COVID cogitations

What was originally a relatively good idea — shut things down for two weeks and let the virus express itself in those who were already infected so they could be treated — has now snowballed into pronouncements like “until the end of March,” “until mid-April,” “possibly until May,” and in our Indiana governor’s throw-your-hands-in-the-air-and-make-a-wild-guess yesterday, “perhaps 30 to 60 to 90 days.”

Now Trump has come along and said this will probably be with us until a year from now.  What?

Meanwhile, grocery stores and wholesale clubs have been stripped of toilet paper.  Restaurants are closed except for carry-out and delivery.  Fitness clubs are closed.*  The governor of Ohio defied a court order to hold the Ohio primary election today (and he should be shot as a traitor for doing so, but that’s beyond the scope of this post).  The entire city of San Francisco is on lockdown.  (Maybe they should have dealt with their homeless before now.  Apparently the mayor admitted that they could have.)  Trump and Mnuchin are talking about sending everyone checks.  (Using what money?)  The Congress can’t even get a bill passed to pay for emergency measures to fight the virus because Nancy Pelosi, the witch, is playing “we can’t know what’s in it until we pass it” games with the bill, and Cocaine Mitch over in the Senate isn’t playing that game.  (Good for Cocaine Mitch, for what it’s worth.)

And yet…the first experimental vaccine has been produced and is being first-stage tested in Seattle.

The number of known cases in the US is only 5,702 as I write this.  94 deaths if I am counting correctly (I had to add up the state deaths as the Johns Hopkins map page isn’t simply giving a number for the US anymore).

WTF are we freaking out about?

More importantly, WHY are we freaking out about it?

The answer seems pretty simple.  The media have latched onto COVID-19 coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 whatever the hell people are calling it today and are gnawing away on that bone like there is no tomorrow.  Why?  They see yet another chance to rid themselves of the menace named Trump.

Yes, that’s right, folks, the media and the Democrats (but I repeat myself) are so madly bought into removing OrangeManBad at any cost, they’re willing to lie, cheat, steal, and probably even bugger small children and animals (well, they are Democrats) to make that happen.  The problem is, this time they’re trying to take down the US economy along with him.

If Trump says something like, “It’s no worse than a seasonal flu at this point”, they latch onto that and say he’s belittling and pooh-poohing the severity of the situation.  (6000 cases and fewer than a hundred deaths in a country of at least 350 million souls?  Clearly they have forgotten the swine flu Obama ignored in 2009 that killed 10,000 before he woke up and started half-heartedly doing something about it.)

If Trump says something to a group of governors like, “Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment — try getting it yourselves.  We will be backing you, but try getting it yourselves.  Point of sales, much better, much more direct if you can get it yourself,” someone from the New Yolk Slimes [sic] bastardizes the quote into “Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment — try getting it yourselves.”  That’s not a projection, that’s a fact — it happened yesterday:

An old friend of mine observed on Facebook, “I called her a Chinese agent.  Said lying like that could only be under orders from Beijing.  No reply yet, the brazen hussy.”

And for that matter, all of a sudden it’s racist to call it the “Wuhan Coronavirus”.  Well, fuck that.  It came from fucking Wuhan.  Whether or not the conspiracy theorists are right (I doubt they are) about its origins as a biological warfare experiment let loose from a lab, it came from that city and, as is traditional, was named for the first location where it surfaced in humans.  Wuhan Coronavirus.  Wuhan Coronavirus.  Wuhan Coronavirus.  Say it three times fast and you still aren’t a racist.  (Indeed, I admire you; that’s tough.)  But the leftist media thinks you are…even though the leftist media itself used the term repeatedly for weeks.  And shut up fast when they were called on it by honest agents.

For several days, there was a rumor that Trump had been exposed to Wuhan Coronavirus by a Brazilian diplomat who tested positive after he went home.  Trump denied he had tested positive (he hadn’t even been tested yet), the press shit themselves (and threw the poo like the monkeys they are), so Trump got tested and guess what?  Negative.  Again the press shut up fast.

Commies like the Mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, have gone on the record saying that “crucial factories and industries” need to be nationalized.  Here is a guy who has run the City of New York into the fucking ground in less than two terms after it had been picked up, dusted off, and set back on its feet by Rudy Giuliani and then at least not fucked with too badly by his successor, Michael Bloomberg.  Goddamn fucking statist asshole should be ashamed of himself.  Say, where’s that nearly two billion dollars you and your wife stole from the city, Mayor?

More commies like the People’s Republic of China (and former commies like the ones who run Russia) are suddenly claiming that the virus originated in the United States and was planted in Wuhan (Wuhan Coronavirus!  Wuhan Coronavirus!  Wuhan Coronavirus!) by agents of the US to make China look bad.  Hey, did you know that commies lie?  And they kill lots of people, too:

(Obviously this was from early on; Wuhan Coronavirus has killed over 3,100 to date in Hubei province alone, Hubei being where Wuhan is located.  Total deaths worldwide are sitting at just under 7,900.  2,503 of those are in Italy.)

But all this said, I keep coming back to these numbers, quoting myself from above:

The number of known cases in the US is only 5,702 as I write this.  94 deaths if I am counting correctly (I had to add up the state deaths as the Johns Hopkins map page isn’t simply giving a number for the US anymore).

This is frankly a tiny number.  But it’s made huge by visualizations like this one, from the aforesaid Johns Hopkins site:

If you look at that map without knowing what you’re looking at, you will freak your shit.  It looks like the virus is EVERYWHERE in the US.

Nope.  It’s just under 6000 cases, and just under 100 dead.  Zoom in and it looks like this:

It’s still over the top, but it’s meant to tell you that there are more cases in the states, provinces, and countries with the larger circles than in the states, etc., with the smaller circles.  And FWIW this is total reported cases, not total active cases.  Out of 195,892 total reported cases worldwide, 80,840 have recovered.  So again, the map is a little misleading unless you understand what it is you are looking at.  These map clips and the data in this post is all coming from here, by the way.

Note that I am not accusing Johns Hopkins of making things look worse than they are.  This is a standard method of showing statistical data and I’m not sure how they could make it look more “real” and still be able to show it on a map that fits on a 27″ monitor like mine.  The problem is that there are going to be a lot of people out there who don’t understand that and who will, as previously mentioned, freak their shit when they see this map.

“But,” you cry, “almost 6,000 cases and almost a hundred deaths, and you say this is ‘frankly a tiny number’.  How can you say that?”

Easily.  Here are the CDC’s numbers for the leading causes of death in the United States for 2017:

  • Heart disease: 647,457
  • Cancer: 599,108
  • Accidents (unintentional injuries): 169,936
  • Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 160,201
  • Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 146,383
  • Alzheimer’s disease: 121,404
  • Diabetes: 83,564
  • Influenza and pneumonia: 55,672
  • Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 50,633
  • Intentional self-harm (suicide): 47,173

So far (and yeah, I’m not saying it can’t or won’t ramp up, but the point is, it hasn’t done so yet), Wuhan Coronavirus isn’t even a blip on the radar.  There are 350 million people in the United States, give or take a few million.  My hand-dandy calculator says 6,000 out of 350 million is 0‭.0017%.  I’m not even going to calculate what 100 out of 350 million is.

I will say that all of the above taken together suggests to me that what panic I have seen — and in fairness i have not seen much actual panic, other than people inexplicably buying shitloads (no pun) of toilet paper and stacks and stacks of bottled water, and cleaning out the meat department at my local Kroger the same day it was restocked — is probably unwarranted at this time.  Look, let’s face it — I’m in the prime demographic for dying from this shit.  I’m over 60, diabetic, and have respiratory issues.  And yet I simply can’t be bothered to sit around all day worrying about whether I might get the damn virus or not.  I told someone yesterday that I’m more concerned about getting shingles before I can get the shingles vaccine than I am about getting the Wuhan Coronavirus.

And yes, I’m using that term on purpose.  Fuck the Chinese.  I hope their entire country falls to this shit, and their tin-pot emperor Xi right along with it.

_______________

* This makes no sense.  Fitness clubs often are some of the cleanest places around, because over the years they’ve educated their members to spray and wipe down their stations with disinfectant after they use them.  Also because they don’t want to be sued up one side and down the other for being the source of some deadly infection, usually staph.  (Ask the guy whose job it was to swab down the wrestling mats when he was the manager of the freshman wrestling team at his junior high school, 40+ years ago.  I still remember that fucking smell.)  The club where my wife works even had staff walking around after guests, spraying and wiping down again, before our worthless mayor decreed yesterday that gyms must be closed.  Hell, she had her lifeguards cleaning the pool handrails with Clorox wipes, never mind that the water people were getting in and out of was fully chlorinated.  And how many people go to the gym when they’re sick, anyway?