Fodder for the Math-Challenged and Panic-Prone

My prognostications concerning the pandemic have taken a hit!

For days, the world coronavirus new-case graph has been dipping, creating an apparent maximum followed by a decline. Over the last couple of days, it has turned upward again. It’s still down from the peak, and it’s WAY down from where it would be had there been no dips. That’s the important thing. If the epidemic weren’t faltering, we would have many, many more new cases today, and the lookout for next week would be much worse.

Here is today’s graph, which comes from last night’s figures. If the epidemic had not dipped, the graph would run up and out of the frame to the right. It would be as high as the word at the beginning of this sentence.

I’m not going to keep downloading and posting this graph. I did it today so people would know I was acknowledging the upturn, but it’s getting to be a drag.

Was I wrong? I can’t know, but I don’t think so. Maybe a new country is having problems, or maybe testing or counting is changing. I’m still betting on a continued decline through the month and, well, forever, until and unless we get a second epidemic.

Here’s something I’m thinking about: why is the death rate worse than they said it would be a week ago? This disease is far less common than the flu, regardless of what anyone says, but the death toll will probably be comparable when all is said and done.

I’m going to make another wild guess: it’s because very old people are extremely susceptible, and we don’t protect them. I’m going to guess that if we ever see real figures, we will learn that the vast majority of the dead were over 70, and many were confined in homes.

A few days back, I noted that about half of the deaths in Massachusetts took place in facilities where old people live, and they were generally elderly people, not staffers. What percentage of that state’s citizens are elderly? Not half. Believe that. People in homes have an abnormally high death rate. My friend Mike, who runs a hospice up there, says it’s wiping out old folks homes.

I was talking to him about it today. I told him to imagine that he lived with his son, and one of them had the disease. Would they be able to keep the other one healthy? His answer: of course. You stay apart. You wash your hands. You watch what you touch. All of us have shared homes with people who had diseases more contagious than coronavirus, without getting infected. It’s just not that hard to protect yourself.

When my dad was alive, I was generally able to isolate him from diseases, but I only had one patient, he wasn’t cooped up with a bunch of other people, and I actually cared about him.

I guess I seem obsessed with pink eye, which I had earlier this year, but it’s one of the most contagious diseases imaginable. You spew viruses from every possible outlet for weeks. Your doctor will tell you to take your clothing to laundromats because it needs the high heat of commercial machines in order to be rendered safe. That’s how bad it is. I had pink eye when I was a kid, I lived with three other people, my mother did not use a laundromat, and no one else in the family got the disease. It’s not that hard to protect people from contagion when you know there’s a danger.

When I was looking for a home for my dad, I saw a number of local ALF’s. I toured the cheapest and the most expensive. None of them were truly clean, by the standards of ordinary houses. Even in the cleanest one, there were always smears of things that hadn’t quite been removed. There were smells. And the places were full of things old people would touch, like books, tables, and chair arms.

I don’t think my area is exceptional. In fact, the ALF industry is competitive here because of the huge number of elderly residents. This county is probably doing a better job than other places.

In my opinion, we’re letting them die. Keeping them safe is a lot of trouble, and there isn’t much motivation, because we see them as people who are nearly dead already. They’re easily replaced, from the perspective of ALF managers. There are people waiting to move in. That’s the hard truth.

When you get past a certain age, and the inconvenience of keeping you well reaches a certain threshold, people will do less and less to keep you well. It’s human nature. I’m not endorsing it. I’m pointing it out. We all know it.

We keep hearing about young and supposedly healthy people who have died, and very often, their ages have been mentioned in the headlines, to make sure we see it even if we don’t read the articles. The obvious intent: to prove that this is a disease that is equally dangerous to people of all ages. It’s a lie. The death rate for people over 80 is over 10%. Kids almost never die. If you’re under 60, the rate goes down close to 1%.

It’s like AIDS. They kept trying to convince us we were all at risk, and it wasn’t true. It’s impossible for a heterosexual man to get AIDS from a woman. Somewhere, there is probably someone who really did get syphilis from a toilet seat, but it’s considered impossible. Female-male AIDS transmission is the same way. Women who think their infected husbands are straight are living with homosexuals or intravenous drug users. You can check WHO if you don’t believe me. The “heterosexual” men in the African AIDS epidemic have had sex with other men.

Magic Johnson is a homosexual. Accept it. Either that, or he shot up. The odds against any other type of transmission are astronomical. One famous group of people were infected deliberately by a murderous homosexual dentist named Acer, but if Johnson had gotten the disease in a similar way, there would be a cluster of fellow victims. There isn’t.

They used to terrify us with numbers from Italy, and then we found out the average age of the dead was about 80. Italians didn’t look out for the elderly.

My guess is that we are going to find out that all or nearly all countries with high death rates will have unusually high average ages for their fatalities. The rest will turn out to be places with terrible medical care.

The Swedish government is with me. Their policy is to look out for the elderly and the sick, while refraining from locking the rest of the population down. I assume this is still their policy. It was last week, and it was working very well.

I’ve seen emotional guilt merchants accusing people who mention the age disparity of being insensitive. They say we don’t care about old people. Where is the basis for that claim? What if I say death in general is more likely to hit old people? It’s true. Does it mean I think they’re disposable?

The effect of age is very important, because, while it’s bad news for the elderly, it’s very good news for nearly everyone else. There is nothing wrong with spreading good news. When did good news become a bad thing?

The special vulnerability of the aged and sick is useful information. It could have been a great help in strategizing. Instead, our politicians listened to the ignorant, emotional mob and wrecked our economy unnecessarily.

It’s a terrible thing when a young mother dies from COVID-19, but it’s also a rarity, and we have to acknowledge that. We shouldn’t put her on the news and make her the face of the disease. It’s like making a lottery winner the face of the average American net worth. The most typical COVID-19 victim is a healthy-looking person who has no symptoms or coughs a little.

Where are the heart-wrenching videos of the tens of thousands of Americans who died from the flu this season? Don’t they matter? Many of them were babies and toddlers. If their tragic deaths didn’t rate coverage, why are we zooming in on atypical COVID-19 deaths?

The press made healthy heterosexual Americans the faces of AIDS, and it turned out to be baseless propaganda. We’re letting them do the same thing all over again.

Maybe if we focused on protecting the most endangered, we could save more people.

To sum up, I’m doubling down. Again. So I’m quadrupling down. No one can predict the future except God, but I’m betting on greatly reduced new infection numbers before April ends. If I’m wrong, sue me for medical malpractice. I’m just a blogger.

Now I’m going to try to make some 10mm ammunition. I can’t wait. I may also hit Harbor Freight for a mount to put a TV on the wall in the gun room. I have to have a computer in there, and I have a 37″ TV gathering dust on the floor.

Still no big celebrity coronavirus deaths. John Prine is at the top, and he was about as famous as Larry Hovis.