 Good afternoon. Welcome to coronavirus and our mental health. Today is January 4th, 2023. Happy New Year, everybody. My name is Ken Burtness and I'm coming from Haleiva on the north shore of Oahu. It's a rainy day. I hope you're not too wet and you're staying dry. Today we're going to talk about, speaking of rain, we're going to talk about a dark lingering cloud. And we're going to take a look at the last three years of the coronavirus and where it's taken us and how we dealt with it. So, without any further ado, why don't we get started. Okay. A dark cloud. Well, it caught us by surprise, that was for sure. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take you through some statistics and then some ideas. And I've got slides to do that and I hope you, hopefully won't be too boring. I don't think they will be. I've tried to keep them short. And I'm going to try to explain to you the variations that are happening with the data and what it all means. So let's go ahead and start with that first slide. And one of the things you'll notice about this first slide is that the data starts not at January 1, 2020. It starts in April. Although we first got wind of the coronavirus in December of 2019, we didn't declare it a pandemic until March of 2020. And the first data that really started rolling in was in April. And what we're taking a look at is the seven day average of daily new cases. So, how many new cases came up every single day during these time periods? And you can see on the left the April, 2020, that first time through with our new statistics, about 31,000. Now jumps up when we go to the big spike time, which is the holiday time really runs from early December and late November on through January, almost up to February. And you can see from the statistics coming in January, 2021 that 31,000 jumped to 248,000 new cases per day, which was phenomenal. Now, during the year as we tried to get ahead of COVID, you can see that those new cases came down a little bit. But then we got to the big jump and the big jump was last January, a year ago, January, 2022, where we jumped up to over 800,000 new cases a day. Now, this was due to the, and I've talked about this a lot during the previous shows, is that Omicron variants, Beta 5 and Beta 4, these were very, very infectious variants of the Omicron. So, you can see that is the cause for that big jump under 800,000. Now, if you go back to the slide, you'll take a look at where we are now. And this is from January 3rd yesterday, 2023. And by the way, all these number statistics are coming from the New York Times, which has been my go-to for the, along with the various World Health Organization's Department of Health, et cetera, and CDC and so on. But the New York Times has been the one that I've been taking most of my numbers from. So, that was a great drop and that's cause for some real celebration so far. But we still got a way to go because the data is still coming in. You know, when we're in the middle of a holiday, when we're in the middle of this spike period, a lot of times things get delayed. A lot of people are off, a lot of people are scrambling to deal with new problems. And especially the triple pandemic that we're looking at, the triple threat that's coming up and I'll talk about that later. When we add not only, when you talk about not only COVID, but we talk about the flu and we talk about RSV. And we'll do that toward the end of the show. Now, let's go to the next slide. Now, the next slide is hospitalized patients. And you see basically the same thing starts off at 64,000 patient people in hospitals. And it jumps up in the in the spike area of the new year up to 142,000 goes down, you know, to sort of what we call sort of the fall spike. And then we got the big spike, but it's not quite as big as the new cases. 161,000 we're doing better. And again, taking a look at January 3 yesterday, we're way down. We're at our lowest level as far as hospitalizations. But here's the caveat before we leave this slide. The caveat is that there's that's still a lot of people in the hospital system that are in there because of COVID. And all those COVID beds that are being taken up by the people who need them, of course, are taking away beds from people who have other problems. And believe me, there's a lot of other problems as well. So it's still a great strain on both the hospitals and all the health care givers that work there. So it may look small, but it's still significant. And we still have work to go on that. Okay, let's take a look at the third slide. Now, the third slide is the deaths. Now, this is a seven day average of COVID deaths. And here's where there's a big difference between this and the first two slides that I showed you. Yes, we start off in April with over 2000 deaths a day. It goes up during that spike period and comes down. But in that February period, that's that sort of the holiday period. Actually, that statistic is from February 1. So you can almost really call it in the January 2022. It's as big as the other two slides. So the big, big spike was the previous year in January 2021. And again, when we take a look at that last figure figure from yesterday, we're way down. And that's the great thing because the other thing about the Omicron variants is they not only are highly infectious, but they're less lethal. So more people getting sick, but less people dying. Well, that's got its pluses and its minuses, obviously. And so we're very happy about the deaths going down. But we're very concerned because people are still getting sick and people are not only getting sick with COVID, but it's affecting all the other diseases as well. Not only the fact that the other diseases have less beds to occupy, but they also interact with COVID a lot. And we've got long COVID, which you've heard about before. And we'll talk a little bit more about that. Okay, let's go to the big slide, which is the next one. This is the total deaths in the U.S. for three years. And that's what we're looking at three years. And this runs from 2020, 2021, and through 2022. And you can see major, major drop in the deaths in 2022. But still a lot, as you can tell, 240,000 people in this country dying from COVID. But compared to that 460,000 from last year, it's some major progress. So not only is the variants that we're dealing with less lethal, but we have more tools to work with. The big thing that worries me when we take a look at this slide again next year, and I'll probably be back to you again in January of 2024, taking a look at four years of COVID, because COVID is declining, but it's not going away. And that's what we have to realize. But hopefully next year we'll see it even much further down. Some experts are thinking we'll be down to 200,000. Some are thinking more optimistically that we'll be down to 100,000 during this next year, still way too many, but a lot of progress. Now, why aren't we making more progress? Because we're no longer using our major tools, and we'll need to take a look at that. Next slide, please. Okay, now here I'm going to switch from the New York Times to the World Health Organization. And this was what came out this past week with the World Health Organization. And here's where they started off. They said, and I'll read to you from the slide, they're hopeful, and hopeful is a critical word there. But at some point in 2023, COVID-19 will no longer be a global health emergency. Now, emergency is the other critical word here. Because what the WHO, the World Health Organization goes on to say, is that, well, it might not be an emergency, it will continue to be a problem. So if you're thinking this year, and we do get away from that emergency designation, there'll be a problem. It will be a global health problem. And that's what we're going to have to wrestle with this next year. And it's not going to be easy, believe me. Okay, let's go on to the next slide. Now, here's the reason for hope. You know, you need some hope, let's take a look at this. Let's see from that first little bit that we got from the World Health Organization, 90% of the global population have some level of immunity, either through vaccination or through previous illness. So the antibodies build up. And so that's good, especially for the developing countries who haven't had as much access to vaccines as the developing countries have. So, you know, that gives us a lot of hope there. Now, let's take a look at that second one underneath there. Okay, the weekly death toll, and we saw that on the last slide, is down significantly. And it's mostly involved with people who are not vaccinated. Now, there's been a lot of misinformation come out during the past three years. A lot of people are putting out and saying, oh, we don't really have a problem. It's no big deal. This is government that's putting one over on us, et cetera, et cetera. Well, these statistics that we just saw, they are not exact statistics in that there is so much variation in the collection. There is so much variation in the interpretation. It is very difficult to get a final number for any of those. But the key to those statistics that we've just taken a look at is the trend. And we can see the trend that's happening, especially that last number slide that we took a look at, where over a million people in this country had died. Now, there is no way that people can fake over a million death certificates. And believe me, when I talk about these statistics, when I talk about we have problems with them, the problems are in underestimating the example, not overestimating, but underestimating. It's so very difficult at times to tease COVID deaths, for instance, away from other problems because they're also affecting the persons who are vulnerable. And that's the other big population in addition to the people who are unvaccinated. It's the people who are at risk. And those are elderly people, and those are people with a previous physical condition. And so when they come in, and if they pass away in our hospitals, sometimes it's very difficult to say, well, this is a COVID death, or this is a death from respiratory illness or cancer or whatever, because there's a lot of interactions there. So while the data may be a little soft, that's what my graduate school professors would say when I turned in my dissertation and saying, well, you know, this is not exactly hard data here. Yeah, that's true. But the trends are very clear. After three years, there is no doubt about the damage that it has done to the people in this country and the people in the world. There is no disputing that. And if you're listening to people or you're talking to people who say, oh, no, this is not the case, you know, you better, well, you can't try to convince them. These are people who are not being convinced, no matter what the statistics say, no matter what proof that we show them, but don't fall into that trap. This is a very serious problem, and it's continuing to be a very serious problem. And we're seeing the good trends, and we're also seeing the trends that we need to deal with this year. So be very sure about that. Okay, let's go to the next slide. Okay, those are the reasons for hope. Let's talk about the concerns. Okay, and there are four major concern areas that I want to talk about. First of all, and this is one that you really have to understand. If you're going to try to eradicate a virus, say for instance, like we eradicated, quote, smallpox, you have to be able to identify those people who have it. The major problem that we've been facing with COVID for three years is that some people don't show any symptoms. They have COVID, but they don't show any symptoms. So they don't get treated. They don't go to the hospital. They're not tested or they avoid testing. And what happens is they have it, and their body is effectively fighting off the COVID apparently, but they're in the stage of giving it to other people. And that's the real danger, and that's why COVID hangs around because we're passing it back and forth and back and forth. So this is very, very important to understand. Now the other concern, let's go back to the slide. The second concern on that slide is that what I just talked about, the no symptoms. So how are we going to do with that? Let's take a look at the next slide. Okay, we'll come to the dealing with it in a second, but let me go to some of the other reasons in addition to that being invisible. Let's talk about animals. Now, when it first came out, we suspected that animals had passed it on to human beings. And the bat became the prime suspect, getting COVID passed from a bat, which is too bad because I really like bats. I was a real fan of Batman when I was growing up, so, and I still think he has lots of people to look at. And we're still looking at them, but there are a lot of other animals that are now coming up and we're seeing that have COVID as well. Now, what happens is we're so overwhelmed trying to deal with the human beings who have COVID. We are certainly not prepared to try to help the animals who have got COVID and deal with the problems associated with them making them better and less infectious. So what happens is COVID feeds on itself. If it's going, you know, if it's in a population where it can keep feeding things back and forth like human beings passing it to one another, animals are also doing the same thing. And if you don't intervene, the COVID gets worse, it gets bigger, the problem gets bigger. So when we try to deal with something like the animal population, and maybe we find something that can help with bats and we're trying to deal with them. Well, other species of animals are getting it and they're passing it back and forth. And it builds up what we call a reservoir of COVID infectious variants and they feed on themselves. Just like when we stopped dealing with COVID, you know, and we have stopped a lot of our tools that were very successful with COVID. Our masking and our social distancing are certainly not what they were at the beginning of last year. And this allows COVID to stick around. And if COVID sticks around, whether it's in a human population or an animal population, it's going to grow. It's not going to go away. And it's going to come back to reinfect people. And that's one of our big problems with COVID is that our vaccinations. And we'll get to that, I think, with the next slide, if you can bring that up. Okay. Oh, this is, you can see 2B, because I needed to equate you with the term zoonotic, which is an interesting term. But basically that means that we not only can give COVID to animals, but they can give it to us and vice versa. So again, it's not only humans passing COVID back and forth to each other and animals passing COVID back and forth to each other, but across species, animals are passing it to us and we're passing it to them. And again, the problem is that COVID builds. And you can see from that second thing, that second reason for concern is animals are having a tough time because of those increased problems that they are facing just like we are. Climate change, deforestation, and mass livestock farming. All of these contribute to massive weather problems and global problems that cause us to get sicker. And that's one of the reasons why we've seen a big spike in flu, and we've seen a big spike in respiratory diseases that RSV. And that's why we're calling it a triple pandemic now, because we're cautioning people to take care of themselves by dealing with and getting protection against not only COVID, but flu and this RSV, the respiratory system, because they're really wrecking havoc here. So with all those things that we're talking about, the deforestation, the climate change, etc. That's causing all these problems to stick around. And if we don't attend to them in an aggressive way, they get worse, and they come back with us with a vengeance. That regeneration brings us to that problem of vaccination. I think that should be our next slide so we can come up with that. You can see we're concerned because there must be a highly effective vaccine that offers lifelong protection where we can get one shot and we can say, wow, I'm done. No more. I'm taken care of with this disease and I don't have to worry about it. Now, if you take a look at that concern, while the COVID vaccines help us to prevent very severe cases of COVID, and that's cases that wind up being lethal and people dying from COVID, and you saw that in the statistics about our deaths have gone down this past year, which is a great positive. But the problem is that they offer little protection against reinfection. And if we get to say we get a booster and hopefully you've got one of the people that have got boosters, the recent boosters that take care of Omicron variants, beta five and beta four. Those should last you around six months, but after six months, right now you're going to need another booster because that wears off. And we're liable to get reinfected and that's what we're seeing a lot with people and we think they were safe. We think, well, I've been vaccinated or I've had actually had a case of COVID. And once you have a case, of course, the antibiotics in your own system build up to deal with that. Or if you've got vaccinations that helps your antibiotics deal up with antibodies deal up with. And we're good to go for a while but they wear off. They wear off we have not got that one golden vaccine that will take us away from all these problems. And we're acting like we have, because we are much less boosted than we are vaccinated. We have less than half of the less than half of us that had vaccinations have followed up and got their boosters. And you need to do that because these wear off. You don't want to have to go through this again. If you haven't gotten COVID, ask some of your friends who've had COVID and ask them if they ever want to go through that again. And I doubt that any of them will say, oh, yeah, no problem, you know, you know, if I get reinfected, no big deal. Well, what the people who have gotten reinfected will tell these people is that just because you had a life case the first time around doesn't mean you're going to have a life case this time around. And being short of those antibodies that your system has in it is going to make you very vulnerable. So these are one things that we really, really have to attend to. Now, the other thing is, like I said at the beginning of the program, we are less masked. There are less people wearing masks, and there are more people who are not social distancing. Getting a big crowds, accepting themselves to, you know, getting infected and trying to deal with spreaders. That's a major problem. Let's take a look at this from a sort of a different angle. Let's take a look at, we'll start off with medically, because that's the one that we're really looking at with COVID. That's what we've been focused on. How do we deal with that in this next year to make sure that all these problems and concerns don't come to fruition? But one of the things, as you can see at the top part, is to move quickly on lockdown. If there's a new wave coming in and you see that new wave from the statistics. And believe me, it's a wave because in this country, especially it seems to come from east to west. So if people on the East Coast have got a spike in COVID, if you're in the Midwest and then later in the West, you can sort of say, well, it's coming our way. So be prepared for this and be very vigilant about this. So immediately go to those lockdowns. The other thing, as you can see from the bottom is that we have to really test for these emerging diseases and not only COVID again, but things like flu and RSV and other diseases. So you can get them to isolate as soon as possible. One of the real interesting things that happened to us at the beginning of COVID, first when we got the vaccines and we started masking, especially the masking part I think was very helpful and the staying away from large crowds. Other problems went down. Our incidence of flu decreased because we weren't spreading our disease, not only for COVID, but we weren't spreading it for the zoo, you know, and other viruses. So we had a respite from that. Now that we're no longer masking and keeping social distancing, those are going to come back as well as COVID. And you have to protect yourself against them as well. And masking is a great way to do it. And I'll talk more about that in a second, but let's go to the sociological view of it next slide. Okay, if you're a sociologist, what you really want to do is to talk about a global community. You want to really drive home the thing to everybody that we're no longer isolated. We're not only, you know, if there's a war that breaks out. If there's a disease like the pandemic that breaks out. If there's other major factors that are causing other major problems to people. In the past, we could say, well, we're not there, you know, we're not close to those people. It's none of our business. We don't have to worry about us, you know, and frankly, they'll have to deal with it themselves. Well, that doesn't work anymore. As the war in Ukraine has really driven home to us. This is a concern, a global concern. Not only for the people in Ukraine, but the people everywhere else that are worried about these type of. Well, this type of war spreading to other people in other countries. And none of us are safe anymore. We have to understand that we are part of this global community. And that's what the sociologists are going to be working with to try to help us to connect with that community. And we've been unconnected with that lockdown and isolation. We've had less chance to interact with our community, our town, our state, our, you know, our culture. All of that we've had less of a chance to do so that's been very difficult and caused problems for us. And it's been sort of difficult to get back into that. Okay, let's go to the, because we're running a little short on time, let's go to the psychological slide. We need to move away from thinking just of ourselves. Now, the sociologists are already on this about let's getting to the global community, but we have to do it personally as well. If we just think about how to protect ourselves. And we're not worried about other people and frankly, we just don't care about other people. We're only so caring so much about ourselves and our immediate family that we don't do things to help other people. You need to do this. You need to understand like that bottom line says that to understand what affects others affects all of us. That if we're having problems like China is having problems right now, this is not going to stay isolated to China. This is going to come to us. And it's going to come to everybody unless we work together we work together as people. And as the sociologists say this countries and cultures, etc. But especially individuals and that's where we can make the most difference. We may not be able to change our world position our world problems, but we can certainly help other people that are close to us. We can help our neighbors. We can help people in our communities are in need of help. And if we help them and they get better and less susceptible to COVID, then it's going to help us because we're going to be less susceptible to COVID. These are the mindsets that we really have to go through. My last slide, I'll go to our Nobel Prize Laureate in literature, Bob Dylan, and I can't sing it to you because I'm a terrible singer. And we can't really play a recording of it for copyright problems. But that's not needed because I think most everybody who's watching this show can sing this song without any accompaniment. We know these lyrics so well, especially those last two lines. Yes, and how many deaths will it take until we know that too many people have died. I can't say it better than that. And I think we can do this. I know we can do this, but we have to it's not an easy road to travel. 2023 will be optimistic much better than 2022, but we still have a long road to go and it's a hard road. So stay with this. In the future sessions that we're going to be having, I'm going to continue on with my work with finding joy in life, even while that dark cloud is lingering over us. There are ways to not only find joy in our life, but to be effective in our jobs and in helping other people and in doing what we want to do to become the people that we want to become. This can happen. So, to all of you out there, thank you for joining in on this. Thank you for staying with this on coronavirus. Like I said, from here on in, we'll have sort of a short update, but we'll be focusing mostly for the rest of the year on things that will make us happy and things that will make other people happy. So I hope that you will join us for all that. Thanks for coming with us. Thanks also to the think tech of white staff. Jay and Haley and Eric and Michael and everybody and. And again, thank you for listening. Aloha and Happy New Year. Thank you so much for watching think tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn and donate to us at think tech Hawaii.com. Mahalo.