Born to do Math 165 – Covfefe-20’s Unnecessary Body Count
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/04/15
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Coronavirus, let’s talk, I hope COVID-20 or Covfefe-20 doesn’t come around.
Rick Rosner: This is already bad. The fear is that this is as bad as the Spanish Flu of 1918/1919. A vaccine may take a year or more to come to the market. The deal is, you want to keep this from exploding and infecting millions of people. You can’t stop it, because it has a long and often asymptomatic incubation period. During which, you are contagious up to two weeks. You can’t stop it. Because it will keep bubbling along undetected. Until, you have a vaccine or enough people have become infected or developed an immunity to it. So, it cannot be transmitted as easily. That’s the game. In Japan, they have already shut down all schools until April. They’re playing baseball games with nobody in the stadium. I feel like America should do this. However, we’re dumb cowboys. We will be pretty slow to do that kind of stuff. The Spanish Flu, so-called because the King of Spain got sick, not because it originated in Spain. Journalists were allowed to write a lot about the King of Spain being sick. They were not allowed to write about this potentially starting in America because we were at war.
Countries have been censoring stories. Of course, by censoring stories about how bad it was, they made it worse. The Spanish Flu killed tens of millions of people worldwide and infected hundreds of millions when we didn’t have a billion people on Earth. Carole has been stockpiling stuff. I have been washing my hands a lot. At the gym, I used to hate people who wiped down the machine after using a machine or after you used a machine. I thought the goop or wetness after using a machine as worse than the not wiping it down. Now, I am a big wiper downer. I think it is going to be bad, not as bad as 1918. Trump told him the regular flu kills 60,000 regular Americans every year. But so what, this is a whole new thing. It is an additional set of unnecessary deaths.
Jacobsen: People should know the number killed by the Spanish Flu was equivalent to the number killed in WWI.
Rosner: Yes. If it goes really crazy and infects 10% of the people on the planet, that’s 750,000,000 people. We might be closer to 8 billion now. 750,000,000 at a 2% mortality is 15,000,000 dead from this stuff. It is hard to tell with the mortality rate, though, because the baseline in time is so short. It is too new as a disease to get a good statistical handle on the mortality.
Jacobsen: Who is most likely to die?
Rosner: They say men more than women and people over 60.
Jacobsen: So, you’re okay, sort of. And I’m super okay, aside from being a guy.
Rosner: Yes. But it is hard to anticipate what will happen, like people with heart disease and diabetes, because it makes it hard to breathe. Messes with the lungs and then the immune system overreacts and does further damage to the lungs. If you have metabolic issues, heart stuff, and so on, people who are already pretty unhealthy are further at risk here. I read a long tweet thread. it was talking about how if this becomes crazy the country; this could mess with the elections. Trump could decide to postpone the elections.
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