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Alternate Remedies

Interesting ways to combat the virus from different parts of the world. One a fabric that zaps the virus, other a remedy from nature. There seems to be a notion that the remedy must be newly created in response to the crisis for it to be credible. Friends and family in India seem to be on the fence about Ayurvedic remedies for covid even those who have depended on it their whole lives even for complex ailments. And it seems to depend on their politics for the most part not on what they objectively think. 

Maybe at some level we don't want to believe that a weed we could pull from our backyard could cure us when we have had our whole lives upended. That would make us look very foolish collectively. If this was so easy all along then we would have no basis for making peace with it, or submit to the life-altering experience and the myriad of pain that the virus has brought in its wake. 

My friend B works in strategy for a software product company. Lately he has been working absolutely insane hours all days of the week and weekend to re-do everything in the wake of the pandemic. The last strategic plan the company had put together is only a few months old has to be trashed out. It's just not him but atleast another dozen people who are working just as furiously at this small company trying to sort the mess out. B says strategy is a pretty ridiculous word these days and to pretend to have one even more so - but that is his job description. Repeat that many millions of times around the world every day. 

To think that a tisane made from a common weed growing in any backyard could make this all these gyrations of humankind redundant may be a pill impossibly hard to swallow. A reasonable solution would need to cost many billions of dollars, involve research institutes, governments and universities among an assortment of other players. Then it would be solution worthy of the pain covid has produced. There is no way to scientifically prove the remedy works without the required time and sample size. The virus itself (in some incarnation) has existed for a long time. Logically then it is possible some humans somewhere in the world might have encountered it and perhaps dealt it with locally in ways they knew to. That would be the kind of "folk remedy" that no one seems to be interested in anymore. 

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