Soylent Green is Made out of Toilet Paper

I feel like I have to keep updating people on my coronavirus forecast equation, even though the facts (apart from the equation) have proven that this pandemic is not going to be that big a deal. There is no longer any possibility, short of a miraculous mutation, of a pandemic that will approach the severity of a bad flu season, let alone a true pestilence.

Every seasonal flu is a pandemic. I wonder if people are aware of that.

The official estimate for the COVID-19 death rate is between 0.5% and 1%, we still know of only a few hundred thousand cases, we don’t have an accurate test that looks for antibodies, and Chinese researchers tell us the false-positive rate is 40-80%. The flu hit about 650,000,000 people this year, and its death rate, according to the source I checked, is 0.1%, which is not that far from the coronavirus rate, which may continue to drop. And the flu and COVID-19 kill exactly the same kind of people, except that COVID-19 almost never kills the very young. Generally, it kills the old, the fat, and the unhealthy. This is a painful paragraph for determined worriers to read.

Today I read a sensational story about a young male nurse who died. The person who commented for the press was his sister, not a wife or girlfriend. Hmm. Gays make up a big percentage of male nurses, and they have crazy rates of venereal disease, including things like syphilis which barely touch the rest of us. They have high rates of viral hepatitis, AIDS, herpes, gonorrhea, and so on. They are also much more likely to abuse their bodies with things like alcohol, drugs, and tobacco. The story seemed to be an effort to portray COVID-19 as a big threat to young, healthy people. It’s just not. The proof is already on the table.

I don’t know if this young man was gay or had preexisting health problems, but whatever the truth is, he’s an outlier. Maybe gays should be treated as a high-risk group, just like old people.

Back to the math. If I don’t provide updates, people (especially those who don’t know much about science and math) will think I’m weaseling out. I refuse to weasel. This time.

Here is today’s figure: 615,519. Here is what my equation predicts: 508,020.

That’s not just okay. That’s still a home run. Two days ago, I was off by 9%, which was astounding (and a fluke, really). Today I am off by 17.5%. Less sensational, but still shocking. They keep telling us the world is ending, but we still have less than 2% of the infection rate of this year’s rather ordinary flu, and not only is my prediction within an order of magnitude; it’s within 18%.

Non-math people will think today’s result proves I’m wrong. They don’t understand that there was never any hope that I would get the exact number or something within a percentage point. All the computers and experts in the world couldn’t do that. It’s probably impossible with a simple bacteria culture in a dish. The authorities don’t even know the current number right now. They only have estimates.

What I’ve been saying lately is that I expect the official numbers to diverge upward from my prediction and then collapse through it. This is exactly what’s going on. It’s not rocket science. It’s not even medical science (oxymoron?).

I can talk about the reasons I think the error would increase and then drop.

I haven’t adjusted my constant upward in a while, even though I probably should have, because I wanted to avoid changing it so often I looked like I was cheating. I thought it was better to have less accuracy than to change the constant too often. I’m in a trap here. You have to change the constant over and over at first in order to make your equation more accurate, but because this epidemic will be short, and because the shape of the actual infection curve will change very soon and make my equation invalid, I can’t continue changing it forever. I chose a time to stop, arbitrarily. It might have been better to stop the following day. That can be checked retroactively, but I’m too lazy.

The graph of actual present and future infections, which is not really known, is in the shape of a hump. It increases exponentially, and then it flattens, turns downward, and dies. The part of the graph I’m trying to predict is the middle of the slope on the way up. That part applies to a very short time. It may end in a week or two. If I’m still fiddling with my constant when the rate’s acceleration drops, I will be wasting my time.

The increase in testing should make the graph turn upward from my initial predictions, but then when the graph starts to level out, it will pass down through the graph of my equation, and from that time on, my equation will predict many more infections than actually occur.

It’s also important to realize that there may be no simple equation that predicts the infection’s spread really accurately.

I don’t know if I’ve explained it well.

Anyway, the equation was never important. At least not after it was obvious that the infection rate was many times lower than that of the flu. As I keep saying, anyone with common sense can look at the numbers and see that coronavirus has never begun to live up to the hype.

The equation is just a fun experiment to see whether my college education is actually useful for anything, and maybe it has some value for reassuring people. Those who are willing to be reassured, I mean. If you like being hysterical, and this would not make you rare at all, no equation can help.

Can I predict how inaccurate the equation will be with time? Search me. To do that would be a back-door way of coming up with a new equation, if you think about it. If you know the error, then you know what the real graph looks like. You just subtract the error from your old graph.

It would be neat if the error stayed under 100% for the next three weeks. I would feel very good about that. It would be amazing.

I’m trying to be nicer to people who are behaving selfishly and irrationally. People can’t be expected to see the truth unless they’re full of the Spirit of Holiness. Everyone is under the influence of spirits, and every spirit is either with God or against him. If you’re not baptized with the Spirit of Holiness, you will believe what other spirits tell you. They will close your eyes and ears. I’m not going to say it’s not your fault if you can’t see the truth. It generally is. If you choose to reject the Spirit of Holiness, whatever happens afterward is your fault. But I have been deluded as much as anyone, and when I’m not deluded, I can’t take the credit. I should be more patient.

Someone brought up an interesting point yesterday. I wish I could remember who it was. They said that draconian measures make less sense in rural areas. If you live in my county, you are automatically socially distanced most of the time. If you live in New York City, you swim in a sea of filth and people even in normal conditions. New Yorkers are very dirty, and there are a whole lot of them in a small space.

If you live in New York, you know what I mean. People in northeastern cities have dirty habits. They share food and beverages. They spit in the street. They don’t take things like hand-washing seriously. The surfaces in the subway are always covered with a film of oil and other substances that come from human skin. This film has a distinctive smell that hits you as soon as you board a car. Unless things have changed, the restaurant and grocery inspectors are on the take. Anyone who has eaten in New York restaurants knows they are dirtier than those in other cities. It’s not like you can’t tell. People in New York joke about it, even when they’re sitting down to eat. It’s a commonplace.

I wish we weren’t so determined to virtue-signal that we’re willing to cut our economy’s throat. When I pray about the epidemic, I pray it will end, but I pray with more urgency that the panic will end. It’s the real problem.

It’s good to live in the country. Think about that, going forward. Human beings are jamming themselves into cities more and more, and in doing so, they are making themselves much more vulnerable to future panics and bad authoritarian leadership. When Soylent Green becomes a reality, the country will be the last place to see it.

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I have a great new example of pro-hysteria press bias.

The press is telling us the STAR of Desperately Seeking Susan just died from coronavirus. Of course, if you remember this awful movie at all, you know the star was Rosanna Arquette. Also appearing: Madonna and Aidan Quinn. So who died?

The deceased is Mark Blum, an obscure character actor. He was 69. Did he smoke? Was he diabetic? Did he have HIV? We don’t know. The press isn’t saying. They’re just saying a “star” died.

No star has died yet. It’s certain to happen. A lot of celebrities have health problems. Many are old. But reaching for near-unknowns like Mark Blum is a testimony to the weakness of the epidemic.

My wild guess is that there are maybe 10,000 people who are legitimate celebrities in the minds of Americans. Mark Blum was not one of them. I’m talking about people like George Clooney and, say, Michelle Rodriguez, to pick someone a little lower on the food chain. Based on current figures, I would expect us to lose a few dozen. But it hasn’t started yet.