Posted on 03/16/2020 11:24:54 AM PDT by catnipman
The Diamond Princess was the worst case scenario, according to Levitt. “If you compare the ship to a country—we are talking 250,000 people crowded into one square kilometer, which is horribly crowded. It is four times the crowding in Hong Kong. It is as if the entire Isaeli population was crammed into 30 square kilometers.” Furthermore, he said, the ship had a central air conditioning and heating system and a communal dining room. “Those are extremely comfortable conditions for the virus and still, only 20% were infected. It is a lot, but pretty similar to the infection rate of the common flu.”
As with the flu, most of those dying as a result of coronavirus are over 70 years old, Levitt said. “It is a known fact that the flu mostly kills the elderly—around three-quarters of flu mortalities are people over 65.” To put things in proportion: “there are years when flu is raging, like in the U.S. in 2017, when there were three times the regular number of mortalities. And still, we did not panic. That is my message: you need to think of corona like a severe flu. It is four to eight times as strong as a common flu, and yet, most people will remain healthy and humanity will survive.”
(Excerpt) Read more at calcalistech.com ...
Wait until we hear that mosquitoes can transmit COVID-19.
Not true:
Smokers in America = 13.7%
https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/adult_data/cig_smoking/index.htm
Smoking in France = 29%
https://www.tripsavvy.com/smoking-in-france-1516917
Wikipedia suggests 32%
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoking_in_France
Well the prevalence of Chinese workers in Italy is just why it got off to an earlier start. Once the epidemic spreads enough, how it got started is less interesting than where it goes from there. I also don’t know that our ventilator supply is significantly better than Italy’s. It might be. But that’s not something I’ve seen info about.
But I agree that trashing the economy may not have been the way to go. Perhaps better: something more focused on isolating the elderly for their protection, while letting the virus run its course through everyone else?
We’ll see soon enough. My only concern is that the food supply keeps moving. But since farm laborers, packing house workers, forklift operators and truck drivers, etc are younger than 70-90, that shouldn’t be a problem.
A vaccine will appear next month when this bug has dried up. Whatever is left of the $50 billion will be absorbed by politicians. Big waste of money... as usual.
Did you remember to practice tongue in cheek? :P
“Smokers in America = 13.7%”
In central PA it feels more like 33%. :(
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A couple of things regarding Italy. The Chinese population has exploded to over 320,000 in the last ten years, which means a lot of travel between the two countries. Also, the average life span in Italy, about 83, is far greater than ours at about 79. So more people over 80 to succumb to the virus?
“Wait until we hear that mosquitoes can transmit COVID-19.”
yeah,i remember that one back in the day: some fool like Travis McGee tried to make the claim one day in the lunchroom at my corporation that mosquitoes spread HIV (this was before the internet), and i came unglued and demanded that he explain that if this was true why practically everyone who had every been bitten by a mosquito in the summertime didn’t have HIV ... the bastard shut the F up and never tried that bullshit again ...
“A vaccine will appear next month when this bug has dried up. Whatever is left of the $50 billion will be absorbed by politicians. Big waste of money... as usual.”
i suspect that’s what will happen as well ... same thing happened with SARS ...
I didn't mean to imply that. Things will get worse before they get better. It will take longer to recover from the economic damage than once the virus levels off.
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