COVID-19: We are all Lady Macbeth now
The COVID-19 handwashing recommendations lead to a rise in OCD symptoms and anxiety.
Makes perfect sense:
But for some people with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), to be warned they must scrub to protect themselves from an invisible enemy, and to do so in a ritualistic way with internal musical accompaniment, is akin to inviting a demon to come for tea. Some of these people have spent years trying not to wash their hands, often as a prescribed part of their treatment.
“It’s definitely put a lot of the internal OCD dialogue back into my life. It’s being reinforced by outside, authoritative voices,” says Erica (not her real name), a long-term OCD patient. “It’s a lot harder to tell yourself that the urge to wash your hands is irrational when everyone on your Twitter feed or on the news is saying: ‘Wash your hands. Nobody is washing their hands correctly.’”
The worsening outbreak affects people with OCD in other ways, too. Chiefly, the spike in anxiety about the virus can fuel existing obsessive fears of contamination and trigger destructive compulsive actions.
I read something a week ago suggesting that people should scrub their hands almost to the bleeding point. No, don’t do that. If the skin begins to crack or bleed, then you are creating new pathways for infections.
Any practical suggestions on how often one ought hand wash? Certainly after the rest room and before preparing food. I get that.
But it’s hard not to touch a lot of things in the course of a day while going about one’s business. Money, handrails, doorknobs, chair backs, table tops, mailboxes, to name a few.
huxley, since I’m in self-isolation at home, I don’t need to wash my hands all day. I wash them when I touch something that some person not me or my husband has touched. So, after retrieving and processing the mail, after bringing the garbage cans back up from the curb, after bringing in the groceries. At the store, I wipe down the cart at the beginning, use the self-checkout, and wipe my hands after putting the groceries in the car and before changing my sunglasses and opening the driver’s door. Call me foolish, but I am washing my hands after opening delivery boxes and breaking them down for the recycling bin.
How often does Captain Hook was his hand and does he also wash the other? aarg!
Where’s William Tecumseh Sherman when San Francisco needs him?
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/361641/
So recommendations that one wash one’s hands conscientiously is potentially harmful to the OCD crowd. And shutting down airlines and restaurants is harmful to the economy. And snowflakes and other neurotics and hyper-gregarious or emotionally needy types may suffer post traumatic stress disorders from being forced into quarantine. And closing schools is a problem because … free breakfast and lunches for half the children, whose “parents” who are too indifferent to feed the kid a bowl of cereal and have better things to spend their money on; like drugs and cell phone bills. And it is wrong to keep schizophrenics locked away when medicines which they cannot be forced to take are available to treat their delusions and keep them from defecating on the streets and sidewalks. And closing the borders to limit the importation and transmission of infections is racist; as is naming names and calling things by their place of origin.
And the most important thing in this crisis is a shared sense of community and solidarity, and bravely singing songs together in defiance of the viruses and microbes; whereas selfishly demanding to know who, what, where, when, how, and why, just has to take a back seat to that.
And those in government should talk to us “like we are your children”, and show care and have compassion: with the best of them acting like omnipotent bureaucrats in charge of nursery schools.
And don’t you dare point a finger unless it’s at Trump
And this society … is really, really, and possibly deserves to be, totally f**ked.
“And this society … is really, really, and possibly deserves to be, totally f**ked.”
Well, half of America anyway. The problem is that predators see the wounded as prey and, the world has some very vicious predators. Were America to collapse it would usher in a new dark age. One whose lifespan is impossible to predict.
huxley, since I’m in self-isolation at home, I don’t need to wash my hands all day.
Kate: Thanks for your response. Staying mostly at home seems to be the real solution.
The last time I had the flu, I was flying to Boston in the Christmas rush, a snow storm hit, my plane got detoured, and I was stuck in La Guardia for 12 hours before I could get rerouted to Boston. Man, I was sick!
This is the first time we’ve been glad that one of the kids is a little on the obsessive hand washing side of things. Until Ths, he was riding public transportation in L.A., but, he never sat down, only touched things with one hand, and wouldn’t touch anything else until he had washed his hands very thoroughly. He’s just passed out of the 5-day window for symptoms to appear.
I have lived this crazy OCD way for over 30 years now. I’ve had OCD since my teenage years…I am a counter. I got really over the top with hand washing etc. when I had my son in 2000. I was diagnosed with MS in ’05 and then I got even more careful and cautious. I always have hand gel and Lysol in my house and car, especially. Family and friends have looked at me funny or made jokes sometimes….not bad ones, though. They love me. My aunt just said to my mom the other day, Wow, your daughter has been on to something for a while.
“Wow, your daughter has been on to something for a while.” – Gail
It’s like the geek response to the demand that they self-isolate, stay home, and work remotely — yesterday, they were loser weirdos; today, they are the bellwethers of salvation.
Based on this the virus is way overblown
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/03/16/diamond-princess-mysteries/
From the article:
before they knew it was a problem, the epidemic raged on the ship, with infected crew members cooking and cleaning for the guests, people all eating together, close living quarters, lots of social interaction, and a generally older population. Seems like a perfect situation for an overwhelming majority of the passengers to become infected.
And despite that, some 83% (82.7% – 83.9%) of the passengers never got the disease at all
83% of the people on the ship didn’t get it, despite perfect conditions for transmission. If you get it, you have about a 50/50 chance of showing no symptoms at all. And the fatality rate is lower than the earlier estimates of 2% or above.
US coronavirus deaths are currently at 67, we’ll likely see ten times that number, 670 or so, might be a thousand or three … meanwhile, 3,100 people die in US traffic accidents every month
Lots of detail at the link.
I’m very encouraged when I read about the experience on the Diamond Princess, and very discouraged when I read about the experience in Italian hospitals. I’m looking pretty hard for a reliable way to determine which one is likeliest to happen here. In the meantime, we’re staying home and washing our hands after contact with anything coming in from outside–and I’ve never been a big hand-washer, or a disease-worrier of any stripe.
I don’t look forward to a period in which the shelf at the ICU that’s supposed to hold the ventilators looks like the shelf in the grocery store that’s supposed to hold the cleaning products. I’m persuaded that there’s value in spreading out the severe cases over time so that doesn’t happen. Still, it’s comforting that it didn’t happen on the cruise ship.
Dick Illyes:
However, they were only on the ship for a finite amount of time after the disease hit. A few weeks, if I’m not mistaken.
About a fifth of the people on the ship contracted the virus in that time. If that had continued on the ship, do you really think that would have been the total number of people infected? I see no reason to think that.
However, the more valid numbers – which have been discussed here, are that about 1% of infected people on the ship died. This was in a population that trended to the elderly, although the death rate among the actual very elderly people on the ship was significantly higher than that. If the disease had gone unchecked on the ship for a year, for example, probably most of the people would have gotten it and at least 1% would have died.
The people who were very ill on the ship got the best of medical care because they were taken off and treated in Japan. They didn’t overwhelm facilities there because the number of people on the ship was already very finite.