My county is has 15 confirmed cases of COVID-19. Testing is still very limited in Oregon and we are in a partial lock down. Some optimization if we follow the guidelines may not overrun our capacity of hospital beds. This will go on for several weeks and every few days there area a few more restrictive orders.
I like science. It is so much more interesting than politics and so very much less predictable. COVID-19 is A (one of many) variation on Coronaviruses. Would you like to understand why we know the following with absolute certainty? While we cannot predict the properties of new variants we know new variants will develop in the future!
Last year, the Dept. of Health and Human Services ran a 7 month long exercise code named "Crimson Contagion," a dry run response to a global pandemic which started in China and expected more than 100 million Americans to become ill.
The simulation highlighted several failures in our preparedness for such a catastrophe.
The world as you know it ends today. Usually we experience this in small unrelated episodes unnoticed by the rest of the world. The car accident, job loss, debilitating injury, cancer diagnosis, fatal infectious diseases, now living with a chronic physical or mental disease and loss of a loved one are endured in silence.
Coronavirus is different. It is a collective worldwide event. We are experiencing the COVID-19 event even if not infected with the virus. The fear, the closing down of communities, the actual infection and the recovery is being played out in each nation. The resilience of each country's government and their population is open for the whole world to observe.
We're all dealing with coronavirus, and so this piece is important:
Please, everyone, be prepared for a total lock down in the next few days. It should last two weeks.
Two good articles by James Howard Kunstler this week:
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/black-swans-dead-cats-live-bats-...
Black Swans, Dead Cats, Live Bats, and Goodbye to All That
JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER - March 13, 2020
Spread this information far and wide.
Around the time of the 2016 election it became popular to revive the word "fascism." Trump was a fascist, we were told. No, I argued, Trump isn't a fascist. A fascist would disdain democracy; Trump is bad, but he's not quite there yet, and besides, "fascism" is a word belonging to an earlier period of history, a period of expanding capitalism. Our period is one of declining capitalism.
Welcome and good day. It has been a fast few weeks. I hope you and yours are well and have had time to make some preparations for staying in place if necessary. The necessary part has become more real as we have seen how fast this virus can move in our communities. This is not an abstract event in other countries seen on TV or our web devices.
Dr. Amy Acton, Director of Ohio Department of Health, discussing community spread in Ohio. Do the math for your local area.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUyGfDJ76g&feature=youtu.be]
