Multi-Year WW3 is Humanity Versus the Disease

82 thoughts on “Multi-Year WW3 is Humanity Versus the Disease”

1. Not cowering, just making an effort to lower the multiplier. IF you cared about your neighbors you would do the same. It isn’t a pissing contest since the virus don’t care.

2. People move too slow and the virus moves too fast. Our healthcare system will be overwhelmed and the death tolls will rise dramatically. In three months, the death toll will start to drop because either everyone was infected or died.

3. Supply of plaquenil already dried up. If will take time to ramp up production and get it distributed. Also, some doctors will be reluctant to use it.

4. There are possibilities. Two major problems. First, getting the doctors to use it and second, getting enough of a supply. The fire is spreading too fast to save the house.

5. The radiation is scary, but I think an actual nuclear explosion that isn’t a test would be quite a bit scarier. Especially if there’s more than one. This thread started from a hypothetical “thermonuclear attack”.

6. Surely Trump (and many others) is talking about a UBI for a month or two until the people can go back to work.

   The issues with UBI (too expensive to be both universal AND enough to live on by modern standards) don’t really apply to a one-off, or two-off payment.

7. It’s comforting to remember that the original promise was “a chicken in every pot every Sunday“.

   The promise was that, in the glorious future, we’ll be able to eat meat at least once per week.

   So that outrageous promise was actually achieved, over much of the entire globe, and to a greater extent than even a political speechwriter was willing to say.

   https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/a_chicken_in_every_pot

8. Is that really the only solution? Think. How about leveling with other countries that they should quarantine ALL people arriving from that area?

9. It got to the rest of China at the same speed that it got to the rest of the world. The Chinese will be more proactive than us but they will still be affected by the virus. The virus is not finish with China yet.

10. The problem is not the virus, but the cure the governments are IMPOSING.
    When, next year, in Italy we will have a 20% less GDP and people will be out of work, taxes will increase, etc. we will see what was worst long term.

11. It is practically lethal like the normal flu.
    In Italy half of the people from 80 to 84 will die in the next 5 years (the 85-89 are half of the number of the previous). This means something more than 11% death rate every year.

    Covid-19 has a death rate of 16% in the same age bracket. And half of the dead had three or more health conditions before contracting COVID-19.

12. Here, in Italy, the GP are telling the patients with mild symptoms of COVID-19 not even bother to go to the hospital or try to get tested. Stay at home until they feel better. The MDs will follow the patients and if they get better, they never get tested or reported anywhere.

    The quarantine for “everyone” is a sure way to kill the economy.
    People can stop working but can’t stop eating.

13. Italy is doing terrible.
    I don’t know how the flu of 68 went down, but now we have ICU patients in the waiting room. And without lockdown they would fill the parking lot.

    https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-they-call-it-the-apocalypse-inside-italys-hardest-hit-hospital-11960597

14. Here it is at 4 in the morning, and I’m reading astounding things on International News. Perhaps that is wrong: the things are astounding, but my astonishment is more of how we’re reacting to events, and not; it is more in consideration for just how bogglingly crazy this shîtstorm is looking to be. The sole image floating in my rather imaginative mind is of the Cheshire Cat, smiling, pointing both ways, telling Alice to follow the path to nowhere definable. 

    Yeah, our mums and aunties, our children and their friends, our in-laws, outlaws, tenants and caretakers. The President can not stand in bunny-suit and snorkel before the podium declaring its all going to’ be fine, people, trust us. No, he must smile, declare victory is both nearly certain and nearly achievable, that it’ll all be rosewater and honeycakes come … mmm … someday soon.  Soonish.  A chicken or two in every pot. We have only to fear fear itself. 

    With a degree of irony hard to overstate, only the totalitarian capable China has had the ‘bâhlls and swords’ to impose total quarantine on her people. how is La Dulce Vida working out for Italy?

    4:45 AM… and I really need to sleep.
    ⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅

15. Oooh. Good point. I hope the local shops still have tonic water.

16. Yes, the Russians haven’t had any unexpected nuclear explosions. But it’s the radiation that’s the most scary aspect of nukes anyway.

17. And the last time the western world had an epidemic (not pandemic, but what % of the population can explain that difference?)… it was AIDS.
    Which had a 100% death rate (for the first several years at least).
    So, there is a new “deadly disease” and this time you can get it just walking past someone?
    So instead of a handful of vague showbusiness celebrities you might have liked in a movie once, it’ll probably get multiple people you know and love?
    Instead of prostitutes in central Africa it’ll be your mum and all her friends?
    Instead of “don’t accidentally have group sex and do intravenous drugs” it’s now “don’t accidentally touch a door handle or wipe your face?

    It certainly SOUNDS scary.

    Then we hear “Oh, don’t worry, it’s just like the flu. Nothing to be concerned about. And by the way we are shutting down EVERYTHING, everywhere, and implementing rules and restrictions akin to a world war. But no need to worry. Trust us.”

    If anyone actually wanted to calm the public down, they are not going about it very well.

18. AFAIK, outside of deliberate bomb testing and the two drops on Japan, there hasn’t been an actual nuclear explosion anywhere. Meltdowns and other accidents yes, but not a nuclear explosion. Even Chernobyl only had conventional pressure explosions, IIRC. The equivalent of a dirty bomb.

    So it would be more accurate to say Russia manages to irradiate themselves. And they tend to keep that under wraps, so even (or especially?) their own populace doesn’t hear much about it.

19. I think you vastly underestimate the panic resulting from a single nuke going off.

    Though… Russia manages to accidentally nuke themselves every couple of decades, and we do kind of just ignore that.

20. My point is that even official Chinese statistics still list thousands of cases in Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, Shenzhen… only Pirx thinks that China stopped it spreading within China.

21. Just noticed that both China and South Korea are showing a slight increase in new cases the past few days. In China it’s still close to statistical error, but in SK it’s more pronounced. Hopefully both are just a temporary hiccup, but if they’re entering a 2nd wave, that’s not an encouraging sign.

22. Well said. I am certain several magnitudes more people will die from the ensuing panic than the virus itself

23. I have no data on age breakdown. It appears this wasn’t a well organized experiment – they rushed into it after the first death from COVID19. I have yet to see a detailed write-up, only articles describing it.

    However, it is interesting that only 10% were asymptomatic at the start. Diamond Princess cases were 50% asymptomatic.

    However there were many elders on the DP – perhaps in the Vo experiment there were many more young people, as the DP data showed younger (ages 20-40) infected people were less likely to be asymptomatic.

24. Here the criterion for “recovered” is testing negative two days in a row.

    But the problem is that only people with risk factors (e.g. exposed to a known positive patient) are being tested so far. People who develop symptoms but don’t have such risk factors aren’t being tested. Nobody knows if their symptoms are covid-19 or not, and by current instructions they’re considered “safe” two days after temperature subsides. If it is covid-19, that’s probably not enough.

    On the bright side, there is a general quarantine here (though not 100% yet), so contacts with such people should be minimized. In theory. No decline in the cases curve yet, but it’s only been a few days since the quarantine started.

25. This experiment was an unusual case, where they tested everyone and isolated everyone for 2 weeks before testing again. So the 2 week period under discussion was explicitly from first test, with 90 people infected but only about 6 not (yet?) showing symptoms.

    Two weeks from the first test was enough to clear the virus from 90%, but of the 10% still testing positive, 8 – apparently a majority – were asymptomatic. Without testing, they would have appeared to be recovered.

    So again, a key lesson is that just putting known infected people into isolation 2 weeks until their symptoms clear up is not sufficient to declare them ‘recovered’. They probably need to be re-tested or kept in isolation for at least another 2 weeks.

    I suspect some nations declare people recovered when their symptoms have been gone for a few days and let them out of isolation, which may be part of why they see faster case growth.

26. Yes, but like I said, that’s just the symptoms. You can be positive and infectious without symptoms, and once you are positive, it can be a month or more until you’re negative.

    More than that, within those 99% that “show up” within two weeks, the majority will only have mild symptoms, which means they usually won’t get tested.

27. 70% in 5 days
    90% in 7 days
    95% in 10 days
    99% in 15 days.

    less than 1% remaining to anomalously ‘show up’.

28. Or perhaps not – crunching the Diamond Princess numbers shows that ~87% of the people exposed in a extraordinarily good environment for spreading communicable diseases – didn’t get the virus.

    Most of us either won’t get it or won’t notice it if we do. The real problem is that even the fraction that does get severely ill is, in absolute numbers, enough to overwhelm the healthcare system. It’s a great use case to illustrate that small fractions can still be big numbers.

    https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/03/16/diamond-princess-mysteries/

29. The two weeks is for developing symptoms. Once you’re positive, it takes upward of a month to test negative consistently. AFAIK, you’re infectious that entire time (or assumed to be). And you may never develop symptoms and still test positive if someone actually bothered testing you.

    edit: source is reports on the incubation time and the hospital cases and interviews of doctors in my country.

    edit2: Also, based on China’s statistics, about 80% of confirmed cases are mild, which suggests an even larger fraction of all positive cases. Maybe 90-95%. In most countries, those won’t get tested unless they had confirmed contacts or other risk factors. There just aren’t enough tests available. That means, if they’re positive, they leave quarantine after two weeks while they’re still infectious. That’s part of why I think an overall quarantine for everyone is necessary.

30. My friend’s company makes lights like this that go into home and commercial HVAC equipment. Pretty effective at killing stuff as it blows through the ventilation. I could also see these things mounted on robots, hospitals have had them available for some time, that come out and nuke areas in our work places and schools while people are out of the area (lunch break, staggered work hours etc)

31. While seeing this exchange has been sort of nice, I’d like to encourage you to just use the mute button. It’ll be better for your blood pressure. Apparently high blood pressure is a risk factor for covid-19 death.

    Also you might find it funny that a there was man in Japan who famously decided to spread the virus around… and then died. So sometimes turds really do get stomped by their karma.

32. Now one cannot even have an ordinary cold,
    sore throat, or bronchitis.

33. To those who think a coronavirus will be like influenza and mutate rapidly into irrelevance or into some “less bad but more transmission form” that just isn’t true. Coronavirus has RNA proofreading machinery and thus a stable genome.

34. You have no such hindsight. You say you take for granted that you should infect others with a disease you don’t even understand.

    It’s both unethical and irrational and you’ve danced around that fact and other nonsensical opinions with ad hominem and changing subjects and other childish idiocy.

    <<Let’s see if COVID-19 gets above that number. It might, but if it’s not much higher, then you might need to rethink how much the media got you panicking.>>
    This is stupid and more of the same very repetitive pattern in your arguments and possibly even your actual real world opinion and behavior.

    You don’t know me, don’t know what I do; unlike your assertions/admissions of what you do – infect others with this virus if you can – and yet you pretend that your assertion (attempted insult) that I’m panicking, a boomer, a millenial, and/or whatever other idiotic smack talk, has some kind of value.
    That’s before we even get to the fact that I’m not panicking and I’m on the extreme end of the bell curve as far as following mainstream media, now and for decades, and just how you can sell that bridge (your confidence in reading others via internet) you pretend to stand on when it doesn’t even exist.

    It’s like talking to a drunk with a bad case of Dunning–Kruger.

35. Also, we expect kids to be asymptomatic already. Were the 9 asymptomatics kids under the age of 10??

36. A vaccine is more than a year away. Cheap test should be here within a month. Then test everyone, everyday, and you can sort it out in a month.

37. This war stance talk, reminds me of wage controls in the US during WW2. Now with the talk of helicoptering in $1000 to every US citizen, I wonder with the threat of coronavirus effecting the economy, it’s now being used as a trial balloon for UBI? Do we need a war-stance situation to make deep socioeconomic changes? The japanese frequently called this “external pressure” as a excuse to make changes that are normally politically unpalatable but economically necessary.

    Someone pointed out that the WW2 wage controls are the precipitating circumstance behind the current US private insurance healthcare model. Because companies could not recruit based on higher wages, they offered expanded perks in the form of employer provided insurance, thus cementing in the employer insurance model that continues to this day, and being a large barrier to employee portable insurance and/or universal government health coverage (and associated limited employee mobility due to insurance non-portability being a separate large economic barrier as well).

38. If China did, as you claim, prevent it reaching the rest of China, then why do all the updates list thousands of people infected in other parts of China?

39. I’ve had my genome sequenced and I am functionally immune to a whole classes of bacteria that kill other people:

    tuberculosis
    MRSA flesh eating bacteria
    the plague

    So by your logic it would be okay for me to find out I have antibiotic resistant tuberculosis and spread it around as much as possible as some kind of public service to the gene pool?

40. Those in ‘positions of responsibility’ took the most effective route to get everyone cooperating and following directions. They induced limited panic (by saying “don’t panic!” often enough), then implemented the Big-Response-to-Show-We’re-Taking-This-Seriously – shutdowns and other social distancing measures.

    After ~2 weeks the number of active cases will peak and start to fall. If they extended the shutdown another month after that, total cases would peak around a hundred thousand or so cases. But if the shutdown was then released it’d rebound.

    So I’m guessing they will instead downgrade to “Cautious Return to Work” only for those under age 50, with social distancing otherwise maintained.

    Or maybe they’ll do a phased return to work by age group, starting with those under 30, then those under 40, etc. This would pacify older people by creating hope that their turn is coming, while getting those with least savings and risk back to work.

    The virus can then spread through the population least at risk of severe symptoms or death, slowly enough that hospitals are not overwhelmed. After some more time (but before election day) enough will have had the virus that it has trouble spreading, cases drop to near zero, and those at most risk can “Cautiously Normalize”.

41. Mmmm… I’ll disagree in a gentlemanly sort of way. My uncles were WW2 vets, and their wives my aunts, were in their teens-and-early-twenties thru that period, too.

    WW2 was a major cluster-fuck internal to this nation from a DISRUPTIVE point of view. However, employment, money flowing, people getting out and working 2, 3 jobs … that was humming along.

    This is different.
    The hubris of the people, the trigger-finger sensitivity of the government, the political need to “do something, damnit” has us going off the deep end, early.

    AND HOWEVER … it should be noted that this really appears to be a pretty bad bug. Causes in a higher-than-people-dying number of victims permanent lung damage. Lifelong scourage, that.

    Anyway. Just saying…

42. That kind of is my point, actually. It has been the length of time since the last pandemic COMBINED with the hubris now easily conjured by social media, COMBINED with people’s new-found purpose of reacting to everything in a ‘mega-‘ sort of way, that is where we’re at.

43. China detaining foreigners leaving the country for simply trying to leave the country would have been an act of war without their home country’s cooperation.

44. replying to deleted message because it’s germane:
    << You’re describing political correctness. >>
    Staying polite while being honest (and I argue that telling someone up front that you think they’re not good and you don’t appreciate them but do not see that as an excuse to be hypocritical about not liking them or to be rude because you disagree with them, is not political correctness; I could go on, I stopped counting friendships broken because I refused to be hypocritical like that)….
    is not political correctness. It is in fact essential to healthy civil interaction and functional society.

    There are lessons amidst the superstitious mumbo jumbo of scripture and religious culture. And this is one of those; whether you get there via or independent of religious influence/inspiration.

    Likewise not pretending that ad hominem is “excellent” and insisting on arguing for what’s true rather than posturing. E.G. the way nbfdmd does in some of the above/below replies with adolescent smack talk.

45. In the meantime, the relatively cheap anti-malarial drug plaquenil (hydroxychloroquine) which is effective against COVID (in vitro) may be the breaker we need.
    “In conclusion, our results show that HCQ can efficiently inhibit SARS-CoV-2 infection in vitro. In combination with its anti-inflammatory function, we predict that the drug has a good potential to combat the disease.”
    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41421-020-0156-0

46. And the very first doctor that sounded the alarm was brought in by the police and forced to sign an affidavit that it was an unfounded rumor.

47. I certainly hope you are right about the severity. Ideally there will be antibody tests readily available. I had a mild respiratory cold that started about 2.5 weeks ago. It knocked me into bed for a couple days and then very mild lingering symptoms for a week and a half. Given the timing I’m assuming it wasn’t covid. Given the risk to the old I have to assume it wasn’t and won’t be visiting the elders in my family until I know for sure or until this blows over.

48. Paywalled article. But after scanning several articles, it looks like there’s some confusion in the numbers.

    A Guardian article (source below) commented on 90 cases at the start, six of which were asymptomatic.

    Yet another article (wessexfm site) quotes a ‘Professor Crisanti’ saying they had a 90% drop in cases on their 2nd test, with 8 asymptomatic – which would imply that of the ~9 still positive on the 2nd test, 8 were asymptomatic.

    That is probably where the “10 asymptomatic for every 1 symptomatic” idea came from, even though from the numbers there were at most 8 of 90 who were asymptomatic at any point – and the articles don’t even say if any of the 8 were the same as the original 6.

    So it sounds like what was happening was that as people started to recover, their symptoms went away while they are still infected enough to test positive.

    The lesson from that might be that 2 weeks is NOT enough isolation time, as around 10% may still be infected even if they no longer have symptoms.

    Sources:
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/18/scientists-say-mass-tests-in-italian-town-have-halted-covid-19

    https://www.wessexfm.com/news/world/3065035/coronavirus-italy-has-highest-daily-covid-19-deaths-as-475-die/

49. << … worse than you …>>

    Maybe what I wrote was lost in translation.

    The maxim means that you get what you put in. Corollary: the world tends toward civility and prosperity from people refusing any excuse to not be excellent to each other.

    Ok I am going back to screwing around with PCBs and you’re deleting messages so that’s the end of this then.
    Ciao.

50. Well. What goes around comes around. My 2c.

51. No. I have manners.
    Good luck with your life =) Don’t post your email like that. I can write a script in under 5min to parse that analogy into an actual email address. And I’m not even close to being the best hacker around.

52. I care about talking with Goat Guy. Among a few other things. edit – That one blue avatar dude who IIRC is directly involved in anti aging. I forget his name.
    A few others who actually have good things to add to conversation that I couldn’t have come up with myself.

    And I’m no hypocrite. I don’t think you’re good. I think if this wasn’t keyboard to keyboard I’d give it to you straight.

53. Agreed completely.

54. So you can’t deny but you can’t even show evidence for what you’re asserting either.

    https://graphics.reuters.com/CHINA-HEALTH-SOUTHKOREA-CLUSTERS/0100B5G33SB/index.html

    And I think I know who you are. It’s disappointing if so.

55. Show your medical evidence for that being the one and only strain you infected others with, and show the statistical evidence for those you infected having had more or less of the same symptoms and consequent quality of life as yours and User333’s.

56. Yes.

    FWIW I switch between a few non work or semi work distractions and a few work projects. On top of changing my mind about what I write/argue sometimes multiple times before posting.

    Also I don’t want to get banned for piling on too hard on idiots. Or on popular opinions that turn out to be idiotic when thoroughly inspected.
    I forget the guy’s name but I got banned for systematically (for like 2 days) deconstructing and flaming someone’s toxic ultra-partisan spam a few years ago. Promised I’d be polite in exchange for being unbanned. That other guy got himself banned for a while for continuing to spam his noise. He/she had neither sense nor taste nor manners; just monochrome one-dimensional noise.

57. Nope. To produce the health effects, it would have to penetrate to live cells. You get the health effects from 270-300nm UV.

58. What about the people you infected? Or was that just talk? Or maybe someone “used” your account name when they said it was “their job” (or something like that) to spread the virus for the sake of herd immunity.

59. The 205nm UVC, which is what I assume Ludus is talking about, isn’t very penetrating. It’s just a bit longer than vacuum UV, and is stopped by the dead cells of your skin, or the water of a tear film on your eye. So, probably not many melanomas, it’s thought to be safe for human exposure. The dangerous aerosol droplets are just small enough for it to penetrate.

    But I admit I’d feel more secure if it were intelligently delivered to NOT land on, say, my lips.

    I would be rather surprised if we got LEDs to produce 205nm, though, unless maybe with photon doubling. Currently you need excitomer lamps to produce it.

60. Way too contrived. People are stupid. Top to bottom.

61. All SARS impacted countries (asian countries) from 2003 got serious and got ready for pandemic. Taiwan, hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Japan and China. They mostly jumped on it right away. China was ground zero, they had some disbelief for 3-4 weeks, then they went from 0 to Full red alert everywhere. Once the flag went up in Wuhan and Wuhan went to lockdown, HK, Singapore all responded with everything, So did every other province in China. The War powers supply measure is the flag going fully up in the US as well as the shelter in place orders. Taiwan started Dec 31. Before China did. https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/03/16/taiwan-china-fear-coronavirus-success/

62. That is why this one is so bad. Almost any surface the sick touch, spit, cough or sneeze over is a risk, and remains so for hours.

    It’s as contagious as the flu, with a long incubation period but much more lethal. Oh, and it is asymptomatic but still contagious for many, becoming hidden carriers.

63. “My hunch is that cocktail will be soon known and starting to become available.”
    ——————————————
    You mean like hydroxychloroquine combined with zinc?

    https://youtu.be/vE4_LsftNKM  About 10:40 minutes, start at 1:18 or so.

64. We (well, some of us Boomers, I was not even a thought yet) also had the 1957 Asian Flu and the 1968 Hong Kong Flu (I sort of remember that, my father got quite sick). I read an article today written by a guy who’s about 80, and has a science background. He said that those 2 epidemics were very severe, and that if it hadn’t have been for the 1957 flu and the immunity it conferred on a lot of people, the 1968 version could have been catastrophic – almost as bad as the Spanish flu in the post-WW1 years.

    FYI, the same guy said that life went on, we didn’t close down anything. He had flu in 1957, and was sick as a dog…but he just went to his dorm room and dealt with it for a week or so.

65. Oh, they bought us time, did they? You mean that month and a half between when they KNEW about the disease and when they told the rest of us – THAT buying of time for us?

    Or, perhaps, you are referring to them allowing flights of their students (from Wuhan and other infected locales) back to the US after the Christmas break from US colleges and universities?

    Or, perhaps, the generic flights of various business people from late November until 1/31/20, when Trump stopped it by banning flights from China altogether?

    Yeah, they were a big phucking help, those Chinese. Thanks, guys, we really appreciate it.

66. This thing is no joke. I know pretty healthy man, doesnt drink, smoke, aged 34 and now sick lives in isolation, he is drinking teas, resting and so on and still has pains in the lungs, breathing difficulties, fever, this thing attacks the lungs ….. Dont underestimate the damn virus. I hope there is no long term damage, because we don’t know that yer precisely. His mistake was, to underestimate the virus and had to go the vehicle examination and there he got it. He was careful, but did not use mask or gloves, did wash his hands,… The workers there wore face masks and probably gloves, but since they go into so many cars that was probably the cause of infection.

67. What exactly are you seeing as objectionable in this question?

68. Yah, true.  

    Do what you need today, but keep a sharp eye out for the inevitable putsch by the hucksters. 

    Sound advice.
    ⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅

69. So the higher numbers of infection are looking more likely as more data comes in.
    According to this experiment (test everybody twice in a town of 3300). EDIT: This seems to be the source blog which I haven’t read. So ignore conclusions below for now; draw your own after reading it https://promarket.org/why-mass-testing-is-crucial-the-us-should-study-the-veneto-model-to-fight-covid-19/ this was the old link: https://www.ft.com/content/0dba7ea8-6713-11ea-800d-da70cff6e4d3 /EDIT
    EDIT: Ignore all this
    90% of people are completely asymptomatic.
    So take your verified cases, multiply by 7 (China’s most recent numbers were 86% mild based on testing, no hyperlink a I’m pressed for time) to get the mild number, and multiply by 10 to get actual.
    So USA at 8304 from here https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ and multiply by 70.
    Around 581,000 cases in the USA /EDIT
    EDIT: tl;dr So asymptomatic rate is 50%. And fatality rate seems about 10x worse than influenza. That means the USA is kinda screwed – our “can’t/won’t/don’t test” combined with “shelter in place with a lot of exceptions” *will not work* /EDIT

70. I cannot disagree with your suspicion-of-ulterior-polity-in-play. I can’t shake my feeling that since the Russia! Russia! Russia! thing went south, the Imeachment! … thing, just the same, the post-impeachment “we’ll find something else!”, the same, that this ‘unpredicted perfect storm’ lined up just in time to provide over-ample cover to a humungous Big Government (plus enthusiastic swamp) take over. Couldn’t have wished for more optimal timing or public/media support. The market has gone to shit, the politically insouciant voices harping loudly from the parapets. We’re all gonna die! Flee! Pray your hearts to the Big Gub’mint Messiah (who is a collective, not the POTUS hisself.)

    That’s if I let my suspicions of vaguely nefarious opportunism run free.

    ON THE OTHER HAND, just as a theatre full of people won’t normally go flying to the doors to trample and crush each other, except when the fire alarms go off, and people start shouting “fire! fire! fire!”, well, we have that now. The alarms are clanging like crazy, from all quarters; governors, senators, congress-animals, military brass, industry polyester, tall hats, short hats, no hats and money-grubbing bumpkins are everywhere heading to the doors.

    That is the real politic of our day, it seems.

    In 5 or 10 years, the reactions of various governments, the wholesale slaughter of civil liberties, the irony of going both Big Brother and Liberal Socialism at the same time … will be widely cited.

    Sigh…

71. Pick your poison, disease, or cancer?

72. Is that a serious question or are you that stupid?

73. Horned One:
    https://www.connexionfrance.com/French-news/French-researcher-in-Marseille-posts-successful-Covid-19-coronavirus-drug-trial-results

74. Forgive me – but how the hell did the virus get out of the Wuhan containment area to the entire world but not the rest of China?

75. Pirx,
    “let it spread” no they did not. They went to heroic measures to stop the menace. Is anyone in the states having the doors to their building welded shut involuntarily? No. They were up against an impossible problem and they gave the rest of us a lot of time. That it was squandered is a shame but that’s something else entirely. Now we need to update our standards of care and start manufacturing the antimalarial drug asap.

    I hate the PRC and the CCP even more so, but in this case they did more then anyone else to buy us all time.

76. The only way for your forecast to not have a horrifying death toll, is to have a cocktail of meds that can be made cheaply and in enough amounts for anyone to stop worrying about the damn covid-19 virus.

    My hunch is that cocktail will be soon known and starting to become available.

    In the meantime, better heed the warnings and don’t act as a reckless fool.

77. Pick your poison, I guess?

78. What this virus is doing to the world economy is worse than thermonuclear attack by China. It is interesting that China managed to contain the virus to one province but let it spread all over the world. They had testing capabilities for people exiting the containment area.

79. I think we ought to be neither glib nor crass, as far as this pandemic goes.  

    FIRST — we must note and accept the fact that SCIENCE is marshaling its mind-bogglingly enormous forces to address this disease head-on. Both from a prevent and a cure-if-gotten point of view.  This will substantially mitigate the world-wide collapse of many economies and social constructs. 

    SECOND — Humanity has had to ‘deal with pandemics’ repeatedly over history. At least my generation (born in the 1950s) had first-hand to deal with Swine Flu, German Measles, Rubella, the tailings of Smallpox, and so on. These did not generate the hubris of the Wu Han Flu. But our generation also had living relatives, great aunts, uncles, grandmothers, grandfathers, who spoke at length about The Great Influenza, the Spanish Flu of 1918–1919.  

    THIRD — Western culture is not in the business of sugar-coating-the-tûrd. The poo-on-the-shoe is to some degree being overblown, entirely so that the dumber-than-a-box-of-hammers types amongst us might conceivably “get the message” in time to take action that benefits themselves, and in turn, others around them.  

    FOURTH — for better or worse, we’re now in a hyper-connected electronic world. This is going to act as a phenomenal rapid-dissemination network, both for fact and well packaged fiction. We have to be wary, wary indeed, about the junk-science and soon-to-make-their-appearances of hucksters flogging wastes-of-money and other scams. 

    ⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅

80. And a bit LESS secure with the ubiquitous rise of melanomas. Just saying, with every sword comes sword-cuts.

81. There will be an enormous global demand for Far-UVC. Assuming LEDs in Far-UVC are developed and mass produced, they’ll be deployed everywhere and the world will be quite a bit more secure against all airborne disease.

82. In a few months most of us will have gotten it and the Coronavirus will fade into history. Much too late for this one.

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