Riding Herd “The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it.” – JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
April 15, 2020 • www.aaalivestock.com
Volume 62 • No. 4
And In Flew Enza BY LEE PITTS
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mericans have had to learn how to socially distance themselves, practice proper toilet paper management and determine if they really were an “essential employee”. We’ve had to learn an all new vocabulary as “shelter in place” and “hunker in your bunker” became part of the American lexicon. With lots of extra time on their hands it seems some people used it to dream up all sorts of crazy theories as to how the Chinese let this nasty genie out of the bottle.
The Perfect Weapon
NEWSPAPER PRIORITY HANDLING
One of the first rumors was that the Chinese had developed this virus as part of their biological warfare arsenal and it had somehow accidentally escaped the labs at Wuhan. I surmise this idea was helped along by a novel written by Dean Koontz in 1981 called The Eyes of Darkness. Koontz was clairvoyant when he wrote nearly 40 years ago, “They call the stuff Wuhab-400 because it was developed at their RDNA labs outside the city of Wuhan, and it was the 400th viable strain of manmade microorganisms created at that research center.” Koontz also wrote that it was a “perfect weapon” in that it only killed human beings. Kristian Andersen, PhD, a professor of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research quickly shot down the rumor that COVID 19 was created in a Chinese laboratory when he wrote, “By comparing the available genome sequence data for known coronavirus strains, we can firmly determine that SARS-CoV-2 (COVID 19) originated through natural processes.” In other words, the virus was
If you get to thinkin’ you’re a person of some influence, try orderin’ somebody else’s dog around. not cooked up by genetic engineers or Communist Generals.
Raising The White Flag Another theory, that the virus was brought to Wuhan by an American soldier, must have come from a Chinaman trying to shed some of the blame. To find the root of this idiotic idea we have to go back over 100 years to the terrible days of the Spanish Flu, although the Spanish had nothing to do with it. It was the deadliest flu epidemic this country had ever seen and 500 million people, one-third of the world’s population, became infected. The number of deaths worldwide was at least 50 million with 675,000 occurring in this country. According to a documentary I watched on public television while I was sheltering in place, the 1918 flu epidemic got its start when a big pile of dried cattle manure was burned at
Fort Riley, Kansas. For days a black cloud enveloped the area and sickened many soldiers on the Army base. Then these soldiers were sent on crowded troop carriers to Europe to engage the enemy in World War I. Perhaps the deadliest weapon the American G.I.’s brought with them wasn’t their guns and grenades but the deadly virus that so weakened the German Army they had no alternative but to surrender. It would be many decades later that scientists would be able to isolate the virus and read its genetic code to determine that the Spanish Flu, the most severe pandemic in recent history, was of avian origin, probably a Kansas chicken farm. Which just goes to show you shouldn’t believe everything you hear on public television. We can hardly blame the scientists back in 1918 for not knowing much about this flu be-
cause their microscopes weren’t good enough to even see the virus. With no vaccine to protect against this flu bug and no antibiotics to treat any secondary bacterial infections, efforts to control the worldwide epidemic were limited to home brews, quarantine, disinfectants, and limiting the size of public gatherings. (Sound familiar?) I remember my grandmother telling me she wore a little bag tied around her neck for protection with something inside called asafoetida. No wonder people could be well at breakfast and dead by dinner. This flu was so easy to catch young girls jumped rope to this little ditty: Had a bird, it’s name was Enza. Opened the the window, And influenza. Perhaps there is some comfort to be taken in the fact that the deadly flu that was wiping out people right and left in October just seemed to disappear on its own in November.
It’s All Our Fault The next rumor I heard was that COVID 19 was a cattle virus. It was later determined that users of Facebook spread this outlandish rumor. While hunkering in my bunker I did something I hadn’t continued on page two
A State Tries to Chart its Economic Rebound From a Pandemic BY BILL LUCIA, SENIOR REPORTER ROUTEFIFTY.COM
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ooking beyond the immediate public health crisis the coronavirus is now causing, a pressing issue for many state governments across the U.S. is what they can do to help get their economies up to full speed again when the disease outbreak finally abates. To this end, Utah last week released a threestage plan that’s meant to serve as sort of a roadmap for economic recovery over the next six to nine months. It begins with an eight to 12-week “urgent” phase that is focused heavily on stopping the disease from spreading. The plan then transitions into a new 10- to 14-week “stabilization” stage where the hope is that public health and economic relief measures take hold. Finally, there is an eight to 10-week “recovery” period, where the goal is to have the virus reined in and to see revived job growth. The state is issuing the blueprint at a time when there is a huge degree of uncertainty over how the public health crisis will play out and how long it will cast a pall over the nation’s economy. In other words, even for the most adept planners, it’s a hard time to plan. But Val Hale, director of the Utah Governor’s Office of Economic Development, said Utah has a tradition of being “a little bit pro-
active” about doing something like crafting an economic recovery blueprint. “We wanted to be able to come through this by protecting the citizens’ health and at the same time protecting the economy,” Hale added. To date, Utah has not seen the explosive case counts that some other states are enduring with Covid-19, the highly contagious respiratory illness that the new coronavirus causes. Figures the state issued for Tuesday show 887 cases in Utah, with 73 people hospitalized from Covid-19, and five deaths due to the disease. New York state, in contrast, has upwards of 75,000 cases and over 1,500 deaths. But while Utah so far may have been spared from the worst of the outbreak, it is still disrupting life there, as it is in much of America. Gov. Gary Herbert issued a directive on Friday calling on residents to stay home as much as possible, and to avoid non-essential travel. The state earlier in the month ordered restaurants and bars to stop dine-in service. Salt Lake County over the weekend instructed business such as movie theaters, gyms and performance venues to close. Hale pointed out that with five marquee national parks, Utah is a major destination for outdoor enthusiasts and other travelers. Tourcontinued on page four
by LEE PITTS
Fancy Foo Foo Food
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’ve always loved being able to identity things. Whether it was guessing state license plates from afar, parts of dead frogs in zoology, breeds of dogs, Democrats or Republicans, makes of cars, kinds of cattle or cats, and crops growing along the road. It’s one reason why I enjoy grocery shopping so much which I’ve done religiously with my wife for 46 years. We’re lucky to live in an area where hundreds of crops are grown and I love being able to identify all the different fruits and vegetables, as well as the cuts of meat. From yards away I can identify Chinese artichokes, bok choy, white asparagus, purple sweet potatoes, purple carrots, kumquats, calabash, fiddleheads, daikon radishes, rutabagas, Hass avocados, kohlrabi, jackfruit, star fruit, tomatillo, tripe, top sirloins and tiger nuts (Insert snarky comment here). My wife was a cashier in a grocery store for over 30 years and when grocery stores made the switch to scanners she had to learn to identify every single fruit or vegetable in the store and its corresponding number code so when it was weighed all she had to do was punch in its code and the computer did the rest. I remember quizzing her in the produce aisle and in the process I learned all the names of vegetables too. My wife became so good at this that she became the go-to authority in the store. For example, another checker would hold up a fruit and yell out, “Diane, what is this?” “It’s an ugli fruit,” she’d reply. “I know it’s ugly, but what is it.” “I’m telling you it’s an ugli fruit.” Eventually my wife would just yell out its code and the other checker would find out it truly was called an ugli fruit. You should have heard the exchange when my wife informed them the name of a vegetable was “yardlong”. “No it’s not, it’s only eight inches,” another checker would reply. “It may be two inches but it’s still yardlong, also known as asparagus bean, number 345.” I tell you, it was like the old Laurel and Hardy routine Hardy routine of Who’s on First.
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