Coronavirus Pandemic Fizzling Nicely

Time for more annoying optimism RE the coronavirus outbreak.

Things continue to look bad for the nervous Nellies and tribulation fans. Right now, the number of detected cases, worldwide, is 111,362. This means we are detecting somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 cases per day, which appears to be a big drop from last week.

This is not how real plagues work. A real plague’s case total goes up exponentially until saturation is reached. UP. Not sort of sideways.

Will the picture change? What if a whole bunch of people have been exposed, and they’re going to develop symptoms and be reported in a nearly simultaneous statistical glob?

Doubtful. The average incubation period lasts 5 days. Assuming a reasonable distribution, that means around half of the cases pop up in 5 days or less. The virus has been in the US for a while now. We should have seen something by now. The US total is 565, which is probably lower than the number of Americans who found out they had tuberculosis last month.

Besides, how would a bunch of people get exposed all at once?

Maybe a bunch of Harbor Freight employees could cooperate to open a particularly nasty freight container.

I’m sticking to my prediction. The plague never happened, and it will not happen, barring a terrible mutation. Just guessing, but I’ve been right so far.

Does this mean COVID-19 won’t kill a bunch of people? No. Every year, trampolines kill a certain number of people. So do roller skates. So do coconuts, staplers, vacuum cleaners, and Beanie Babies. The world is a big place, and a lot of nutty things happen here, because that’s how probability works. Even a fairly tame epidemic like this one will take a toll when it has 7 billion people to work with. COVID-19 doesn’t have to be a plague to kill a few thousand elderly people. A real plague would infect millions or healthy people and kill a significant fraction of them.

I just read that the common cold kills 4500 people in the US every year. I’ll bet it’s true.

Now that I’m confident there will be no plague, I’m still annoyed, because there is no guarantee I won’t get sick. There are several cases in Florida, and I do not want to join them. I already had pink eye this year. That will suffice.

I don’t want to go on the cart. I feel happy.

Given the choice between the flu and COVID-19, I’d say COVID-19, all the way. The symptoms are typically much less unpleasant.

I read something interesting the other day, and it must be true, because it was on the Internet. I read that viruses tend to become less severe as they spread. I wonder if that explains what happened in Wuhan province, where COVID-19 was much worse than it is everywhere else. Maybe the disease changed, or maybe the dirty habits and poor response of the Chinese explain everything.

It’s not fashionable to say people in this country or that one are dirty, but–you know this–it’s frequently true. People in Arab countries are really dirty. The Germans are cleaner than the French. Hispanics tend to be less clean than other Americans. Black people seem to be cleaner than other Americans, as do Southerners. New Yorkers are really gross. A New Yorker will drop an ice cream cone on the sidewalk, pick it up, and eat it.

The Chinese are dirty. No two ways about it.

A friend of mine crossed China in 1983. He told of a horrifying experience there. He was on a riverboat, and meals were included with his ticket. He said there was a table, and at mealtimes, a big bowl would be placed on it. The passengers would then start grabbing food from the bowl, using chopsticks. One bowl. He said the toilet in his car on the Trans-Siberian railroad was a small hole in the floor of the restroom, and it was surrounded by rounds that had missed the target. Poo flyers. He also related a terrifying tale of a man who was employed by the state to clean people’s rear ends, with a giant swab, at a public toilet.

I hope things have improved, but current hygiene standards in China are still highly disturbing.

When I think about travel, I don’t worry about things like terrorism. I worry about encountering fecal material in every item of food and drink, and on every surface, I deal with. On the other hand, this is what happens whenever I visit someone who owns a cat.

I lived in Israel for 4 months, I visited Jerusalem maybe 3 times, and I got dysentery from Arab food twice. The Jewish food was awful; like prison food. But it was clean.

Jews can only make two things well: desserts and sandwiches. Steer clear of the other stuff. Even if it means dysentery.

I haven’t had a Nova bagel in ages. Man.

I wonder what will happen with COVID-19 in Thailand, where nose-picking in public is acceptable. They need to cut that out.

If my sunny coronavirus predictions are giving you heartburn, you should probably go away until the hubbub is over, because I don’t see myself not writing about it while the story is still in the news.

Don’t despair if you spent a lot of money on useless surgical masks. They should work pretty well for protecting you from dust in your workshop. Also, Purell is flammable, so if you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to use napalm, now you may get your chance.

As for me, I am not yet ready to go about in public in a face-burqa.