Orlando, Florida. She noted that people could tend to be dismissive of symptoms that may be early signs of coronavirus.

“It includes symptoms that one may be denying to themselves or others because no one wants to be sick ― that’s human nature,” said Daniel Berliner, a physician at the virtual health platform PlushCare.

“Mild” cases of coronavirus can also be more severe than people imagine, however. Bruce Aylward of the WHO told The New York Times last week that “mild” cases in China were not necessarily like a mild cold.

″‘Mild’ was a positive test, fever, cough ― maybe even pneumonia, but not needing oxygen,” he explained. ”‘Severe’ was breathing rate up and oxygen saturation down, so needing oxygen or a ventilator. ‘Critical’ was respiratory failure or multi-organ failure.”

When Should You Seek Medical Care?

Due to the mildness of many early symptoms, it can be difficult to know when to seek medical care for a potential case of coronavirus.

“One symptom that does raise a ‘red flag’ is shortness of breath and/or difficulty breathing, although many people do not have this symptom as early as the other symptoms,” Berliner noted.

A high fever and worsening cough can also indicate a bigger issue that requires medical attention. If you have a history of medical conditions that can decrease your immune system’s response, you’ll want to be extra cautious as well.

“Decreased immunity may be caused by some of the following conditions: being older than age 65, diabetes, heart disease, chronic lung disease, chronic kidney disease, cancer, HIV or taking immunosuppressive medications,” Dean explained.

If you fall into one of those categories and are experiencing any symptoms, contact a health care provider via phone or a virtual video visit to talk it through and discuss the next steps. This is especially important if you have traveled to areas with high community transmission or been in contact with someone diagnosed with the COVID-19 virus (even if you aren’t exhibiting symptoms, it is advisable to self-isolate for 14 days after contact).

Conducting initial consultations through telemedicine networks can help reduce the spread of the virus by allowing health care workers to take protective measures to prepare for a visit from a potentially infectious patient. If you’re experiencing severe symptoms, however, call 911 to get immediate medical care.

What If You Don’t Need Hospitalization Or Medical Care?

Due to test kit shortages in the U.S., people who show mild symptoms but haven’t been in contact with confirmed coronavirus patients or visited high-risk areas may not be able to get a diagnosis. But it’s still important to stay home if you aren’t feeling well to help reduce the spread of illness.

“If you suspect you have COVID-19, please do not go to work, school or out in public places until you are directed to do so by a health care provider,” Dean said. “Mild COVID-19, just like other colds you have experienced, will typically resolve on its own by taking care of your health.”

She advised people who are exhibiting mild symptoms to get plenty of rest, stay hydrated and remain isolated from others.

“You can take over-the-counter cold remedies to help treat your symptoms, such as acetaminophen for fevers or headaches, and cough medications to alleviate coughing,” she added. “Since this illness is due to a virus, antibiotics are not effective. Stay in touch with your doctor about changes in your symptoms, and when it’s all right to return to your usual activities.”

Doctors still aren’t certain about how long patients infected with coronavirus are contagious, but one study suggests that those with mild cases are probably not infectious by about 10 days after they first experienced symptoms. Pending more conclusive research, however, it’s best to exercise caution and stay in touch with your doctor.

Avoiding high-risk places, washing hands, disinfecting surfaces, keeping a safe distance between people, not touching your face, and coughing or sneezing into elbows instead of hands are all measures everyone can take to help slow the rate of infection ― even if you aren’t experiencing symptoms. Taking care of yourself is one of the most selfless things you can do in the time of a pandemic.

“If everyone with a sore throat goes to hospital, resources will be used unnecessarily,” said Jake Deutsch, a physician specializing in emergency medicine and co-founder of Specialty Infusion. “Statistically speaking, most people won’t need an intensive-care level of treatment, so make sure those resources are available for people who clearly are more at risk. If you don’t have underlying medical conditions, I’d recommend staying home until you’re not sick. Judge your symptoms and put them in context of your medical problems.”

Ultimately, it’s important to follow guidance from reputable public health leaders like the WHO and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“The best treatment we can provide is making sure people have correct information and can process everything,” Deutsch said.
https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/mild-coronavirus-symptoms-235401563.html