How Do I know It's A Pandemic?

     Because the COVID-19 heat map at Johns Hopkins has nearly one-to-one correspondence with population density, at least for the United States.

     Like most of my generation and subsequent ones, I grew up in a world of cureable (or at least treatable) disease.  Throughout my adult life, the planet has kept issuing little reminders that it's not a simple battle; we just got a big one.

     The models for coping with this look like the more-successful responses to the 1918 - 20 influenza pandemic, or London when they best coped with Plague.   We cannot stop it by sheer force of will.  There's no bluffing a blind, biological robot.

     And no matter what we do, this is going to hurt.

     We had good years, good generations.  My Dad and Mom grew up fearing polio but my sibs and I didn't; my nieces and nephews didn't.  We've all got the scar from our measles vaccination.  Antibiotics have been truly miraculous -- I would have succumbed to childhood rheumatic fever were it not for penicillin and later drugs.  It was a halcyon time and now it's over.

     We're back to the 1930s at best in dealing with this virus.   There's no magic bullet, not yet.