Tuesday, March 31, 2020

Now Wait a Minute (Gardening Postponed edition)



April 30 is well over two weeks away.  Is there a Trump calendar I'm unfamiliar with?

And that's still a best-case scenario.

Still, the White House could still be listening to this guy:

You wrote, “The adaptive responses should reduce the exposures in the high-risk groups, given the tendency for the coronavirus to weaken over time.” What tendency are you talking about, and how do we know it will weaken over time?
Well, what happens is it’s an evolutionary tendency. [“There is absolutely no evidence for that,” Ko told me. According to Kuritzkes, “There is no proof that this is the case. To the extent we see that evolution taking place it is usually over a much vaster timescale.”] So the mechanism is you start with people, some of whom have a very strong version of the virus, and some of whom have a very weak version of the virus. If the strong-version-of-the-virus people are in contact with other people before they die, it will pass on. But, if it turns out that you slow the time of interaction down, either in an individual case or in the aggregate, these people are more likely to die before they could transfer the virus off to everybody else.

On the other hand, those people have the more benign version of the virus that will allow them to live longer, which means that they have the chance to make a connection with somebody else. And so what happens is, if it turns out you think something like the coronavirus is ten times as strong as another virus, what that means is that the distancing is going to be more violent, which means that the
evolutionary process should be more rapid than that for the ordinary flu.

There is no "benign version" of this virus.  And Epstein, who originally posited only 500 would die in America from the virus before the "adaptive response" swooped in to save us all, later upped his estimate to 5000.

The total number of deaths nationwide on Tuesday surpassed 3,400 — more than the number of people who died in the initial Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and surpassing the number of deaths attributed to the viral outbreak in China, where it was first reported late last year.

I don't like to be gloomy, but the trend in deaths is not toward suddenly slowing down:

As I say, the silver lining is that Epstein is no longer taken as a reliable seer.  But it's a slender reed to rest much on:

On the other hand, Trump pointedly gave the podium to Fauci this afternoon to discuss the expected number of deaths.

 He's no longer calling it a "flu," either.

Small graces.

1 comment:

  1. Yep, it figures a libertarian lawyer was the one steering the ship right into the whirlpool. The media making the word "libertarian" respectable when it should have been obvious to anyone it's essentially an ideology of a 2-year-old with sharing issues, insisting on getting their own way is a huge tell. It's a popular ideology among show biz folk, especially those in infotanement.

    ReplyDelete