If you haven’t seen the movie Contagion from 2011, you can rent it from Amazon. The death rate in that movie is higher and the incubation period is much shorter. It’s a scary movie. After you watch it, you’ll be thankful that Covid19 isn’t as bad as that.
The reason you should watch it is because it predicts with amazing precision what is happening today. It shows how the virus was created in livestock, who patient zero was, how it spread, what R0 is and how long it will take to get a vaccine. Maybe someone should have shown that to Trump. It’s a movie after all. You know, entertainment, not fake news.
CPAC turns out to have been a bad idea. Ted Cruz and Paul Gosar are in self quarantine after coming in contact with an infected marine. Romney dodged a bullet.
Trump is handling this crisis very very badly. He played golf this weekend. The markets are crashing, oil prices are plummeting and little red dots spring up along the northeast corridor, tracing Amtrak almost perfectly. His reckless inaction is inexplicable at this point. Maybe he knows something we don’t. But let’s do a thought experiment. If we don’t test a lot more people, how will we know when the fever is burning out and where there are pockets of infection? How can we know when it’s safe to go out? Plan that wedding? Spend money at the mall? Seriously. We’re going to become recluses. That’s not good for the economy.
The GOP’s inaction is a little more explicable. Who are they going to replace him with? They’ve cancelled a ton of primaries. There’s no rival. Well, except Romney. He might end up being the only healthy one.
The CDC is underfunded, public health agency staffs are skeletal and ICU hospital beds will be in short supply. Who’s going to make those ventilators on a moment’s notice?
And this just in from Biff in Rockland County New York. A couple of the confirmed cases catered some events in Monsey last weekend- and didn’t tell the public health officials until today. In that brief period of time when it was possible to stop it in Rockland, the infected event attendees infected two people…and they infected two people…and so on… and so on.
Filed under: General |
The Confluence 
A couple of confirmed cases catered an event? Shades of Typhoid Mary.
I recently read online or heard it on a news report that the more lethal the virus, the quicker it burns itself out because it kills its host before the virus can be spread around to enough people to keep it thriving. However, travel does mess with this type of observation nowadays.
In 2017-2018, 10% of all seniors who went to the Hospital for the flu, died. These viruses kill seniors at a much higher rate. The CDC actually refused to publicize how many seniors were dying during the 2017-2018 Senior Flu Epidemic during that Flu Season.
Seniors with the flu or pneumonia who showed up at the ER during the 2017-2018 flu epidemic could have been sent home because the ER was fearful they were using too high of a percentage of ER and Hospital resources on seniors. in 2017 the percentage of deaths among Senior Patients was 3 times higher than the rest of the population. The percentage of deaths caused by the flu could have been 10 times higher among Seniors when comparing the population of Seniors versus Seniors who died from the Flu, then using the same calculation for other demographics.
If the Corona Virus is reported as primarily a senior killer, the rest of the population just won’t care. If the Corona Virus is reported as a pandemic, everyone is on high alert but this could also mean that once again ER’s and Hospitals focus more of their resources on non seniors even though seniors are the one’s most vulnerable.
I’ve tried to post a number of times, including three days ago with the first CPAC link.
All of them were blocked.
What gives?
I don’t know. I’ll take a look.
Thanks!
In the meantime:
I call it TurdPress, due to its frequent misbehavior.
I just know it hates me.
How I long for a government that actually plans for potentially catastrophic events, such as pandemics, and then institutes the plans with total transparency.
Oh, and thanks Trump for emboldening Putin to make this market wrecking move.