This is one Easter Egg you DO NOT want to open…
If Christianity or indeed any other religion has even a shred of a claim to truth, then their churches/temples/mosques etc and holy places would be the safest spots on earth as it would imply their god could not protect them even in “his” home.
If so called “holy water” can repel demons, and that is one of its main functions, you’d think a virus would not stand a chance.
Same for Communion wine. I cannot imagine a safer think to share if you really believe this stuff on a Catholic level of intensity…
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Well, it still does because low-risk people live in households with higher-risk people (e.g. infants don’t live by themselves…). Even if you exclude from the scheme all the low-risk people who have unavoidable contact with high-risk people (because of children, roommates, partners, work at nursing homes, etc.), you’re probably not left with so many people, really.
Part of the problem with envisioning the death toll is that the risk gets underplayed. That 0.2% death rate gets compared to a seasonal flu, and people say, “Oh, it’s not that much worse!” Except that ignores that the 0.2% is a significant undercount (both theoretically and practically, given that the actual death rate is entirely dependent on resources), ignores that this virus is likely to infect three times (or more) people than the flu does, that the actual flu mortality rate is half the commonly stated number (because the high death rate is pre-vaccine, and vaccines are quickly available), and only applies to the least-vulnerable age demographic.
So even then, even for that least vulnerable demographic, we’re talking about at least an order of magnitude more deaths than for the flu in general. Worst case scenario, that we’re staggering towards, we’d have almost twice as many deaths in the US as a normal year. But in concrete terms, it’s hard to quantify - what does it mean to most people if morgues and mortuaries double in size? Having twice as many funerals doesn’t mean much for those who don’t go to one in a given year, but for those who do, older people, with older friends, that number wouldn’t just be doubled, but would be a sizable fraction of their social circle dying all at once.
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Russia might not be far behind.
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Two weeks after all the Trumpers go outside and infect each other…
“Hey! We finally found a combination of stuff that acts as a treatment that prevents serious illness in most cases! But you have to take it in the first week.”
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The Dutch papers are now making predictions they will be able to “lift the quarantine early”, based on only a couple of days improvements. The paper conveniently leaves the growth rate graph out of their presented data. Elderly folks dying in nursing homes are categorized as “natural causes”.
If you don’t think the “herd immunity” approach, and the optimistic reporting is based more on market forces than science, I’ve got some land in Florida I’d like to sell you.
Also, for anyone thinking a downtrend in a graph is a good cause to go back to normal, this mistake has been made before:
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Ah, creative statistics, the old standby…
As I’m basically next door (~70km) I’m somewhat interested to see how this’ll work out.
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My hope is Rutte and company don’t believe they will be able to lift restrictions early, but feel making the statement will boost the markets. It makes me very nervous though, when people act directly on such statements.
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There are some words that keep rattling around in Trump’s skull like a marble lost in a sewer - ‘beautiful’ being one of them, ‘nasty’ being another.
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I assume that headline will soon be updated to ‘Missing Russian official questions Putin over coronavirus’.
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Methinks the mayor of Moscow is too prominent to be disappeared.
This article explains why his core voters literally cannot see the truth, they have been driven insane and their tiny minds explode at having to deal with reality.
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Exactly. It’s a cult, as we already know. They are ‘True Believers’ as described by Eric Hoffer…
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If half the population is gonna get COVID-19 before “herd immunity” kicks in,
and if 20% of those people need to be hospitalized
and if there are not enough hospitals, and half of those people die
then that’s, um, 10% of infected people dying, and 5% of the total population
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Isn’t herd immunity at like 95% ? or am i missing something ?
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Hey thanks for the heads up on that title. I was ignorant of it.
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