What I learned from COVID with two years of hindsight.

 If there's one thing that will stay with me after lockdown, it's..... eczema. I have never had atopic dermatitis before and now I have.

It came from overuse of antibacterial handwash during peak lockdown.

Turns out, if you didn't already know, that overwashing is not a great idea because it actually washes away the acid mantle which.... hey presto...... actually protects you from bacteria. So, too much sanitising actually makes you More prone. To viruses? I don't know. This isn't my area of expertise. What I have read is you can fuck yourself up if you wash too much.

So, during lockdown I won myself an itchy rash on the backs of my hands around the knuckles where abrasive contact while washing was most intense.

It had subsided but now, maybe thanks to the fact I still take long daily baths and refuse to leave the house unless I have, the skin rash has spread. I have it on the backs of my hands and feet and arms.

I have looked it up and apparently there is no known effective treatment so I have had it now for three years.

I also don't really believe the government advice. Am I conspiracy theorist? Well, not really, but it is true that nobody ever seemed to really work out how it was transmitted. Everybody knew it was being transmitted but, being a respiratory sickness, it Might have been through inhalation, not touch.

The guidelines then were based on a basic understanding of the germ theory of disease which dates back a hundred years.

Because the disease was very new and the medium of propagation wasn't known the truth was that government medical advisers didn't really know what advice to give so they came up with that because... at least it's something. Not only is it something it's probably the only thing which could be done. Its why we had to wear masks too because they didn't know how you got it.

There were theories you could get it through your eyes because if the suspicious the virus was airborne was right then it could fall into your eyes like dust and make its way into your body that way. There was no advice on that because it sounded like speculation, even though it had about as much empirical backing as anything else, and what can you ask people to do? Wrap a scarf around their head? Wear swimming goggles?

So, touch and mouth where the ones which got the attention and I still haven't seen any really good research on how it is caught, because you can't. God only knows, maybe it was transmitted by insect bites? You don't know exactly how you caught it, it's too small to see in the air, so what can you look for?

What you could do is prepare different room and in each one isolate the various theories. Have a covid aerosol in one, have a covid covered surfaces in another and in a third room have covid aerosol but have everybody wear swimming goggles and see what percentage of people contract it in each room, which won't be reliable, because you probably can't account for differences in susceptibility and you need volunteers who want to expose themselves to a respiratory disease. Hey, rats and beagles, we could use your help. For ethically questionable reasons humans care less about members of other species dying. Why don't they care less about members of their own species dying? It's for their benefit and there's 8 billion of them. Humans, if you killed even a few billion people it would probably do more to help your own species, and almost everything else, than killing a few dozen rats.

So at least some of the government advice was not well grounded but based on a best guess by science advisors who didn't know what to do nor what to expect because the whole thing which made it scary is nobody knew what to expect because they hadn't seen it before.

The lesson here is in how the media capitalising on the debate by politicising it taking polemical opposite sides of the argument where one set of opinions became the left-wing view and another became the right-wing view with both sides calling the other stupid.

It's definitely a less in ad hominem since anything said by right-wing commentators was deemed wrong by the left because it came from the right-wing media, and vice versa, with both sides calling the other stupid.

Both sides had their points:

The left were right in that it is wiser to take a view from somebody qualified to talk about the subject rather than some random bozo.

The right were right in saying the advice was shady.

The synthesis of these apparently opposing sides is that, in this case, "the experts" were not specifically experts in COVID vectors because nobody was so what you got was speculative generic advice based on creaky germ theory of disease which could offer no greater specific advice in this case. So, wash your hands, you might be touching deadly germs which might wipe out the human population.