If you had eastern equine encephalitis as the newest pandemic on your bingo card, you are a winner. Known as EEE, the disease has been around for a long time and was used to scare us about 35 or 40 years ago. The disease is rare but can be deadly. It is transmitted by mosquitoes. Some people can die, others will suffer ongoing neurological problems. On average 10 people a year contract the disease. It has never reached a level of infection among the general population that should scare anybody. But in today's world, it's the next scary thing for politicians to latch onto and exert their authority.
Oxford MA, where the City Council has put a 6:00 PM curfew into place. The curfew will last until September 30th and then it'll be changed to a 5:00 PM curfew until the first frost appears. Angry residents expressed their displeasure and concern at the City Council meeting, but the councilors voted to go ahead with the curfew anyway. Their 'logic' was based upon the idea that mosquitoes are most active at dusk and dawn. Interestingly, they did not set a limit or time for quarantining in the morning. If their decision was based upon science, wouldn't it seem logical to do so?
How many people have currently been infected in the Boston area with EEE? Was it 100? Maybe a couple dozen people died? Most of you will probably not be surprised to learn that one 82-year-old man has contracted the disease. No one has died yet. But the authoritarians claimed that you can't be too careful.
So, you can forget all of the after-school activities in which children engage. Volleyball, football, soccer, band, and every other activity cannot be carried out without significant alterations to the schedule. Members of the council said they could play during the day but that would cut into class time. How about changing it to weekend play? Some of which does already occur but scheduling playing time at the various venues is complicated. The council even considered extending the quarantine to weekends with exceptions for people who normally work weekends but decided not to go that far. If you're truly trying to protect people from mosquito bites, what do many of them do on the weekend? They head for local parks which have ponds or lakes that can be breeding grounds for mosquitoes. Wouldn't it then seem logical to close those places down or keep people inside and away from those areas? It would if this was truly a threat to a large segment of the population.
And of course, the recommended preventative action is to keep yourself from being bitten by mosquitoes. I wonder if someone will create a cream or a spray that might deter mosquitoes? Then people would be able to go outside whenever they wanted or make a decision about their own safety. I'm surprised somebody like Pfizer or Moderna hasn't created something in anticipation of this action. Maybe there is a liability exposure that concerns them. We could probably give them blanket immunity in perpetuity if it would prevent the spread of EEE. We'll worry about side effects later.
Many of you are correctly thinking that EEE is geographically limited, and you would be correct. One would then think that in our area of the country, establishing a curfew to prevent the spread of EEE would be ridiculous since we don't have the significant mosquito populations of the eastern seaboard. You would be correct, but never put a pass to politicians to set aside logic and science.
But I think this is more devious than anything we've seen from the government before. This year they have tried to scare us with a new version of COVID and the monkey pox. But dire warnings from the government and their propaganda partners in the media did not create the fear in the population that it did several years ago. Now I think they are going to try regional pandemics. Find something that is more likely to happen in a specific part of the country. We might see Lyme disease or Hantavirus make a comeback. Stock up on toilet paper now, as you can expect the panic to set in sometime in October. It will affect voting and that's what it's designed to do.