agingrebel.com
Well there goes the right of the people
to peacefully assemble. Except to panic-buy the contents of entire big
box stores. Did you know, there are no more pro-democracy demonstrations
in Hong Kong? In case you have not yet heard, there is an uncontrolled
pandemic of a new disease called Covid-19. The nerd name is an acronym
for COrona VIrus Disease – discovered in 2019.
China, where the disease probably
originated, claims to be controlling its spread by declaring that every
home should be a prison. Maybe it is working, maybe not. South Korea
seems to be controlling the new disease by testing everybody and
isolating everybody who tests positive. Italy, has virtually shut down
the entire nation.
The United States is combating the disease by trusting the wisdom of Donald Trump’s gut.
Neopathogen
This is a new, or “novel.” disease.
Nobody has any immunity to it. Everybody will get it. That is about as
much as anyone can say for sure. The initial administration response was
that the virus is a foreign invader that can be kept out of the United
States by vigilance at the borders. Plan B for dealing with this is
variously called “flattening the curve” and “social distancing.”
We, as a people, got to Plan B quickly
because there are probably already one million people infected with the
disease in the United States and it spreads exponentially – as leaves
appear on a tree in Spring. The point of testing was to only quarantine
those people in those areas where the disease was rampant. That is
beside the point now. We are rushing toward total quarantine and then
anarchy. Serge Kovaleski, who some of you know, had a piece in the New York Times the other day in which he wondered what might happen when all the police get sick.
Symptoms
Covid-19 is a big deal because we are a
big country. There are between 325 million and 330 million Americans.
About 80 percent of us, about 260 million people, will largely skate
through this. An independent journalist in Los Angeles named Jessica
Yellin has done some journalism on what we can expect. Just about
everybody will have a dry cough, a slight fever and a slightly sore
throat. Some people will also get an upset stomach. For 260 million
Americans, that will be it.
A “moderate” case of Covid-19 will also
include extreme fatigue. People may want to take a couple of days off. I
think I had a moderate case this week. I survived. You will too. Or
maybe I had a mild case of the flu. Who knows? I heard “anybody who
wants to be tested can be tested.” Unfortunately, I missed the secret
password.
The younger you are, the more likely you
are to not have any symptoms at all. Nobody knows why. But a big number
of people, 48 million, will get very sick and also have trouble
breathing. With a healthcare systems that works, they should all
survive. But we do not have a healthcare system that works. We, the
people of the United States, have within our borders fewer than one
million hospital beds.
Arithmetic
Hence the phrase “flattening the curve.”
The “curve” is a bell curve tracking infections. The center is a big
peak. If everybody gets sick at once, which is where we appear to be
headed, there will be a place in a hospital for one patient in 40. If we
can slow the exponential spread of the disease and keep everybody from
getting sick at once, we might have one bed for every 10 patients and
fewer people will die.
Experience in both China and Italy
suggests that about five percent of patients, about 16 million people in
the United States, will need a ventilator to breathe. Depending on who
you ask, this nation now has between 110,000 and 160,000 ventilators.
Arithetic says that works out to one ventilator for every 100 people who
need one.
So this week everything is shutting
down. People are panicking. People have no idea how long they will be
virtually imprisoned in their own homes so that the curve might be
flattened. Nobody knows when there will be toilet paper again. If there
ever is toilet paper again, nobody knows if there will be someone at the
store to sell it to you. Nobody knows how many people will be thrown
out into the streets because they were imprisoned in their own homes and
could not work to pay the rent on their prisons.
Very. Very. Very
I just watched another news conference
in which the President said “very, very soon” a lot and the
Vice-President pulled his tongue out the Presidents ass just ong enough
to thank him for his “leadership.” I read that eventually Jared Kushner
will save us. Actual details of our deliverance are kind of sketchy.
There is no vaccine for Covid-19 and there is unlikely to be one
until 2021. There is no treatment for Covid-19 yet. A drug named
Remdesivir, which flopped at treating Ebola, may prove to be effective
against Cpvod-19. Or it might work best at getting money from the feds.
The big motorcycle run in the West, the Laughlin River Run, is still scheduled to begin April 23.
That is what happened this week.
