[ExI] COVID-19 has killed more Americans than the Vietnam War

[spike at rainier66.com]

-----Original Message-----
From: spike at rainier66.com <spike at rainier66.com> 


>...My suggestion is that the house-arrest notion might be exactly the wrong
thing: they should be shutting down subways, airlines, cruise lines and
buses.  If we have strict house arrest, anyone infected in the family would
infect everyone else in that home...spike


I had an idea.  We are trying to count these C-19 cases by nation, by state,
by county, etc, but we can see that over time, the case load converges to
numbers that are more a function of how much international travel a country
has.  The US is a capitalist country, so there is a lot of money sloshing
around, and proles tend to spend it on international travel.  Businesses
prosper from international business, which results in international travel.
If we look at all the hardest-hit nations, they are ones with lots of
travel.  Makes sense.

Now let's look at it a different way.  Suppose we create a contour map based
on population density.  Analogous to how we make elevation contour maps by
connecting places with the same altitude, we connect places which have the
same population density to create a population density map.

If we do that, we will find a huge population density map in the biggest and
densest metropolis in the US: New York, with some of it spilling over into
New Jersey.

OK then.  If you go to Google maps and choose anywhere at random in New York
outside the city, select any place you want and zoom in, go to street view.
Most of it is rural.  Same with New Jersey: once you get very far from
Newark, and the metropolis that is all part of NY city, that is rural too.

Now overlay a map of C-19 cases, expressed in cases per million (the only
metric which makes much sense (or deaths per million if you prefer.))  We
will see that the case density follows the population density.  This isn't a
bit hard to understand why.  It has little or nothing to do with politics,
or if so, only indirectly: densely populated regions make a lotta money, so
they do a lotta international travel.  Result: case load goes up.

The problem becomes clear: if decisions on how to deal are done at the
federal level, the conditions are vastly different from one state to the
next.  If done at a state level the conditions are vastly different, with
the metropolis areas making decisions that apply to the rural areas where
the conditions are very different.  Perhaps the best thing is for city
governments to decide how to best handle the crisis.

Do let me suggest shutting down the subways, planes, trains, ocean liners
and buses forthwith.

spike