Things are Getting Creepy

I’m glad I posted my coronavirus equation and predictions online, because I don’t think anyone would believe me had I waited until after the results came in. Today’s result is another stunner. It’s so accurate, I’m starting to feel like somebody is pulling my leg.

Johns Hopkins global toll: 1,359,398

My predicted toll: 1,360,398 (rounded to nearest integer)

Error: 0.074%

Yes, my figure is almost exactly 1,000 higher than the actual number. And you can check it yourself, because all the required information is available to you.

I don’t know what the error in the Johns Hopkins number is, but I guarantee you, it’s a lot bigger than 1,000. For all practical purposes, my figures are identical to the actual figures.

Don’t ask me what’s going on. I don’t know.

The prediction is higher than the actual number. Does that mean anything? I don’t see how it could. It’s just one number, based on approximations, compared to another number which is not all that reliable, and the spread between them is too small to mean anything. But what if my prediction starts diverging upward from the Johns Hopkins number, and it never stops? That would mean something. Eventually. At first, the uncertainty in all of the figures involved here would make small movements meaningless.

Are they changing testing methods? Are people volunteering to be tested more or less often? Are doctors becoming less biased toward diagnosing coronavirus when the flu is the actual problem? Does an increase of 10,000 this week mean the same thing as an increase of 10,000 next week? No way to know.

Because of the huge false-positive rate (estimated at 40-80%) and other factors, it’s impossible to be sure of anything on a small scale. What is reasonably certain is that the flu’s numbers continue to dwarf those of the disease that motivated us to ruin our economy.

Here’s a prediction for you. The flu is going away. That’s certain. As it goes away, I predict a dampening effect on coronavirus diagnoses, because there will be many times fewer people to misdiagnose. Colds and other respiratory bugs also go away in hot weather, so they should contribute. I would think the death rate from coronavirus would also drop, since there would be fewer bugs out there to cause secondary infections.

I don’t think there is any way to prove or disprove this prediction. Sadly.

I’m still hoping for a drop-off in the acceleration of contagion this month. The weather is warming up, the dirtiest, most careless, and most susceptible uninfected people are getting rarer, many people are trying to be clean for the first time in their lives, and, of course, a lot of people are imprisoned in their houses.

One nice thing to remember is that my equation doesn’t take recoveries into account. There are a lot of people in the total figure who are no longer sick or contagious. That’s very important. They can’t spread the disease, they can’t burden the rest of us, and in all likelihood, they can’t be reinfected.

If there were enough of them, I would expect them to serve as buffers for the rest of us, but so far, only about one American in 1,000 is believed to have the disease, so I doubt the recovered are making a big dent in the effective mean distance between contagious people and potential victims.

Today I was nearly impacted personally. It would have been the second time. The first time was when McDonald’s, in an act of extreme callousness, stopped serving all-day breakfast. Today I decided to look for mouthwash. Believe it or not, some places don’t have it. What are people doing with it? Are they bathing in it? It’s not the answer.

The Internet says my local Walgreen’s has it, so I guess I’ll be visiting them today in my plywood-and-polycarbonate coronaburqa.

There are several victims in my zip code now. I am ambivalent about the risk. I truly do not want to get sick. I hate respiratory ailments. I hate mucus and sore throats. On the other hand, if I get coronavirus, when I’m over it, I’ll be able to go anywhere I want without even thinking about the possibility of getting sick.

Shouldn’t I have faith that God will keep me well, regardless of whether I have antibodies? Yes. No doubt about that.

I haven’t had the flu in years. I started taking the yearly shot. I haven’t one in a good while, and I still haven’t gotten sick. I feel like I should go get one, but Florida has very little flu, and it’s April.

I don’t get respiratory bugs very often. I would guess less often than once a year. I think I had them all when I was a kid, so it built me up! I like to think so, anyway. Seemed like I was sick every month.

If I recall correctly, I had pneumonia once, but it didn’t bother me. I was up and around, functioning normally.

It would be embarrassing to die from coronavirus after trying to make people understand that the epidemic was overblown.

We still have no major celebrity victims. I check every day. Some have gotten sick, but none have died. I thought Tom Dempsey was fairly well-known, but I talked to a friend who is involved with professional football, and he didn’t know who Dempsey was. I had to remind him.

He’s not Kim Kardashian.

Some weird things have happened here. Two nights ago, I woke up, and before I was completely awake, I saw a spirit leaning over my bed. It was transparent, like the Predator character in the movies. It was shaped like a fat man in a bowler hat. I got very angry, and I cursed it with defeat and banned it from my property. Last night, I woke up again, and briefly, I saw a transparent cloud in a corner by the ceiling. I cursed that, too.

Spirits seem to love upper corners and beds. I don’t know why.

I’m not afraid of them. They’re weaklings. They play for the losing team.

Last week, and again last night, I had the strange feeling that something big had ended. Maybe the age of the gentiles, also known as the church age? I don’t see the rapture happening right away, and I’m sure the world isn’t ending. I’m a bad student of prophecy, but I’m fairly certain a number of prophecies need to be fulfilled before the tribulation.

The rapture, tribulation, and second coming are three different things, and they are supposed to occur in the order in which I just wrote them. The rapture is supposed to follow persecution of the church. Worldwide, the church is persecuted very badly. Christians suffer more persecution, including murder, than anyone. Still, I have always expected pre-rapture persecution to be much worse than what we see right now.

The age of the church is definitely ending. God has been telling me that for years, and he has told other people. Maybe this epidemic is a threshold.

Churches cause a lot of problems. They teach garbage and keep people from getting to know God. Moving to smaller groups will be a big victory.

I can’t get inside the heads of people who are afraid of death. I know fear of death must be very common right now, but I can’t relate to it. I’m afraid of suffering, but not death. If you’re afraid of death, I’m sorry to say, it’s your fault, and you need to do something about it. If you don’t know God, and you’re reading this, what is your excuse? You have the Internet. It’s full of resources.

I discussed this with a buddy of mine. He told me a story about an aborted airline flight. His plane aborted takeoff three times. The pilot said a light kept coming on. The pilot looked at a manual, and he told the passengers the light meant the jet would need oil filters soon. He took off again, and the plane went over on its side. My friend looked out the window and saw the ground.

He said he started taking account of things. He knew his kids would be okay. He expected to go to heaven. He wasn’t afraid. This is how I feel about death.

In dreams where I have died, in the seconds before death, I felt very sober. I felt that something extremely important was happening. I also felt relieved that I was putting down my earthly burdens. I felt a sense of concern, hoping I was prepared. I wasn’t terrified. I didn’t beg God to rescue me so I wouldn’t die. Truthfully, I was looking forward to heaven. I suppose that’s selfish, but life on earth is tiresome. It’s a grind, even when it goes as well as possible.

There are people out there who feel differently. There are many people who will eat their own children if food becomes scarce, and that is not an exaggeration. It has happened.

Right now, those people are all hoarding toilet paper and Clorox wipes. If a real famine comes, a lot of people will be killed by the actions of hoarders, not by famine itself. Those who survive through selfishness and hysteria will be relatively worthless people.

In a society in which a woman will tear her own baby’s arms and legs off in order to avoid taking a semester off or just to look better in a bikini, should it surprise us when someone suggests that many of us would eat our children? We’re already doing it, not to avoid starvation, but to avoid inconvenience. We are known to have eaten about 60 million of our children since Roe v. Wade.

It would be great if, later in the week, my forecast was 10% too high, and then next week 50% too high, and so on. Sooner or later, this disease will stop spreading quickly, and then it will drop off to nearly nothing. Then we’ll get a vaccine, and our main problem will be coping with the likely needless recession or depression we caused.

One wonders how we will treat the hoarders and gougers.