[ExI] COVID-19 has now killed more Americans than Chinese

Wed Apr 1 13:05:34 UTC 2020

From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] COVID-19 has now killed more Americans than Chinese

On Tue, Mar 31, 2020 at 5:51 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> > wrote:

> Note that if the incessant political whining were to ever actually cease, John could face defeat and even disqualification from the regional Incessant Political Complaining competition, for failing to meet the “Incessant” requirement, explicitly spelled out in the rules.

>…Yeah, that's whiny old John Clark complaining and overreacting about trivial stuff like 770  Americans dying of COVID-19 yesterday alone. And as you point out, John Clark is arrogant too, but at least he's not as arrogant as some who think they understand how diseases can spread and grow exponentially better than every expert epidemiologist in the nation (if not the world) and insist that early testing is not vitally important.

John K Clark

The articles in the popular press often contain a few sentences about epidemiology, then immediately devolve into politics.  When science is mixed with politics, the result is pure politics.  

Infection numbers are being tossed around rather than per capita rates.  If we wish to speak of numbers of cases, we should be comparing Italy with the combination of the New England states, which total to somewhere around Italy’s 60 million.  Or we should take our infection numbers and divide by about 6 to match Italy’s population.

If we look at per capita infection rates, note that all of the western countries converge to similar values over time, regardless of what medical technologies or policies are in play.

We see that infection per capita is way higher in densely packed areas (no surprise there) and way higher in wealthier areas (no surprise, more international travel.)  Combine higher wealth with high population density, such as California’s Bay Area, or a cruise ship, and there you have the ideal place for contagion.

I didn’t need to promote any particular politician or party to write the above, for that is nearly irrelevant.  

Diseases evolve.  International travelers carry it across the globe to every country they visit.  These isn’t much we can do about that, or rather not much we will do: every economy needs tourism.  Tourists spend a lotta money everywhere they go.  So… 

So have a home respirator for every member of the family, find all the ways to work and study from home, ramp up delivery of necessities, find other ways to have fun besides travelling abroad, compensate by looking into virtual travel where a camera bot walks around the big tourist attractors and lets you see what is there.  Do those things, and you have done your part.  I have done mine, except for the respirators.

spike

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