Let’s Wait for a Better Reason to Spaz Out

A friend called me yesterday to ask me what I thought of the new coronavirus, AKA COVID-19 and SARS. People are getting really worried.

Here is my official prediction: the epidemic will fizzle, and people will wonder why they were scared.

In certain areas of China, this illness had a pretty high death rate. That got people’s sweat glands and kidneys working. Thing is, the death rate has been much lower in other places. It appears that in areas where people get decent health care (i.e. not Wuhan province in China) the death rate is about the same as it is for the flu, and we don’t panic over that.

Here’s something else. Last year, about 10% of Americans got the flu. So far, the Chinese have had fewer than 90,000 cases of COVID-19. China has what? Five times our population? Six? The disease has had three months to do its job, and it hasn’t spread very well.

Maybe I didn’t express that well. I’ll try again. In America, 40,000,000 flu cases. In China, fewer than 90,000 coronavirus cases. See what I mean?

I don’t pay any attention to the news, but I do watch Youtube for amusement and education, and I happened to see some videos from a South African expat who just moved here from China. He’s huge on Youtube. He lived in China for over a decade, and he married a Chinese doctor. He is hopping mad at China for various reasons, and he has been doing what I would call “post-breakup videos” in which he vents the anger he kept bottled up while he was under the watchful eye of the communist party. He has been exposing China’s asinine response to the epidemic.

Long story short: China tried to prevent people from finding out there was an epidemic. They lied. They censored. They arrested doctors who spoke out. The government response was very poor. This is probably why things have gone so badly there. “Go home. You fine. Maybe sniffle.”

Some experts are pointing out that most people who get the disease get mild symptoms, so they don’t get treatment. This means the medical establishment doesn’t deal with them or put them in databases, so the information is skewed. Doctors are treating people who are really sick, so their experience colors their opinion, which they then repeat to the public. This makes it look like the disease is worse than it is.

True? I do not know. It sounds reasonable.

I think this disease will amount to nearly nothing in the US. If it makes 10,000 people sick and kills 100, it will be extremely insignificant compared to the diseases we are used to seeing here.

If you want to follow the epidemic and see if my prediction pans out, go to the Johns Hopkins site and watch their interactive map. Best resource I’ve found.