Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

That moment when you see in Parse.ly that one of your stories has a refer from SJ and you go track down where.

 

The entire country is going to be shut down by Wednesday. Good thing I have a bunch of Bud and Benchmark?

 

Good thing no crowds are congregating

 

For a while here, you'll see the number of cases grow steadily and outpace the death count. Outside of Washington, which is full of those damned libruhls whose lives don't matter anyway, the death rate is 0.68%. The overall death rate will go down from its current 2.15% and well below 1% for a while. At that point, people like Clay Trumpist and Dave Portnoy will beat their chests and say, "See. It's the common flu." And then as the case count levels off but time passes and the virus has time to do its work, the death rate will climb a bit. But that may not be for a while. After reveling in the glory of a relatively low death rate and claiming this whole thing was overblown by libruhls, Rush Limbaugh and his klan will not, I predict, take new inventory of the situation.

 

Anyone who is trying to compare this to H1N1 is essentially trying to compare a first quarter score against a final score. Dumb.

 

“American exceptionalism,” indeed. Its federal government has been exceptional at mismanaging the crisis.

 

Still isolated and sleeping a lot.

 

I expect that there will be more births than usual in December and January. My wife's reaction was that the divorce rate will rise too.

 

Publix cut their hours here in the SEC Badlands.

Dang. T&P.

Mitch is terrified of his constituents. However, he might beat his chest at someone he assumes will be too polite to clap back.

There's the silver lining.

 

This seems a little misleading. It's not accurate to say that the U.S. had 88 cases on March 1 and 158 on March 4, etc. We knew about (had received positive test results for) 88 and 158, etc. There were more cases out there, it's just that testing hadn't been done. As testing ramps up, the number of known cases should rise faster in percentage terms than the actual number of cases, so if the number of known cases has risen by 30% per day, the actual number of cases probably has increased by a smaller percentage per day.

That said, if the real rate of increase in the number of cases is "only" 10% /day or 20%/day, that still compounds pretty damn quickly.

 

I've been extensively debating with a (full MAGA) doctor on my Facebook page who's doing exactly that. He contends they are similar and we are vastly overreacting. I still haven't seen satisfactory answers from him why:

1--the current fatality rate estimate of 3.7% will decline by a whole order of magnitude as to ultimately be comparable to H1N1's 0.2%. He posits it will end up at 0.35% and contends that there are a lot of asymptomatic carriers out there. There would need to be about 10x as many carriers as those who present with symptoms for his math to prove out.
2--why the hospital systems in 2009 weren't overwhelmed, as Italy's are now, and as Spain's and France's soon threaten to become.
3--why business leaders, of all people, would be the ones overreacting if they stand to lose billions and possibly crash their businesses if this is on a similar trajectory to H1N1.