Amerika

Guys and gals, we have an ¡EMERGENCY! What is this ¡EMERGENCY!? A pandemic in the form of a respiratory virus on cattle steroids, known as Novel Coronavirus, Covid19, or maybe The Wuhan Wipeout. I was kidding about the whole Wuhan Wipeout thing. I’d sure hate to see The Thought Police get offended.

Whatever we call this thing, it is a problem. I mean the death rate of this sucker is ¡3.4%!

“While many people globally have built up immunity to seasonal flu strains, COVID-19 is a new virus to which no one has immunity. That means more people are susceptible to infection, and some will suffer severe disease. Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died. By comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 1% of those infected.” -WHO Director-General

So we can all run some arithmetic in MS Excel and panic! Take a rough swag at the US population; 328M isn’t too rough an over-exaggeration. Set an infection rate. (Hack in 0.034 if you want to scare up some $$$). Then run scenarios based on how much bad sci-fi and horror you’ve watched/read. I used an integer set of n+5 {5,10,15,20,25}.

Why n+5? Because this is like Climate Science. My job is to scare the crap out of people until they hand over their wallets. Think of it as the STEM version of the $PLC. Instead of Hatewatch, I’ll give you Germwatch. Call it the MAPA approach. Make Amerika Panic Again.

The only thing in the way of this opportunity for our elected swine to continue depriving us of our rights, and helping themselves to the UST, would be a set of facts on the ground.

Amerika is in surprisingly decent shape as far as handling a pandemic. Johns Hopkins University tells us the following.

The United States was ranked the best-prepared country in the world to handle a pandemic in late 2019 by the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (JHCHS) — an assessment seemingly at odds with claims by Democrats that the Trump administration left the country vulnerable to the ongoing coronavirus outbreak. The Global Health Security Index was was “developed with guidance from an international panel of experts from 13 countries, with research by the Economist Intelligence Unit” from 2018 to 2019, The Washington Post reported last year. “More than 100 researchers spent a year collecting and validating publicly available data.”

Assuming this is an accurate assessment, countries that score well will prove more resourceful, and should infect less completely and suffer fewer proportional fatalities. Countries that score more poorly, should infect higher proportions and suffer a higher Pk per infected individual. There is a difference, for example, between attending virtual church online from your remote location, and “lick the holy relics, you hateful, sinner dog!”

A fundamental difference in leadership decision-making should lead to an operational difference in results on the ground. In real life, The United States, Italy and Iran were each estimated to have differing levels of organization and ability in handling pandemic infectious diseases. Ordinal rankings are as follows from best to least capable: USSA, Italy, Iran. So how are things on the ground in each country? Realclearpolitics gives us some data from the field.

So given this information, we can rerun the OPS Research Doom tracker for each country in the Realclearpolitics Coronavirus data tracker.

Given the scenarios below, we can see that Covid19 could prove a bad, bad thing. However, we in the USSA can be relieved, if not proud, to be Amerikans. We will do better than the rest of the world, assuming all these death rates are constant over the entire course of epidemic. If we phase similar to the epidemic in Italy, we hit the downslope a few days before Easter and are on the clear side by the first of May. It’s all a question of keeping closer to that 5% scenario instead of the 25% ¡DOOM! run on the far right of my Excel simulator.

Tags: coronavirus, covid-19, epidemic, pandemic, panic