Coronavirus and Pandemics

"The Buck Stops Here!" -- President Harry Truman"The Buck stops with anyone else besides me. I'm perfect. If something goes wrong, I will deflect by blaming the people I appointed to my Cabinet. Two words: You're Fired!" -- President Donald Trump

The United States of America, a country that spends gazillions of dollars on a defense budget dreaming up possible scenarios and probes for inner weaknesses to be exploited by her enemies has an infection rate that is nearly SIX times worse than the second worst, Spain. Now, you could make the argument that the US is more populated but you could also make the argument that its not nearly densely populated than Spain is. And yet you can find Covid cases in nearly every single county in the United States.The lack of preparation for an epidemic, let alone a pandemic, is astonishing to me. That ventilators, masks, gloves, and various supplies aren't stashed all throughout the country is laughable to me.That airplanes are STILL, right now, flying, is astonishing to me. If we had done the right thing from the get-go, which is shut down the airspace and immediately contain, is why we are in a protracted misery that is definitely going to lead to a recession, millions of businesses closing forever, millions of unemployed into the foreseeable future, AND the fact that Covid-19 will now be with us forever.Make no mistake, this another influenza. Stopping influenza is like trying to stop the wind. Its basically an impossible task. The best you can do is create a vaccine based on probability that X strain of the Flu virus will be the most prevalent during flu season. Covid will be no different.Since we are so far behind the curve, we are stuck between a rock and a hard place. If you open the economy back up you can guarantee that cases will dramatically increase to the point where New York is basically everywhere in the country. At some point the healthcare system everywhere is overwhelmed, people start dying, people get very sick, the economy stops or slows down so substantially that what difference does it make at this point now that its "back open?"The other problem is if we continue to wait indefinitely for the curve to flatten, you've now shut down a economy for 6 months or longer. How the fuck do you expect the entire planet to bounce back from that economically?There's just no good answers.But I know this much.... there are countries doing exceptionally well:- Greece
- Taiwan
- Hong Kong
- Singaporeand possibly a few others. Because they did the opposite of what this retarded, supposedly superior nation did. They were aggressive, they took decisive action, and developed a strategy. The US's strategy is throwing their hands in the air and pointing fingers.Let me tell you something, all of our enemies are now seriously considering a biological attack as a strategy for defeating the US because of how unbelievably unprepared they are to withstand that kind of an attack.I am disgusted and amazed at the magnitude of incompetence. They should have treated this as seriously as a war invasion and as an existential threat.And one last thing to consider.... can you imagine if this was Ebola that got out like this, which nearly did a few years ago? That thing has like an 85% kill rate. You can just expect a total reset of humanity back to the stone age. There would be about 500 million survivors on the entire planet and life would be altered beyond repair. Electrical grid? What's that? Planes? What are those? The computer I'm typing on, a paper weight. What's the internet?If you don't think that can happen you are a damned fool.... and so is every country who is underprepared now.This planet had better learn the lesson of a lifetime about how to deal with pandemics. We have had so much warning about this eventuality and we kicked the can down the road. Its inexcusable.

I was referring to rate of infections, not necessarily deaths. The US has almost six times the amount of Covid positive cases than its closest competitor -- Spain, followed closely by Italy. I agree that per capita is the only way to accurately measure it since the US has a much higher population than Spain. However, Spain is more densely populated that the US. The United States is expansive and yet the virus has managed to travel to almost every county in the nation.India should be completely engulfed by now because of its unbelievably high population density, but it isn't. Their cases like almost everyone else are growing, but they have done a much better job of containment. People actually respect the shelter in place order unlike the US which continues to throw caution to the wind.My main point is that this highlights how underprepared so many nations are. The US trains hard and places a huge financial emphasis on its military capabilities but failed to accurately estimate the potential of a virus.As we've now seen, the virus doesn't have to infect everyone directly to make a substantial impact. The ancillary effects of the virus has infected the entire planet by stretching thin the healthcare system, by invading and destabilizing the world's economy, etc. Every fabric of our life has been infected whether we have actually contracted the virus or not.Taiwan learned a big lesson with SARS and was much better prepared when Covid hit. God help any nation that doesn't learn from this. If Ebola had gotten out the way Covid has it would be an existential threat to humanity. And there's nothing saying that it can't. in the future Preparedness and containment is the only way out. Edited by Hyroglyphx, : No reason given.

Places like New York, Istanbul, London, Montreal, etc are population dense... and yes, parts of Vancouver are very dense.Its interesting. Los Angeles is hugely populated but it is more of a sprawling metropolis. Same with Houston. Lots of people but they aren't crammed in on top of one another like the places above are. They have thousands of cases, but not tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands like the densely populated urban area metropolises do. There has to be something to that. Obviously that is what happened in Wuhan, a country of several million living on top of one another.

Montreal and Toronto aren't quite as dense as NYC, but they are comparable with Chicago which is still very dense. Consequently, Quebec has been the hardest hit in Canada. We can surmise that the overwhelming majority of those cases are coming from inside the densely populated city of Montreal.

Five cases that I personally know, each with varying results. From these results we can deduce that it is a wildly divergent disease. Allow me to elaborate.The first instance was a coworker, scary enough. And he was very, very ill from it. Interestingly, however, he never infected a single coworker and he did not infect his fiancee who was in extremely close proximity to him.The next three cases was a very good friend of mine who was on a boat with two semi-friends that I know through him. We were actually on a video chat at the time and I told him what a terrible idea that was. He brushed it off and days later he would return with a positive test.My friend only lost the sense of smell and taste with very mild cold-like symptoms that passed within a couple of days. His girlfriend, who is an ER doctor, did not get it. My two semi-friends who were also on that boat got it worse than my good friend did, but all things considered, about as typical as average flu-like symptoms. Neither of their significant others got sick.The last case is my good friend's sister, who is so close that she's my practically my sister too, who contracted it independently from her brother's case. She was very, very sick just like my coworker and thought she was going to die. Said it felt like firecrackers going off in her lungs when she breathed. Her husband did not contract it. She is also 7 years younger than her brother.This is a pretty small sample, 10 in total if you include significant others. But I did think it was very interesting that not a single spouse or girlfriend were infected and the severity of the cases ranged from nearly symptom free to marginally sick with the flu to damn near deathly ill. While my anecdotes are small, all of the reports seem to indicate the same thing -- that it varies wildly from person to person. This is a strange illness.Sometimes young, freak athletes who you'd think would do well are placed on a ventilator and some people with preexisting conditions do well. Its all over the place. We know so little about why it effects some people harder than others. Edited by Hyroglyphx, : No reason given.

Oh shit, he knows.... Night Falcon to Easy Rider.... initiate Operation THIN MINT immediately!Edited by Hyroglyphx, : No reason given.