THE NASTY VIEW OF CORONA VIRUS

THE NASTY VIEW OF CORONA VIRUS

Adam N. Rosenberg 2020 April 8, Wednesday

1 INTRODUCTION
2 CORONA VIRUS
3 POLITICS
3.1 SCALE
3.2 THREAT
4 DAMAGE DONE
5 THE EMPEROR IS NAKED!
6 DISEASE THREATS
7 THE VILLAINS
8 CAPRICORN ONE

1 INTRODUCTION

So we're all in a panic about the pandemic of Corona virus, also known as COVID-19. They're canceling and closing everything. One political wag says, “The difference between panic and pandemic is DEM, for the Democratic Party.” We're scared and we should be scared. I'd just like to make sure we're scared of the right things.

While every new disease has the potential to be another 1918 Spanish flu, dozens of new biological diseases in the past century (1921-2020) have fizzled out compared to the plain, old, ordinary, household flu.

Sick sucks, no doubt about it, but if we're going to study things that kill people that are transmitted by groups of infected people, then maybe we should consider social, economic, and political diseases as well as their consequences.

2 CORONA VIRUS

The Corona virus has killed 26 K (ten thousand) people, 0.0005% of the world population, one in 270 K. It could be much worse, maybe as bad as flu that kills about 35 K per year in the United States and, I'll extrapolate, about 1 M (one million) people worldwide.

AIDS is a horrible scourge, about 1 M per year in deaths. (Remember “Dr. Stranglove” with General Buck Turgidson's book of World Population Centers in Megadeaths?) While we didn't close concert halls or restaurants over AIDS, its method of transmission kept those places safe from AIDS, at least for most of us.

We've watched “The Last Man on Earth,” “The Omega Man,” “Night of the Living Dead,” “Resident Evil,” “Outbreak,” “12 Monkeys,” “28 Days Later,” “I am Legend,” “28 Weeks Later,” and the horrible plague scenes in “Things to Come.” If you're stuck at home because of all this Corona fuss, then you could watch these on Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime.

I would point out that I believe the deaths from Corona beer are about the same as the reported deaths from Corona virus so far.

3 POLITICS

People who argue the case for more government raise the case that we're talking about lives versus some personal freedoms. Let's look more closely at that.

About 100 M people have died at the hands of their own governments in the past century. The big, popular players in the genocide game were Stalin, Hitler, Castro, Pol Pot, and Mao, but there are plenty of others. These governments have almost all been Socialist, both from outside designation and their own self-descriptions. Figure somewhere between 5 G and 10 G people (between five billion and ten billion) have died in the same past-hundred-years century, that means that the death rate from big government or Socialism is between 1% and 2%.

Suddenly a disease that might kill 100 K per year of our world population of 7 G isn't looking so bad compared to the big governments we're building to combat it.

Here's the political picture. The progressive, left-wing, liberals represented by the Democratic Party here in the United States have lost big time. After eight devastating years 2007-2014 with severe costs in economics and personal freedom, things are looking a lot better with the Republicans in charge. Democrats lost a key election and the impeachment loss was embarrassing. Swine flu, SARS, Asian flu, West Nile, bird flu, et cetera didn't occur at opportune times, but Corona virus does and they are taking advantage of it.

It's not entirely partisan as many Republicans want bigger government as well, just doing different things. The dynamic of government is to grow bigger and more evil, this disease is a golden opportunity for big-government fans all over the globe, and they're not going to waste it.

One Facebook fellow unfriended me because he was appalled that I was insensitive enough not to consider Corona deaths more important than other deaths. Another one got in my face for not counting Corona deaths more than other deaths because the disease is transmitted easily and kills easily. Wasn't that figured in the death-count estimate? I'm beginning to realize part of being liberal is being comfortable counting your own victims and not counting the others who get hurt. Others seem to think of COVID-19 as another opportunity for TDS, that's Trump Derangement Syndrome. He's doing too much, then he did too little. It has to be Donald Trump's fault, no matter what happens, no matter what he did about it, no matter what should have been done.

The other overzealous response is a push for socialized medicine, health care provided by government funding. The end results of socialized medicine have been less medicine at higher cost for different people than would have gotten it at the lower, private cost. We can see what free market, unregulated health care provides, we can see what government health care provides, and the only reason the latter is okay is that the virus is so limited in scope that very few are afflicted by it.

3.1 SCALE

Before we reject concern over Corona based on the small numbers, I'll point out that this is a contagious disease, so one case can become two, then four, then eight, and in a few weeks 8589934592 people will get the disease. Mitigating that exponential growth is that there aren't that many people, many people won't get infected, and many exposed people will neither get sick nor infect others.

This is nothing to sneeze at. It's not silly to think that today's 30000 cases in the United States could expand to a million and 1000 deaths could expand to 30000. Infectious disease is no joke as 30 million get the flu each year and 35 thousand die of that here in the United States.

About ten million people die of cancer each year, 600 thousand here in the United States. On a more-similar scale, about 50 thousand die in automobile accidents in the U.S.A. and one-fifth of those are due to drunk drivers. Of course, none of these visits from the grim reaper is contagious as an infectious disease.

The horrible, scary influenza of 1918 killed three percent of the world population. Corona does not spread much more than flu, but in its current state, with no vaccine available, it kills about ten times as often for those infected.

3.2 THREAT

So maybe 300 thousand Americans will get this Corona virus, maybe there won't be a vaccine for a while, and one percent of those won't survive the experience, most old, breathing-addled people like myself. That's three thousand deaths, enough to make me worry a bit. Of course, Corona is being compared to the 1918 flu that killed a great deal more.

So we're canceling anything that gets people together like concerts and events, we're scaring people into staying home, and maybe we're getting some of them actually to wash their hands.

Nobody is asking the question of why similar measures weren't taken for SARS, West Nile, or swine flu. The swine flu killed 18 thousand worldwide and 12 thousand here in the U.S.A. Of course, it wasn't an election year where the news media weren't trying terribly hard to unseat the current government and to replace it with a much larger government with a lot more control over us. In case you have a moment of belief that our liberal faction wants to do what's right, note that the Democrats in Congress added support for illegal immigrants, Planned Parenthood, the Kennedy Center (who promptly donated money to the Democratic Party), windmills, and solar energy to the bill for Corona relief.

Look, I've been in areas where polio is still out there along with Dengue Fever and Cholera, a few hours drive from the Kisangani-Bukavu road in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I stayed at the Chobe Lodge along the beautiful banks of the Nile River where I was advised not to run along the lovely dirt road because there were things on that road that would eat me. The riverside walk had blue banners sticky with insecticide for tsetse flies. Yes, there's stuff out there that kills people. One hundred million people are going to die in the next year. It's not because somebody's political views are mean.

4 DAMAGE DONE

All these projections in the United States were based on 600 deaths, compared to annual deaths of about 35 thousand from flu and 10500 from drunk drivers. We're projecting big numbers from these tiny numbers, kind of like the same scientific community in 1998 telling us that there would be no more cold winters. “Forecasting is hard, especially about the future.”

Meanwhile, what is the real damage done? Our economy, at least for the time being, is down so far that it's about as bad as it was in 2016 when President Trump took office. I think it will rebound, but it will take time and there will be pain.

There are tens of millions of people in the United States who have made their livelihood out and about in various service positions. These people are waiters and actors and retail-store employees and musicians and dancers and bartenders and drivers and theater ushers and so on. While people in computer services post cute notices about how tough it is to stay home and watch Netflix, these people are wondering how much longer they'll have homes they can afford to pay for now that they can't go to work. I have no idea how many factories have had to close. Government bailouts aren't the answer, then other middle-class people will be taxed to pay for it. There aren't enough rich people to pay these bills and these are the very-same rich people who would otherwise be investing in factories and enterprises that pay the people who made our pre-Corona lives so pleasant.

So we have a disease we were guessing will kill 500 times as many people as it already had. Let me give an example from my own retail-science business. A big-screen TV for $399 sees a 50% increase in sales when we lower the price to $389 and another 50% increase going down to $379. That exponential growth predicts selling 60 times as many TVs for $299 and 3300 times as many for $199. We know enough to be skeptical of such increases at lower prices calculated from a few data points at higher prices. We know that exponential growth has limits and we don't always have a good grip what those limits are. Shouldn't we be similarly-doubtful about exponential-growth predictions based on a few increasing small numbers? (A few days after I wrote that, I'm seeing Andrew Mather's video or his pages with real WHO data pointing out that China, Italy, and Norway are already leveling off quite a bit short of the 500-fold forecast increase.)

We have certain massive economic losses in a sector of the economy I care deeply about. I have many friends who used to be in the service area and I have friends who own small shops that cannot pay either their rent or their employees. These certain huge losses should be weighed against the extrapolations and they should be weighed with concern, compassion, and skepticism, far more than we're doing. I would feel fine doing what we're doing with Ebola and its proven massive-death historical track record.

5 THE EMPEROR IS NAKED!

I've been around for a lot of pseudo-science. I caught the tail end of eugenics, the impending ice age, acid rain, Mercury in the tuna fish, the ozone layer, global warming, and climate change. Twenty-two years since the last global-warming year, I was accosted at Princeton's Alumni Day by a sweet young student imploring me to cut off my donations to Princeton until they divested their fossil-fuel investments.

This was twice ironic. First, my class did the same thing about Apartheid in South Africa, Apartheid went away, and it was replaced with tyranny and corruption so bad that Apartheid is now the “Good Old Days” in South Africa for people of all colors. Second, while at least my classmates were alive during Apartheid in South Africa, this young woman was born several years after the last year significantly warmer than the year before.

All these years I find myself screaming, “It's not true! It's not true! It's all a lie!” In 1939 there were no invading Martians nor was there a need for a master race, no matter how many people believed it. Am I the only one who believes the moon landing was real and pro wrestling is fake?

Now two in a million die of a disease while a hundred times that many die of a similar disease (flu) and we're in a panic. Based on a 500-fold extrapolation we threw away most of the joy in our lives, about one-tenth of our ability to produce wealth, and the livelihoods of one-tenth of our population.

6 DISEASE THREATS

In order of increasing threat, let's look at the diseases in play here.

COVID-19, Corona virus, has claimed somewhere around 44000 worldwide, one in 160 thousand, 4000 here in the United States, one in 76 thousand.

Flu claims about one in 9000 every year.

The worst Corona projections are about five times worse than flu, maybe 180 thousand in the United States, one in two thousand.

Poverty from being out of work takes a terrible toll of life, liberty, and livelihood. I have no scientific estimate of the death rates from non-Corona deaths from the loss of income for one-tenth of America, but it's real and it's terrible.

Big-government socialism has killed 100 million people in the past century, about two percent of all deaths from all causes. Making government bigger to deal with a perceived Corona threat prediction creates a real, live, here-today threat. (What idiot thought taxing people two trillion dollars, mostly from people in need, giving one-third of that to people possibly in need, and giving the rest to rich friends of those in government was a good idea?)

7 THE VILLAINS

So who are the villains here? Who are the bad people in this scenario. Now we know we grotesquely expanded government and trashed ten percent of our economy and seriously damaged the lives of ten percent of our population here in the States, some 30 million people, for something that wasn't a threat. The data from China, Norway, and Italy are showing them going over the hump with numbers quite a bit smaller than flu. Corona virus isn't the threat we were told it is and it never was, but we paid a terrible social and economic price. Whose fault is that?

There were people who thought they knew more than we did and who we thought knew more than we did telling us to be afraid when we looked at the small numbers of Corona virus compared to flu. They were wrong, we believed them, and we messed things up badly.

The people who were genuinely afraid aren't the bad people here. Besides the obvious fact that we all have the choice to stay home with lots of soap and cleaner and disinfectant, that choice has never been easier to make. We have all kinds of entertainment and communication media and delivery systems so we can be happy and healthy at home. (I have computers and Internet and a wonderful hifi with 4000 vinyl records and 700 tapes to listen to. I won't be lonely or bored at home and I'm finally getting eight hours sleep a night.) We all can learn something about hygiene and social distance and the spread of flu is a good reason to do that anyway.

The bad people are the people who forced this upon us, the people who forcibly closed our stores and restaurants and concert halls, the people who found a way to violate our right of assembly to pander to panic about pandemic. They knew that Corona was another evil-looking disease and they knew studies depending on extrapolating exponential models by a factor of 500 didn't make sense. Maybe they were the intellectual followers of earlier pseudo-science finally getting power over us, or maybe they were from a completely different sector. In any case, they messed up, they messed up badly, and if there were a way to extract the economic loss from them to pay the people who suffered, then I would be happy to help make that happen.