Two years ago I had the flu [the reason I didn’t cover the 2018 Yukon Quest]. I had to give a friend self-defense training so she could provide food and water to my cats. I still had equipment my Mother used so I didn’t get shuffled off to a nursing home, but I spent a lot of time on the phone explaining to others how to do things that I did all the time. I was in a self-imposed quarantine.
The wounded require more resources than the dead, so a death count is not always indicative of the effect of a disease. That is not a nice thing to say, but it is reality. Trump is disarming the government’s ability to deal with problems while he is allow business to create more problems for us by polluting the air and water. It’s slow motion suicide.
]]>Of course, we’re still early, so we don’t have accurate information, but this virus doesn’t appear to be the one that I’ve been predicting for the past decade. It’s not deadly enough to be the Final Epidemic that basically ends civilization and most life on Earth. I doubt any viral infection ever will be, because there are limits on how deadly they can be. For real deadliness, we need to look at bacterial infections. The Black Death killed half of Europe’s population. All it needed was one mutation for virulence to do that. Today, we’d knock out the bacteria with antibiotics long before it became an epidemic, which is fine as long as the antibiotics work. But we’re breeding hardier and hardier strains of bacteria with our crappy healthcare system and overuse of antibiotics, and all it’ll take will be one mutation for deadliness on the part of, say, a common antibiotic-resistent pneumococcus, and we’d knock out half the population. Civilization likely wouldn’t survive that, we’re not medieval serfs, we don’t grow our own food anymore, we rely on a complex supply chain to stay alive. Or not alive, if that supply chain collapses.
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