Pandemic Film: Day 1

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Politicgirl shared a Tik Tok film on Twitter created by @digitalresonator that set me off an a new film production adventure. The film used AI generated imagery cut together to the Billy Joel song, We didn’t Start the Fire. My plan is to create a similar music video style film using the amazing music of local musician Andy Matchett. He was responsible for an astonishingly prescient show titled The Key of E which was about an apocalypse. Listing to the song, Just Can’t Wait for the Game to End, I realized that is was very much a song about the pandemic.

I decided to start with a scene which zooms in on a flock of sheep. The title of that painting is What the Flock are They Doing? I want the opening shots to be a series of slow zoom ins. The challenge is to add parallax so that sheep closer to the camera move faster that sheep further from the camera. Whit this particular painting I knew that I had already separate foreground sheep from mid ground sheep and the sheep furthest away were also on a separate layer so that I could blur them.

I found out that Photoshop files can be imported into Adobe Premiere Pro, the video editing software as a series of individual layers. I stacked those layers i the timeline and animated each at a different rate for scale and position. Getting this shot to work was critical to figuring out the workflow for the rest of the 3 minute and 44 second film. After a solid day of work I managed to get a decent 1.5D effect and it worked perfectly with the soundtrack.

Minotaurs

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I have started production on a short film (details to come) and found myself in need of 16 thousand Minotaurs tearing up the street. While researching, the scenes of the Spanish bull runs became my primary inspiration.

The Minotaur, appears briefly in Dante‘s Inferno, where Dante and his guide Virgil find themselves picking their way among boulders dislodged on the slope and preparing to enter into the seventh circle of hell. Dante and Virgil encounter the beast first among the “men of blood”, those damned for their violent natures.

On my occasion scrolls through Instagram videos, I am shocked by the number of videos being posted of fist fights in public. After three years of the pandemic, people are violently mingling in public. They have lost sigh of how to be civilized and care about people other than themselves. Fights break out in airplanes, busses, and public events. Humanity as a whole seems to have become more primal, driven by fear and a hatred fueled by a virus they can not control, and do not understand.

Hate crimes against Asian Americans had been on a steep incline. Domestic violence has also been on a steep incline. It is as if the hoards need someone to blame. The virus is invisible and therefor easy to ignore as it spreads among the masses that have no idea that it is airborne and can cause infection from much further than six feet.

The simple act of wearing a mask has become a heated source of violence. A fight over masks led to gunfire outside a Los Angeles grocery store, according to authorities, and a rapper named Jerry Lewis was killed. When workers in a Michigan pizzeria told a customer that she had to wear a mask, the costumer  flashed a middle finger, and kicked someone in the restaurant.

The wearing of masks has become a catalyst for political conflict, an arena where scientific evidence is often interpreted through a partisan lens. While I was wearing a mask while walking the streets of Charleston, I was accosted by a drunkard and my politics were called into account. I ignored the drunk trying to impress his buddies and a fight didn’t follow. We went about the rest of the evening outside learning about the ghosts of the city from a guide. I don’t care if I am the only person wearing a mask. I know too much to risk the infection.

Some idiot on a crowded plane tried to convince a woman seated near him to take off her mask by offering her 100,000. Besides being a smarmy gesture, the price was far too low. I would need an offer of 4 million dollars in cash to even consider taking my N-95 off in a crowded plane. Even then it is not really worth it.

Kids can’t start a wildfire!

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Infants, children and adolescents are equally capable of carrying and spreading high levels of live, replicating COVID-19. Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and urgent care clinics, studied 110 children aged two weeks to 21 years who tested positive for COVID-19. They then showed that these high levels of virus correspond with live, infectious virus, and that levels are highest early in the illness in both symptomatic and asymptomatic children.

The viral loads of kids in the hospital were no different from those found in hospitalized adults. The high viral loads are infectious. Children can carry the virus and infect other people. Most children are asymptomatic or only mildly symptomatic when they develop COVID-19, allowing them to stay under the radar as spreaders of the disease. Who would ever suspect that cute little punum? children are reservoirs for the evolution of new variants as well as spreaders of current variants.

Every year, children are a major driver of transmission for the viruses that cause the flu and the common cold. So why would the deadly COVID virus be any different? The study concluded that masking is important for children as well as adults. COVID is not a benign disease in children. It has become the eighth most common cause of death among children in the United States.

 

Kids don’t burn!

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Minimizers love to claim without evidence that children do not get infected with COVID-19. In New South Whales more than 20,000 children caught COVID in the first 2 weeks of school. In a recent study published in JAMA Network found 24% of parents were found to be hiding their child’s COVID infections. 21% allowed their children to break quarantine or isolation rules. The bottom line is that parents want those germ factories out of the house, to hell with others.

The vast majority of children have had COVID and passed it on to parents and grand parents. Children are the primary driving force for the spread of the COVID virus. Pfizer’s vaccine for 5- to 11-year-old was 68% effective in December. But just more than a month later, the effectiveness dropped to 12%. Clearly vaccines are not preventing infection. They do offer protection against infections that are severe enough to cause hospitalizations.

“About 20-30% of children who get COVID-19 will have long COVID,” warned UC Davis Health, a major academic hospital system in California, on its website. Roughly 16 million children in the U.S. alone may have suffered from long COVID. That’s a whole lot of long tern sick children. That is our new normal, of disability and shorter life spans for the next generation.

 

Don’t expose children to art, just COVID in Floriduh

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A Florida principle was forced to resign after a parent complained that her 12 year old was exposed to  Michelangelo‘s David which she claims is ‘pornographic.’ The famous sculpture was one of many works of art shown in a talk about renaissance art. Other questionable images included, the Creation of Adam, a Sisteen chapel fresco  and Botticelli‘s Birth of Venus.

The principal of Tallahassee Classical School, handed in her resignation after an ultimatum from the school board’s chairman, local media reported. “It saddens me that my time here had to end this way,” she told the Tallahassee Democrat.

In the 1500s, when the Roman Catholic Church deemed nudity as immodest and obscene, metal fig leaves covered the genitals of statues like David. A reproduction of David was made in 1847 for display at the Victoria and Albert museum in England. When Queen Victoria first saw the reproduction of David, she was apparently so shocked by his nudity that a proportionally accurate fig leaf was commissioned to cover the genitalia. The leaf was kept ready any royal visits. If you peeked up from below you could still see what lay below the leaf.

In Florida, parents are fine with infecting their children repeatedly with a deadly pathogen but heaven forbid the child see the human form. No, this story is not an April fools joke.

COVID Organ Damage

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Is there any organ in the body that COVID-19 does not harm? Many people are more sick now than they ever used to be. And it’s due to COVID. In June 2022 the CDC estimated about 7% of adult Americans had long COVID. Governments are ignoring the virus, hoping it will miraculously go away.

Stanford medical school researchers recently said COVID is “akin to HIV” and has not magically transformed into the common cold. What is repeated exposure to COVID  going to do to the kids? No one knows. The flu has a short limited season each year, but COVID is the virus that keeps on giving. Spikes happen all year round summer, winter, fall and spring.

The John Snow Project reported that, “current evidence suggests infected adults and children are at greater risk of new onset diabetes, adults are at increased risk of cardiac problems, and the long-term impact on children’s cardio-vascular health is uncertain. In addition, people can experience kidney injury, liver damage, erectile dysfunction, hearing loss, immune dysfunction, brain and memory dysfunction, ocular damage and dermatological complications. In fact there are few organs that COVID can’t harm, largely because COVID-19 is a vascular disease with immune-mediated severity impacting multiple organs. 

COVID Sweeps Through Jury

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Sudbury.com reported that the second-degree murder trial of Robert Steven Wright was delayed again after several jurors tested positive for COVID-19. The court is discussing the possibility of having ill jurors to continue by participating virtually. However, one juror is “not feeling well enough to participate virtually.

The first infected juror tested positive on March 16, 2023. The virus then swept through the jurors who had been in close quarters throughout the trial. They were told to self-isolate through the weekend. The exact number of positive jurors was discussed during voir dire and can’t be reported. Nationally in America the exact number of people infected by COVID is also kept under wraps.  Ignorance is bliss. Ignorance is also in the best interest of any politician letting the virus rip.

Wright is on trial for the second-degree murder of 23-year-old Laurentian University student Renée Sweeney, who was stabbed 27 times while working at a video store on Paris Street on Jan. 27, 1998. At the time, Wright was an 18-year-old student at Lockerby Composite School, which was within walking distance of the store where Sweeney worked.

Partygate

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Partygate is a political scandal in the United Kingdom that lead to the downfall of Prime Minister Boris Johnson. While United Kingdom lock downs were in place, multiple gatherings took place at 10 Downing Street, its garden, and other government buildings. The police issued 126 fixed penalty notices (FPNs) to 83 individuals whom the police found had committed offenses under COVID-19 regulations, including one each to Johnson, and his wife. All apologized and paid the penalties.

Public unrest over the events led to a decline in public support for Johnson, the government and the Conservatives, and contributed to the party’s loss of the 2021 North Shropshire by-election and poor performance in the 2022 local elections.

Fighting for his political future, Johnson strongly denied misleading parliament in a marathon session in front of the Commons Privileges Committee on March 22, 2023. His excused were feeble and misleading at best. He claimed that the COVID guidance allowed for exceptions for him and his staff. The policies however did not allow exceptions for the public who were unable to visit loved ones or attend funerals for those who died. Measures in the guidance were “usually” expected to be complied with, just not in his case at 10 Downing Street.

Johnson did mislead parliament about parties held at Downing Street but his defense is that he wasn’t intelligent enough to recognize the lies.  Johnson said it was not realistic to operate in Downing Street in a socially distanced way as if there had “an electrical force field.” Social distancing is not rocket science. Getting 20 or so staff drunk in a small room is just plain stupid. Stupid is as stupid does.

If the Privileges Committee concludes that the former prime minister misled Parliament, and that this constituted a contempt, there are a range of possible sanctions that it could recommend. Possible sanctions could include suspension from the Commons for a number of days. Any sanctions recommended by the committee would have to be approved by a vote of the whole Commons. As Boris Johnson no longer holds ministerial office, the only sanctions that the committee could recommend relate to his status as a member of Parliament.

Stockholm Syndrome

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COVID-19 is here to stay. Any chance of defeating the virus has long since passed. Airlines spread it around the world and countries no longer are making any attempts at mitigating it’s spread. The virus has won and humans are it’s fuel. Just as humans lust for fossil fuels, the virus loves each helpless host it infects.

I haven’t dropped my mitigation measures. I continue to filter the air I breath with a HEPA filter in the studio and anytime I am out in public, I wear an N-95 mask. Since COVID is airborne and can spread much further than 6 feet, I tend to maintain 22 feet of social distancing if unmasked outside. Basically if I hear to see someone the mask goes on. My thought is that if the artist Banksy can hide his identity all these years, I can certainly always be masked anytime I am seen in public.

Most of the country however has lovingly embraced the virus. I seldom see anyone masked anymore. For the past two semesters all my students have been unmasked. I hold the classes outdoors for their protection and mine. Only a few times have we worked indoors. In those cases I keep the door open and spread the mask less students out as much as I can. Those students only ever see my eyes.

Once infected, people seem to experience Stockholm Syndrome where they love their captor and drop all attempts to protect themselves and others. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines Stockholm Syndrome as “the psychological tendency of a hostage to bond with, identify with, or sympathize with his or her captor.” Once infected people lovingly promote the spread of the virus by hosting superspreader events in indoor spaces. Feeling invincible, since they survived the initial infection, they return to indoor bars, theaters, gyms, and restaurants. Huge indoor concerts are being held except when the performers become ill and have to cancel.  For the infected their new lover is a fast and wreck less return to normal.

This love affair is only in the best interest of the virus. It continues to spread as asymptotically among friends and family. One in five of these lovers develop long COVID and the quality of their life is sometimes forever destroyed. More and more people are not returning to the work force because they can not get out of bed. As a conservative estimate, about 16.3 million have long COVID so far. About 4 million people are out of work due to Long COVID. That number will continue to grow at the country promotes mass infection. According to one study Long COVID could cost the United States 3.7 trillion dollars a year. Improving ventilation in all buildings and educating the public about ways to avoid infection would cost a whole lot less.

Lion Infects Handlers with COVID

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The New Scientist reported that, A lion at Potawatomi Zoo in South Bend, Indiana, tested positive for COVID after it started coughing and became breathless. Zoo workers who had cared for the lion later caught the infection. The lion that was infected with the coronavirus probably passed it on to two zoo employees, researchers have said in a new paper. Viral samples collected from the animal and the two workers were identical, with contact tracing suggesting the employees didn’t catch the infection in any other way.

After the lion tested positive, keepers wore respirators when interacting with the lion and all other animals at the zoo. The lion was old and needed to be hand fed by the keepers. The lion was likely first infected by an asymptomatic zoo keeper. The lion had two vaccinations for COVID in September and October 2021. By the time the animal was infected the immunity from the vaccinations had worn off.

COVID-19, can infect many species, and it can pass between humans and animals. The virus likely jumped from an animal to a human in the first place, and past studies have suggested that pet cats and dogs catch COVID from their owners at extremely high rates. Other studies have shown that deer have transmitted the virus to humans. Infected hamsters in a Hong Kong pet shop sparked a human outbreak of the Delta variant of COVID.

A wide variety of zoo animals have been infected by SARS-CoV-2 including gorillas, snow leopards, hippos, hyenas and giraffes. The first zoo animal in the U.S. known to be infected with COVID-19 was a tiger at the Bronx Zoo in New York City back in April 2021. However, animal to human transmission of COVID has not previously been reported in a zoo setting.