Friday, August 7, 2020

The current numbers and where all this COVID-19 stuff is headed

In America, we crossed 5 million cases yesterday, and will likely hit 10-15 million cases by the end of the year.

That means one out of every 35 Americans, minimum, is going to get this. Shut down the churches, but unless you also shut down the protests, that means nothing. When you fail to treat the sick differently from the well- when you fail to segregate based on actually having the virus, nothing else you do matters. Masks don't matter, shutdowns don't matter. One in 35 Americans will get this, and it looks like after all the people over the age of 80 who get it are dead, the rest have less than a 1% chance of dying.
Let's bump this up. Go worldwide. 20 million cases out of 7.5 billion people so far. Double that. Heck, let's multiply it by 5- say we hit 100 million people by the end of the year. Worldwide that means 98.6% will not even get sick.
We're now closing in on 720,000 deaths. Worldwide, dying "with COVID" , because nobody dies FROM COVID without other underlying issues of some sort, known or unknown. So far, that's .0096% of humanity has died. A horrid number, but not nearly as bad as say, WWII when there were only 2.3 billion people in the world and we lost 85,000,000 of them- about 3%.

Still, with all of that perspective- I'll admit COVID is bad and we should do something about it.
So let's take it actually seriously. We live in a day and age of total information awareness, at least in the first world. The data exists to track every adult American, to within 3 meters, for the last 18 months. The data already exists, we don't have to recreate it. So let's do away with the outdated concept of privacy entirely, and actually feed into the google search engine to build a tree of everybody who has had even the slightest contact with any known patient- and everybody who has had contact with them- down 4 levels deep.
Let's quarantine all of them. Commandeer those empty offices and hotel rooms, and make sure everybody who could possibly get this, spends the next 12 months in quarantine.
Until NONE of them test positive.
Then they can rejoin the human race.
That is how you deal with a true health emergency. But I think if you did that- you'd have people pointing out what I did at the beginning of this post.

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Oustside The Asylum by Ted Seeber is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
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