COVID-19 is well and truly here. It's not hype, it's not fake and it is not -- as I have pointed out before -- a weapon or a crowd-control tool. It's too uncontainable.
If you live in a major city, it's already there. And spreading out.
If you're getting your coronavirus "news" from a gray-to-black propaganda site, like "Zero Hedge"* or a nutjob conspiracy site shilling dodgy products like "Natural News," stop taking them seriously. They're clueless and serving other interests. They're not out to help.
Get real information. Johns Hopkins has a good dashboard that includes an interactive map and the Feds have an extensive set of pages run by the CDC. These are factual sources.
We don't know how bad this thing might get. The only way through it is forward and the best way forward is not to spread panic or invidious rumor. This is the kind of health issue our parents or grandparents or, for some of you, great-grandparents lived through and feared before antibiotics and the widespread availability of vaccines. They got through them. Society got through them. We can, too.
_____________________________
* Almost certainly a Russian government operation intended to sow chaos. Anything you read there is not to be trusted; if they gave the sunrise time at my location, I'd wonder what was in it for them and go check another source.
A coupe of notes on that Johns Hopkins dashboard:
ReplyDeleteThe map works better (for me!) in Internet Explorer -- still the standard in The Salt Mines! -- or in Firefox than in Chrome.
If you click on the "Get Daily SitReps" link you can sign up not only for daily updates about COVID-19, but also other items of interest from an Emergency Management/Preparedness angle. It took me several tries to complete a subscription, not sure whether their system didn't like my work email address, my network connection, or their system was simply overwhelmed.
'Twill be what it will be. Harder to pin down real numbers than it is to catch a greased pig at a bacon festival.
ReplyDeleteNo matter what. it gives every appearance of being serious and deadly. That alone is enough to cause an older school teacher like me to lose sleep. Even if it's a fizzle, the economic fallout is already locked into being a possibly bigger issue.
The economic end is really all I can honestly deal with. The medical side... I've got too many friends in that industry to harbor illusions.
At this point, I'm ready for some weeks of dedicated non-social behavior. Whether my for-profit school employer agrees, that I doubt greatly.
Happily going turtle, and waiting to see (with as much social distancing as I can achieve).
I'm an ecologist by training, so I know exponential growth models. It will suck mightily for a number of weeks IF we do the social distancing thing and practice good hygiene. If we don't, it will suck mightily for many months, and far more vulnerable people will die. We are in very early days here. We may or may not have started shutting public events down in time.
ReplyDeleteI am assuming I am the only person who can protect myself at this point (which is probably a pretty solid assumption ANY time) and so I am locking down and holing up and avoiding as many public situations as possible. My spring break this year will be spent in my sewing room. I don't LIKE it but I suspect I would like less being told "Well, ideally you'd need a ventilator to beat this disease, but there are currently none available."
I just hope that after the eight to ten weeks of extreme suckage, things will slowly get better. I hope we were not too late on this, and that there aren't too many people who don't take this seriously.