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addabox
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: oaktown
 
2020-03-10, 15:48

Quote:
Originally Posted by crazychester View Post
Y'all need to listen to billybob.

The world is about to change.
This. I had dinner over the weekend with friends that were completely contemptuous of "media fear-mongering" and sure that the threat was being vastly overblown. But the media can exploit the fuck out of an actual crisis. Everything I've read (from actual epidemiologists) suggests that: 1) the current numbers in the US are vastly undercounted due to the relative paucity of testing to date, and that 2) infection rates (again, starting from far more cases than tallied so far) can be expected to double every week. We can't know for sure, of course, but it's not unreasonable to assume that we could see upwards of 30 million infected in the US. Given the severity/hospitalization rates/mortality rates we've seen so far, our health care delivery system will be completely overwhelmed far before we reach anything like those numbers. That's not "panic", that's a completely supportable conclusion based on what we know about the virus and previous pandemics.

Again, it's possible the virus will subside on its own but there's no real reason to assume that. The two places that seem to have successfully mitigated the impact are China, which of course used draconian techniques that would never fly in the west, and South Korea, who jumped on testing and follow up hard and early. We're well past that point here and can expect something more along the lines of Italy. All we can do now is try to slow down the spread enough so that the caseload at any given time doesn't swamp out available resources.

That which doesn't kill you weakens you slightly and makes you less able to cope until you're completely incapacitated
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