My friend buried her husband today.  He didn't die from COVID, but he died all alone, a few days after Christmas.

Here in the wasteland of fear that California has become, if you enter a hospital, you may never be seen again.  Nobody can visit.  If you're too unwell to have the strength to communicate via FaceTime or Zoom, you will miss any possible comfort from, or communication with, those who care about you in your last moments.  The same is true for those in nursing homes who have suffered for so long.

California is shut down tight, the populace barely clinging to sanity, with many people practically too scared to breathe, much less interact with one another in a meaningful way.  Masks are worn in cars, on bikes, walking around the neighborhood, as if they are a magic talisman against the COVID virus.  Obviously, they are not, given the currently reported state of our state.  Hospitals are full of COVID patients, and funeral homes are overflowing with the many who didn't survive it.

What the heck is going on?  Why is nobody in our dumb, read-the-prompter cadre of local media asking questions and demanding answers?  Even the national cable news shows report the never-ending litany of death and fear (seemingly finding only the worst stories to share), but they never ask questions.

I have questions — simple, pertinent ones I don't seem able to find answers to.  How are we treating our infected patients?  Are we intervening early with proven treatments, or are we simply allowing them to die?  Why?  Is it for political and monetary gain? 

After all, we know there are effective therapies for COVID.  Take the case of President Trump.  He got the virus and then got treatment with Regeneron's experimental antibody cocktail along with Remsdevir and a steroid called dexamethasone.  He was hospitalized for a few days, went home.

Trump seems perfectly healthy.  Obviously, the treatment worked and worked miraculously well, and it has emergency use authorization from the government.  Yet that treatment has barely been mentioned since.  Nor, frankly, has any other been mentioned in recent times, much less touted as being used to save lives.  All we hear about are the deaths, the fear, and our society being ratcheted shut to quell the spread.

Then there are the statistics on hydroxychloroquine.  In countries where it's used, we read, there are far fewer hospitalizations and next to no deaths from COVID.  These countries have long used the drug to curb malaria.

Nigeria, for instance, to quote a Fox News report, has a population of 191 million, zero COVID deaths, and only 254 cases.  Peer-reviewed studies indicate that it works when given early enough.  When we tested the drug here, however, we did not test it on patients who were recently diagnosed and not that ill yet.  Instead, we tested the dying.

The funny thing about hydroxychloroquine is that it doesn't work on end-stage disease.  Still, based on that "doomed to fail" study, last June, the FDA revoked its emergency use.  Most states followed suit.

In a handful of places, public pressure put hydroxychloroquine back on the menu of available treatments (see, e.g., Ohio, Minnesota, and Nevada).  Additionally, many states still allow its use for non-COVID-related illnesses.  But is it being used for COVID in any of these places?

Oddly, as reported here, the factory making the precursors to the drug mysteriously burned down in mid-December.  I try not to be a conspiracy theorist, but I have heard nothing since about the incident, so I wonder.  We supposedly had a huge number of doses stockpiled at the time of the ban, but are they being made available?  Are they being used?

Right now, the media are still reveling in a body count.  They announce that the vaccine will not alleviate masks or lockdowns.  It seems clear that they're not asking the questions because they don't want the answers.  For our Democrat-run media, the status quo is what they want.

Image: Spanish influenza hospital ward, Camp Funston, 1918.  Public Domain.