Since there's quite a bit of confusion, even here, I wanted to consolidate some existing covid-19 material on Hubski, and add some more. I might do this every few weeks or every month-ish. Other people are also encouraged to make round-up posts, of course. I'm sorry that this content has to be political, it's not my fault.
3Blue1Brown just put out a very nice video discussing the mathematics of epidemics, which resembles an exponential during the early phase of explosive growth:
He nails it with his last spoken sentence: "But if there's no one worried, that's when you should worry". It is my belief that we aren't yet collectively worried enough here in the 'States, as we haven't seen concern translated into taking the actions required to face this disease, both personal and political. In a large hunk of the general public, there seems to be almost a grave misunderstanding of what we need to be doing. I think we need to be taking drastic action at a federal level if we are to even begin this process of "flattening the curve", i.e. hastening the "inflection point" in the transition from an exponential to a logistic curve. I can see that China appears to have reached an inflection point in their covid-19 spread 1 month ago, as seen in the data from this Covid-19 map, but it took a large-scale and very invasive government response. Here's a related concept, showing why it's important to minimize and slow covid-19's growth while we develop a vaccine: Yes, wasoxygen, containment was likely impossible, which of course contradicts relatively recent claims from the Trump administration. My own father has more or less dismissed covid as media hype, and is upset that my mother has insisted on canceling (this is the weirdest part) two cruises they had scheduled for this year. Somehow, this man has whittled his information sphere into somewhere that taking not one, but two cruises this year is a good idea. I think there's about a 100% chance that the ships never sail. Clearly, at a personal level, large swaths of the public can't be trusted yet to even ATTEMPT to behave in any significantly risk-adverse behavior. Community-scale stuff and businesses telling employees to work from home is all fine and dandy, but ideally, we need an essentially endless supply of test kits distributed everywhere in the United States. Well over a month ago, experts had begun recommending that the United States majorly ramp up covid-19 testing capabilities. Because of the complexity and cost of this, it should probably happen at the federal level. Obviously, the Trump administration hasn't and isn't ramping test production up fast enough. It's plain that Trump calls all the shots, but he doesn't understand a goddamn thing about pretty much any of the requisite source material here, and usually manages to gag those in the government who do. Seems like half of America now gets most info from F-book.com, and welp, we know how that's going: According to accounts from several social media platforms, the State Department has been reluctant to share evidence of disinformation, making it difficult for Americans to know what to look out for. As the novel coronavirus outbreak has grown in recent weeks, the State Department has informed the press of conspiracy theories about the outbreak that are being spread on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Many of the accounts spreading these theories appear to be from Russia, the State Department says. Strange. And just to spam this in one more place, yes, the Trump administration fired the pandemic response team a couple years back. We can argue CDC, NIH, or whatever funding, but it doesn't much matter if you've fired some experts and then ignore and contradict the ones you haven't, using a buffer of loyalists headed by the VP between federal scientists and the public. ========= Trump's To-Do List: (in my fantasies) 0. Changing the rhetoric and educating the public, which includes telling America that some models are currently predicting several hundred thousand American fatalities from covid-19: Here, you can model covid-19 spread with your own parameters. 1. Working towards testing literally everyone as often as we can possibly afford to. 2. Building new emergency hospitalization facilities. 3. Beginning negotiations to contract and train shittons of people how to be nurses or even doctors at these facilities. 4. Federally subsidizing immediate mass production of medical supplies, and then maybe we'll avoid more price gouging from idiots depleting equipment (although this is the first time I'm almost OK with gouging, if it's primarily idiots being gouged). ========= Some version of all of those things already undeniably needs to be done. If hospital facilities are already commonly near capacity each influenza season (they are), the numbers say we need, like, ten times as many facilities. Note: that does NOT mean 10x as many hospitals as we have currently, because most hospitals do many other things besides care for influenza patients. But still, arranging for State Department officials are claiming that disinformation related to the coronavirus — including some pushed by Russia — is rampant across popular social media platforms. But the government seems cagey about reporting the details to the companies involved.
The above paragraph is facts. After that, then we can debate exactly how stupid a payroll tax cut is when it's the elderly and retired who will overwhelmingly be most impacted by covid-19. Trump has been thinking about short-term economic stimulus plans (almost 100% assuredly to help his re-election chances) instead of taking sufficient steps to slow covid. Every day is precious. "Precious" in a comedic and farcical sense, too. Today was "I'm self-quarantining, but everything's absolutely fine" day. Who knows what tomorrow will hold.
Know that things will get worse, but don't panic. Educate yourself and others, and practice better hygiene than normal. Call your representatives.