Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/02/26/cdc-coronavirus-is-inevitab.html
“The risk to the American people remains very low,” Trump said, flanked by VP Pence and US public health officials.
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A projected 70% infection total and a 2% fatality rate = 1.4% death count in a 327,000,000 population = ~4,600,000 graves. It will take the old, the very young, and an unquantifiable immuno-impaired middle.
About half of those who recover complain of lingering debility similar to chronic fatigue. It didn’t kill them but made them weaker, and to Hell with Nietzsche.
Meanwhile, society and economy skid to halt. I don’t want to think about what’s next.
Somebody go infect 45 and his enablers, already.
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He put Pence in charge. Who doesn’t think smoking kills, isn’t sure about evolution, probably thinks the world is 5000 years old, and is going to focus on praying the plague away.
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It’s not contained. Sorry, dude.
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Prayer and positive thinking. Go about your business, El Magnifico has it all under control. Since there is no “Crown virus” in the Exceptional America, there is no need for testing and any diagnosis of so-called “covids” is an attempt to panic the markets and will be dealt with harshly. That is doubly true for official documents such as death certificates.
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Until he decides that the infection has to be cauterized. What better excuse to nuke the state that has the most electoral votes (and is among the bluest of blue states)?
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I fear this could, under certain circumstances, be the excuse he needs to “delay” or outright cancel the election. I know, “paranoid much, doc?” Well, yes, I put nothing past this asshat.
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I love that he put Pence in charge of it. His MAGA base never really liked Pence, who I assume was brought on to get the conservative christian vote in 2016. Now when things go to hell even more than they already have, he has someone to toss under the bus with a “you’re fired!” then he can bring on some jack-hole like Graham and really get the Jingoists fired up.
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Who wants to wager this is a precursor to throwing Pence under the bus? If Trump knows anything it’s how to deflect blame and set somebody else up for the fall.
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And who almost single-handedly caused an HIV disaster…
What a track record!
He did everything but say, “Hey Mike - put on this goat costume!”
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That one left pupil is the bat signal.
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Someone does?
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I don’t want to minimise the impact of this, but let’s not paint the lily. COVID-19 is, what? less than 2 months old? Almost everyone feels ‘lingering debility similar to chronic fatigue’ after a hearty dose of regular flu.
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Like SARS, this new coronavirus is not regular flu:
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It’s also a brand new (to humans) virus with no track record or natural history to cite. It is scary in that unknown-ness, and doesn’t need any enhancement. Maybe there will be long term sequellae, some viruses do, but with this one there is, as yet, no long term.
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Not to mention his already stellar record in dealing with epidemics.
(Removing HuffPost link because @shuck beat me to it)
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it’s also worrisome to me that something like 27 million americans don’t have a doctor they can go to, and that 20 million more are underinsured. it could potentially create a very large pool of undiagnosed, untreated individuals.
i wonder very much how we will weather the storm.
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Absolutely. My point was only that comparing this wholly new pathogen to the seasonal flu is unsound.
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The old for sure, but at this point it’s not yet clear that this disease poses an especially high risk for younger patients. JAMA just posted this study showing a case fatality rate of over 14% for patients over 80, but none of the patients under 9 died. They only had a few hundred kids included in the data so with the law of small numbers these results may shift a little as more data becomes available (not sure how many of those hundreds of kids were babies) but at the moment it seems that risk is highly dependent on age with the young being much better at handling it than the old.
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