COVID-Mania

When the first news about COVID-19 appeared on the news in early 2020, I joked in my gym’s spinning class that we need to rev it up and lower our spinning class’s room temperature, because COVID, being a respiratory disease, is best dealt with by improving our immune system’s coping skills with stressed lung’s – by deeply breathing in lots of cold air. After all, the immune system is like a muscle: the more you use it, the tougher it gets. So, strictly speaking, I wasn’t joking; I was serious. Decades of riding bicycles in cold weather outdoors have given me quite some resilience in handling flues and colds.

However, rather than mandating everyone to do cardiovascular exercises outdoors to toughen our lung’s immune responses, the government decided to shut down the economy, lock up everyone indoors, stop most exercising by closing all gyms, and thus make people’s immune system even weaker. Oh, and all tread-mill and spinning-class aficionados ended up having to exercise outdoors rather than in gyms, for lack of any other choice. It was the first time I was joined by a crowd for my daily early-morning outdoor exercises.

I am no expert in virology, but by the looks of it, it just seems to be a somewhat more severe flue that’s making the rounds. History will tell later what it was, and whether the government’s reaction to it was appropriate or an overreaction. I am sure there will be plenty of revisionist nagging at the official narrative, too. Already now, as the history of this pandemic merely starts to unfold, there are inconsistencies and contradictions in the official lore that are waiting to be challenged. I just hope that any COVID revisionism will not be accompanied by repressive measures, as we have them in so many countries today when it comes to Holocaust historio­graphy.

On the upside, the COVID-mania has led to our printers once more waiving all setup fees as a measure to stimulate their business, which means I went back to the drawing board, accelerating the release of new books and new editions of old books once more – see the section “Book Announcements.”

I’ve been in hyper-overdrive.