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Featured Editorials

Open Thread Friday 4-17-2020

When a big change in life occurs how should you feel? What should you do? How should you move forward? Since 1969 the path way many Americans use is the five DABDA stages (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance) described by Dr Kübler-Ross in her book On Death and Dying. It moved from the realm of end of life care and hospice into how to manage change in business and all aspects of major disruptive transitions in life.

For me Acceptance became not a stage to achieve, rather letting go of Denial, Fear, Anger and Depression to let in rational thought. Life may not be what I want, it does become easier to live, make changes and move into the directions I desire.

Over time the five stages have morphed into 7 steps on a Change Curve
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0bO3o4iZHY]

What will happen if we reopen for business?

The following calculations are rough and do not use any fancy epidemiological equations. The poor availability of testing and flaky reporting of outcomes make it difficult to know exactly what the numbers are.

According to Johns Hopkins on April 16, 2020:

Case fatality rate 4.5%
Confirmed cases 636,350
Deaths 28,326
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/cumulative-cases

What's Goin' On?

Stanford's John Ioannidis, who really knows his stuff, has released a preprint of an article that analyses mortality rates of Covid-19 in folks > 80 years of age versus folks < 65 years of age. I found the preprint because it was referenced from a site that BlueRepublic had linked to in his COVID-19 Deep Dive - Swiss Propaganda Research essay.

America doesn't have a functioning democracy

I'd like to focus on something other than the Democratic Party's sham primary. The reason is this: though it takes a leader to lead a movement, the movement is--must be--independent of the leader. People projected onto Bernie a genuine hope that he could change the Democratic Party, either by taking it over or at least pulling it further left, and that by so doing America's political landscape itself would be improved.

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