XiNN had this (found at Instapundit):
Three Arizona teachers who shared a classroom got coronavirus. One of them died
(CNN)Three teachers who shared a summer classroom at a school in Arizona all contracted coronavirus last month, leaving one of them dead.
*SKIP FOUR PARAGRAPHS AND INLINE PHOTO*
Kimberley Byrd started feeling unwell in June. She was prone to sinus infections, and also had asthma, diabetes and lupus. Her doctor gave her antibiotics and steroids and on June 13, she went to the emergency room, according to her husband, Jesse Byrd Sr.
(My emphasis.)
So, to recap:
XiNN published a story that talked about a teacher who died in Arizona after contracting WuFlu along with the rest of her teaching team. No students were involved because the teaching was online. (Which makes one wonder why the three teachers had to teach from the classroom.)
But the real story doesn’t start until long after the typical low-information, short-attention-span XiNN reader would have stopped reading and blamed Donald Trump.
From the photo, we get that Ms. Byrd was clinically obese. That’s one co-morbidity. She was also
- Over 60
- Prone to sinus infections
- Had asthma
- Had diabetes
- Had lupus
Any one of those would have put her at high risk of death from WuFlu. But she didn’t just have one, she had SIX. And possibly more. Did she have hypertension? What about hypoglycemia from treatment from diabetes? Cardiac issues, e.g., irregular heartbeat? The heartbreak of psoriasis? (Just kidding about the last. I think.)
(Note that the only one those bulleted issues I don’t share with her is lupus. Thank $DEITY.)
Someone made a very astute comment on this post at Instapundit:
This is where we went so wrong on Covid. Less than 60 and healthy should never have been put under house arrest. Older and people with health issues should have first in line for the work remote or enhanced unemployment with guaranteed positions when returning to work.
Exactly. AND anyone in that “older and/or with health issues” cohort should have been allowed to make their own damn decision. My wife — 60+, diabetic, obese, asthma, hypertension — kept working, as an essential employee. Admittedly there were only a few people at work in that huge building, but she kept going out and working every day.
But what I think is significant is that the lady had lupus. There’s a chance she might have been on hydroxychloroquine, as it’s a standard treatment for lupus, but there’s also a chance that she wasn’t due to unacceptable side effects. I am pretty sure my ex-GF who had lupus was on hydroxychloroquine for a while, because I remember her saying she stopped taking it because the side effects were preventing her from working.
Aha! say the orangemanbadders. See, we told you, it doesn’t work!
Uh-huh. Look at all the co-morbidities, fuckfaces. At some point, nothing is going to work, and people just die. It is the way of things.
But lupus…bottom line, lupus is your immune system going nuts and attacking parts of your body it shouldn’t be attacking. That’s similar to a cytokine storm, which appears to be the main problem faced by folks who get the WuFlu. The difference is that a cytokine storm is a much stronger response. And while the whole point of the hydroxychloroquine is to mitigate the cytokine storm, its use is simply contraindicated in some people who have certain underlying conditions and/or simply react badly to it — and it may have been contraindicated in the case of Ms. Byrd. The point being that having lupus AND contracting WuFlu may well be a death sentence in and of itself.
Plus: Even if they did have her on it, did they supplement with zinc? Did they ensure that she had a reasonable serum level of Vitamin D, or despite the photo showing her outdoors in the sun, and stating that she “loved the outdoors”, was she chronically Vitamin D-deficient like most Americans?
One more question: “Her doctor gave her antibiotics and steroids and on June 13, she went to the emergency room.” Did they not, at any point from June 1 to June 13, think to get her tested for COVID-19? There’s no indication in the article that Ms. Byrd was ever tested for COVID-19. Did she really have COVID-19? I’m asking the question because XiNN’s reporter apparently didn’t think it was important to ask it.
And more to the point: Did XiNN bother to check into any of this before they wrote their five-paragraph obituary followed by a photo and only then followed by, “oh by the way, she had a bunch of co-morbidities”?
Well, we know the answer to that last question. Anything that makes Orange Man Bad is going to be top-shelf news at XiNN, and they’ll shove the inconvenient facts way down in the article where they know their readers won’t go.