Burn the Optimism Boy! Pitchforks! Torches! PURELL!!!!

Because I live a hermit-like existence, I am out of touch with many common trends, and usually, that’s a blessing. Lately, I have been out of the hysteria loop with regard to the coronavirus epidemic. I have read a few stories about it, but I have only discussed it with one person.

I think the panic is worse than I realized. Last week, I noticed that my local Home Depot had packed its aisles with displays of bleach and santizing wipes. It wasn’t until the second time I saw this that I put two and two together.

Yesterday, I had a blast cutting up a huge oak that had fallen over, and at the end of the day, I went to buy a rib eye to celebrate. I saw a lady at the store walking around with a surgical mask.

Okay, that’s too much. They say a lie travels around the world while the truth is still getting out of bed, and now I’ve seen proof.

Health officals say a mask won’t protect you from a virus floating in the air. They’re made to keep tiny, germ-laden water droplets from falling into surgical patients. They don’t trap individual microbes. Look it up. It should be obvious that the holes in masks are enormous compared to airborne viruses.

I suppose a mask could prevent you from touching your mouth and nose while you’re out and about. That should be worth something.

Surgical equipment isn’t magical. Operating rooms aren’t really sterile, as in “100% free of microbes.” I have not looked this up, but I have common sense (a little). You can’t destroy every loose microbe in a room full of people. Even if you manage to sterilize the room and equipment, as soon as one person walks in, the room is no longer sterile. I used to brew my own beer, and brewers used better terminology. They say beer equipment is sanitized but not sterile. Sanitizing isn’t the destruction of every microbe; it’s a gross reduction in their numbers so they can’t breed fast enough to be a problem.

I’ll bet doctors have a standard for the application of the term “sterile,” defined in microbes per unit of volume or area or something. I’m sure they don’t seriously believe operating rooms are truly sterile, in the lay sense of the word.

Youtubers say Amazon is out of surgical masks. Is that true? I can understand wearing one if you’re sick, to reduce (but not eliminate) the microbes you give off in public, but if doctors are right, there is no point in wearing one to ward off COVID-19 or any similar illness.

I have seen complaints that medical people are having trouble getting masks, which they actually need.

Maybe I’m wrong about the lady at the grocery. Maybe she has an immune disorder, or maybe drugs are suppressing her immune system, or maybe she has the flu and wants to protect everyone else. Or she could be painfully shy. In the current social climate, however, my money is on hysteria.

She looked pretty sturdy.

I have written about the strange phenomenon of attacking helpful people like me, who refute rumors and choose optimism. Since then, I have experienced it. I really annoyed one person when I predicted that COVID-19 wasn’t going to amount to much. No point in going into it here, but I received an emotional response painted up to look like the result of rational analysis. It was full of errors. If I interacted with more people, I would be getting more of this.

How is my prediction panning out? Better than I expected. The epidemic was cranking out 5,000 cases per day until yesterday. Now it’s more like 3,000. As I noted the other day, China, all by itself, would have to generate 1.5 million cases per day in order to come up with an epidemic resembling a typical American flu season. The ratio of 1.5 million to 3,000 is pretty big. If I owed you 1.5 million dollars, and I gave you 3,000, you would be very upset.

Of course, the ~3,000 cases we accumulated over the last day include all new cases, worldwide. If you limit it to China, the number is smaller, making COVID-19 look even less threatening.

The graphs depicting the number of cases over time are still flattening out, and that’s not compatible with a major pandemic. The growth should be exponential, not arithmetic, and right now, we barely have arithmetic growth. The transmission rate is so low, the number of cases could be said to be nearly stable.

What about the disease itself? What if you get it? They are now telling us it’s usually a cough plus a mild fever and shortness of breath. Only 13% of victims even get a sore throat. That’s a lot better than the flu! Man, I hate the flu. Sore throat, high fever, dizziness, weakness, bone pain, stuffy nose, mucus…one year, it made pus come out of my eyes.

Why are people dying, if the disease is so mild? First, they’re not dying. Much. Second, Chinese health care. Third, there are a lot of people who are so weak they can be killed by a strong breeze or being Rick-rolled, and they’re the ones who die from COVID-19. If you die from COVID-19, you were probably not long for this world anyway. You’re the type of person who dies from the flu or getting overly excited while watching Antiques Roadshow.

There are many, many people who have had COVID-19 without even realizing it, and many get no symptoms at all. Is that how it worked with actual pestilences like the black plague or the Spanish flu? No.

I guess the best reason to fight transmission is the lack of a vaccine. Old people and AIDS patients can’t protect themselves with vaccinations, so it’s up to everyone else to try to keep the disease away from them. Truthfully, however, given the mathematics of the situation, it makes more sense to put barriers around the weak than around the rest of us. It would be easier and cheaper. It’s easier to finance a bubble boy than a bubble world.

In view of the disease’s failure to spread and kill the way it was expected to, I am quadrupling down on my irritating predictions of pandemic fail. Quadrupling! People who love misery are now in danger of COVID-19 symptoms plus, if they read my blog, having steam come out of their ears.

I may be wrong. I’m just a guy who blogs for fun, and I have zero training in epidemiology. But I feel pretty confident. In order for the pandemic to materialize, the transmission graphs would have to shoot up abruptly for no good reason.

If COVID-19 has a path to blowing up the graphs, it must surely lie in Africa, the poorest and most primitive continent. There are 1.3 billion people there, and their medical system is atrocious. However, as AIDS has shown us, a disease that causes a plague in Africa isn’t necessarily catastrophic in other countries.

The AIDS story is very interesting. People tried to tell us it was a big threat to heterosexuals, thinking this would motivate politicians to spend more money on it. Then it turned out it was impossible for heterosexual men to get it from sex, and then the medical authorities hushed this up. Then it turned out to be a plague in Africa, and that exposed the enormous homosexuality rate there. Men who claimed to be straight were not, and many who held themselves out as heterosexual got the disease from voodoo initiations in which they were sodomized by witch doctors.

I guess I shouldn’t make light of vile, humiliating rituals that give men a lethal illness which spreads to women, but it makes me feel a lot better about the things Christians have to put up with from pastors. Although there is the pedo-plague the Christian clergy can’t seem to shake.

Anyway, AIDS activists tried to tell us straights were going to get AIDS here, and they used Africa to prove their point, claiming straight male Africans were getting it. Not so.

You should really try not to be mad at helpful people who debunk the coronavirus hype. Instead, ask yourself why part of you is hoping for a catastrophe. That’s what’s going on inside you. It’s not healthy to feel that way.

As for me, my beautiful new welding mask has arrived, as have some gun things I needed. I am planning to fabricate, work on my plan to turn my dining room into a gun room, and install a new extractor spring on my Desert Eagle. If I feel like going to the store, I’ll go to the store. I won’t even wear a space suit.