By the way on the arguments on numbers:
The comical thing is that he wanted to NOT test people because then the markets would be spooked. I'm sorry, that is laugh-until-you-cry tragicomical.
Because the only way you contain is to test aggressively as soon as possible, and isolate EVERYBODY who knows ANYBODY who is positive. We lost contain. We just blew it off. You know why? Because oh no, we might have some selling on wall street. Farkin' genius.
Now the easily led ruminants are actually believing that "he stopped it! He closed the border!"
He did a sloppy job of a nationalist response AFTER there were confirmed cases in Seattle, cases that had already blossomed into one node of infection. And the brilliant theory that the virus needed to be brought in by someone from China led to an infection in NY.
Even now, the right is still obsessed with defending this seriously idiotic theory that viruses play "RISK." They don't. That's why this virus is in 140 countries, not just ours. The countries that win containment win against the virus, eventually. We did not. The Brits went all Boris Johnson and decided to just GET the virus for a long time, similarly wasting time in the beginning.
But I meant to post a simple point on the numbers: You only know how many have it by testing, and testing a LOT -- then extrapolating from the test.
We might very well GET that 40-70% infection, that makes perfect sense. 80% will have mild symptoms or be asymptomatic, among those testing positive. 20% will be severe cases. Some single digit percentage will die. If you're very sick, the way you don't die is be on a ventilator. If you have more people than ventilators and nobody else has a ventilator they much more likely die.
So you might "only" get 1% death rate in, say, 170 million people. That's "only" 1.7 million dead.
Or it might be lower. The point is, the same thing applies to, say, seasonal flu, which we say is .1% fatal. Well, maybe that's .01% fatal counting people you don't ever know have it. Same concept.
Among the positives, when you test more, the death rate does look lower. This is not, as one savant here stated, the disease becoming milder. It is adding to the denominator.
If it's 1% fatal, that means that it does the damage of 10 flu season in 1 season, and the way to best survive it is a relatively scarce medical resource (vents.) That's what we've got thus far. Hence, "flattening the curve." Ventilators are available for more people in a given time period if people socially distance.
And yes, you brilliant deniers who went around carping "it's not that bad, I'm going to a movie and a crowded bar" or whatever, you're killing grandma lol what can I say. You want this spreading slow - because it IS going to spread, it's a matter of fast or slow. If it's fast, people are out of options and die.
"The latest democrat hoax"... how many people believed that? Well hell they were at a rally when it was well known that the right move was isolation, right? As was POTUS. Sometimes your irresponsibility kills people. Hey, maybe Stalin didnt KNOW that directing the Great Soviet Famine against Ukraine would kill people, and make the famine worse in toto... maybe he just had quaint beliefs that maybe the peasants really WERE hoarding the food... or maybe he thought the famine would be over, it would "be like a miracle."
Still goes down in history as a man-made famine.
