I’m not saying it was the COVID Zombie Virus, but . . .
First, let me be clear. This is a dead sobering lesson we should all take to heart. Because the Halloween crush in Seoul is terrifying to contemplate, or it should be. It shouldn’t have happened, and yet – it did.
I’ll just mention the things I found significant, like not enough police because – well, because someone obviously didn’t think things through. Things like that this was a gathering at a time when such gatherings were very much a novelty after the pandemic conditions of the last few years and so of course everyone would want to get out on the street and be social and celebratory.
Things like considering that there’d be tourists there, a lot more tourists because with lifted restrictions cruise companies, airlines, and travel agencies were finally able to serve large numbers of people again, and so of course the already huge number of novelty-seeking local revelers would be swollen by large numbers of tourists that would want to be going to EVERY event.
A Perfect Storm
People out to celebrate after being denied such gatherings for recent years, tourism swelling the local population. Someone in Event Control clearly not planning too well. It begins to add up.
The people in the streets, in that alleyway and others like it, were out to have a fun night of rubbing shoulders with other revelers. Just like pretty much every other person there. A LOT of revelers. Something was
Bound To Happen
I’ve noted it since way way way back: That COVID seemed to predispose people to become antisocial – a trait a virus or bacterium really needs its host to have in order to facilitate its spread. By “antisocial” I don’t mean hiding away from others because that would mean LESS chance of a virus or organism spreading. I mean becoming unconscientious, irresponsible, uncritical, and uncaring towards others.
Stuff like ignoring the safety of others by ignoring social distance and by not masking, despite 100% incontrovertible evidence that these things would prevent the spread of the virus and could actually eliminate it if carried out for a long enough period.
In this post, I wasn’t 100% sure of it yet but it was dawning on me:
Back then I just knew that people were being far less socially responsible once they’d caught COVID and it rang alarm bells. Also by then (and a few more times since) I’d come across a dozen or more cases where fungi, bacteria, and microorganisms changed the behaviour of their hosts to suit their lifecycles. (And there’s a whole study topic to be had in THAT, alone. What/how/why/inhell did these things apparently HAVE to develop in most of the ecosystems of the planet?)
Look for yourself, “zombie organism forces/forcing”
- Spiders that are forced by a parasite to spin themselves into a cocoon so the parasite would be safe – and have a snack when it came time to emerge.
- Ants that are forced by a fungus to climb grass stalks to a certain precise height and then clamp themselves there for the entire day so that they stood the highest chance of being eaten by a cow that would become the host to a new generation of fungus.
- A thing called hairworm that infects a grasshopper and quite literally forces it to drown itself in the nearest body of water when the worm is ready to mate, whereupon the adult worm leaves to host’s carcass to find a mate.
- And cats, they harbour an organism toxoplasmosis gondii that infects other mammals and makes them LIKE cats. (This last one is interesting because it was once thought to only affect rodents, making them attracted to the scent of cats and cat urine, but has now been shown to affect birds, most mammals, and primates – including us – in a similar fashion.)
That last one should hit home hard. We make up stories about cats coming along and ridding farmers of mice and rats – so we domesticated them – but it’s quite obvious once you understand that toxoplasmosis gondii needs to transfer from where it breeds into another host and then back into the cat to breed again. Toxoplasmosis NEEDS other mammals to like cats so that they can hop into them while they grow to maturity and then back to the cat. Toxoplasmosis domesticated US.
And the thing that Toxoplasmosis does to the growing host is to reduce their fear reaction to all other predators, not just cats, and it also makes the hosts find the scents of cats attractive. In other words, it causes definite and permanent change of mental processes in the host.
That COVID might produce a similar set of effects in hosts to increase the chances that one host will infect another one isn’t surprising – it would seem that if it didn’t make such changes, it would be the exception to the rule.
Could These Have Contributed?
There’s been a definite link demonstrated between having contracted COVID and a reduced brain function. The most obvious was initially the alteration of the senses of taste and smell, but since then it appears that functional IQ is damaged, “brain fog” incidence increases, some confusion and alertness issues are reported, mood changes. And these are only the effects of COVID on the brain.
COVID almost invariably causes lung damage to a greater or lesser degree, often damages the heart and other organs, and attacks joints, muscle and tendons. We’ve been thinking of COVID as a “get it and forget it” disease but it’s increasingly becoming obvious that it isn’t. Just as every influenza leaves behind lasting damage in victims, just as mononucleosis (glandular fever) leaves damage, and just as almost EVERY disease leaves behind signs of its ravages, you just have to accept that if COVID DIDN’T leave damage behind it then it would be almost unique among diseases.
Let’s take the effects on the brain, then. Loss of IQ, brain fog, loss of alertness. You may not even be aware of it. Unless you take a few IQ tests and consistently come up a few points short of your usual score. . . You may not be aware that you’re less patient with people around you, have less emapthy toward them, less tolerance for them – because we’ve become socially isolated over the last few years, and new social norms can take hold frighteningly quickly.
You’re in charge. You know the city is going to celebrate Halloween in the streets for the first time in a few years, and you’re quite happy for that, hey the city’ll come alive for the first time in years.
You shake your head to clear another one of those intruding thoughts you’ve been getting – yeah, of course there are going ot be a lot of happy people celebrating. So what? We used to manage it quite well before didn’t we?
A quick thought passes: “tourists. Tourists too.”
But you’ve got enough to do what with organising your people in the Force to make sure they watch the shops and monuments . . .
The above is a scenario only. But it could well have contributed to the disaster.
And then there’s this from the article:
“We were yelling, we were saying, ‘You have to go back, you have to turn around, people are dying.’
– Mr Taverniti
“But nobody was listening.”
That does sound like incoming revelers either completely misunderstanding the yelled warnings as part of some huge macabre Halloween joke – or a complete lack of concern. Given what we’re finding out about COVID, the latter now also has to be considered possible, sadly.
Is This A Conspiracy Theory?
It literally can’t be a “conspiracy” theory, SARS-CoV-2 is a virus and can’t think or create a conspiracy. People can’t “conspire” to hide the effects of the virus and then deliberately go around sabotaging quarantine arrangements, destroying social distancing, and refusing masks as a result of getting together to fool “those other non-COVID people.”
It may even turn out to not be an effect of COVID at all and instead there’s just a fairly random series of coincidences at work here. The social situation of the whole planet may be causing an overpopulation trigger to activate.
(Rats under ideal conditions will breed until they reach such a trigger, after which they become bad parents, start fighting for no reason, kill each other, and become antisocial and prone to repetitive addictive behaviours.
Grasshoppers when they hit their overpopulation trigger almost turn into a different insect, becoming swarming locusts. So this could be a factor which has coincidentally helped COVID’s spread.)
But one thing we do know about COVID is that it attacks almost every organ and system in the human body, including the brain. So far studies have noted a decrease in IQ, but we may well find that toxoplasmosis g. has a co-inhabitor of our thought processes.
CATspiracy Theory, Then?
You know, this actually has a smidgen of merit, it’s been shown that t. g. has an effect on pretty much all birds and mammals and is taken as proven these days.
(Well, Dr T Plasmosis may, anyway.)
And – from my admittedly small sample of the world population from social media and the various news sources I research. It’s been gnawing at me little by little over the last year or so. What if toxoplasmosis g. is a stronger influencer than whatever effect – if there is any – that COVID produces?
Give me some free rein here. It’s worth exploring.
Sure, the possible effects of COVID which I propose, and the proven effects of toxoplasmosis g. could co-exist in a single host. But what if they can’t? What if, in effect, toxoplasmosis g. immunises a person’s brain against the “zombie” aspect of COVID? Perhaps it’ll be discovered that people who’d been affected by t.g. before the pandemic are now better able to withstand the changes to behaviour that COVID is trying to create.
Also there’s no suggestion that t.g. will protect from any other effects of COVID on the host body. It’s not logical, t.g. just wants host animals to fall prey to cats more easily so the only thing it would compete with COVID over would be the behaviour control mechanism. So if proven to occur, it’s not a tool to manage other effects, but it might be useful in lowering the chance of a t.g. host from contracting COVID in the first place.
I’ll quite readily admit that this isn’t even anything more than a tenuous hypothesis at best, but there should be figures already available to conduct a retrostudy of and see if there’s a significant correlation here. A new study could be commissioned.
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