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kscherer
Which way is up?
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Boyzeee
 
2020-01-25, 12:51

For right now, let's just call it what it is: The FUD virus v9.3, build75812.

These things come along every few years. Chicken flu, pig flu, monkey flu, cats and mice flu, one flu over the coo coo's nest. Don't get me wrong, it's never good when ~50* of the world's 7.5 billion people die from a minor illness Unspeakable Horrible New Thing®. Never good at all. But hardly an "outbreak". When >1 million die, we know we have a problem. 10 million? Get out your masks. 100 million? The end of the world is coming. That thing that happened a hundred years ago affected a terrifying percentage of the world's population. That was 50 million people dead (estimates rise as high as 100 million) and 500 million were infected, or 1 in every 5 humans alive! Comparing this to that is FUD, and nothing more than FUD. (Remember that SARS—the Deadliest Most Scariest Disease Of All Time—claimed a whopping 800 deaths in 2002-2003, which is just barely 49,999,200 shy of the lowest estimate of the Spanish Influenza outbreak of 1918 to which this Wuhan thing is shamelessly being compared**).

*GASP* 0.000000000133333% of the population has died … IT'S AN OUTBREAK! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!

Yeah, let's compare 43 to 50,000,000 as if those two numbers bare any reasonable similarity. But, hey, companies that sell face masks have seen their share prices rise, so there's that. Yay, public panic sends rich-people stocks upward! Hmmmmm …

I'm not saying it can't get bad, I'm just saying that as of right now, it's nothing. Not even a drop. So, don't lose any sleep.

*This number will likely change. As of 1/5/2020 at 12:00 PM MST, the number in the article linked above was ~43 dead in China, and ~63 being watched for maybe possibly but not quite sure symptoms in the U.S. I am not providing a link in this footnote because in the internet age, "journalists" revise their numbers directly in linked articles with zero reference to changes, thus it becomes increasingly difficult to refer back to original numbers. The article in question has already been edited multiple times to reflect "current" numbers, rather than numbers as compared to any given point in the past. This is just lazy journalism at best, and scaremongering at worst.

** Of course, if one of your loved ones is among the dead, then percentages do not matter. But, that still does not make Wuhan*** an outbreak. It is likely that more people died from malaria during the time it took me to type this.

***Oooooo, a footnote within a footnote. And, yes, I'm calling this Wuhan until it has an official title.

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Last edited by kscherer : 2020-01-25 at 15:07. Reason: Clearing up my thoughts and supporting them with facts.
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