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Understanding this disease is kind of personal to me.  While you guys were grieving over not getting to go to Copia I was going to my brother’s funeral.  It got him.
The above graph shows less hospitalizations now than 2 years ago.  I think that translates into less deaths.  I think that is not true in most of the world.  I think that is because we are doing it better.

Magicpaddler wrote on Apr 17^th, 2020 at 12:01am:


  Thanks for sharing that MP. I think as you do.
We are doing better and have come a long way considering how we were working on very flawed information.

This thread is like finding unexploded ordinance.  I think I'll just tiptoe away... 

  We have about 330.5 million people in the US.
So far we've had about 36,000 COVID-19 deaths.

  With a larger population, you're always going to have larger mortality rates for almost every illness.

  I understand the frustration with getting enough fast tests for 330 MILLION people, but people need to understand what it takes to get that done.

  Before I retired I worked for a company that was the #1 vehicle sunroof Mfg in the world. They had facilities all around the world. We supplied sunroof for ALL the American mfg and MOST of the foreign ones too.

  I worked in the Auburn Hills MI plant. It was built to produce 200,000 units a year. When I retired in 2015 we were running 1,000.000 units! That staggering number made us #1 in the world for sunroofs.

  They did that by running 3-8 hr shifts 24/7. Even then we could barely meet the demand.

  One of our biggest problems was running out of parts to keep that pace. Unless you make EVERYTHING in house, your vendors have to be able to run 24/7 to keep up with you. We had multiple vendors and we still had a warehouse full of sunroof we couldn't ship because they lacked parts.

  It's the same for most of those PP items. You might be able to make masks/sew enough if you run 24/7 but the suppliers of the raw materials HAVE to be able to keep up.

Those tests are the same way. You just don't build the supply chains necessary for building 330 Million tests in weeks, maybe even not in a few months.

I personally think they shouldn't have shut down the economy. They should have put the resources into protecting the most vulnerable and self-quarantining them.
  Then using social distancing guidelines, masks/gloves and handwashing allowed people in the LEAST at-risk categories to continue to work IF they felt comfortable doing so. If not they would go on unemployment.

  We could have run the economy on "idle" which would better than a HARD stop.
  Life is about choices and what risks your WILLING to accept. If I was still working, I would be going to work IF they let me. I would do all I could to protect myself as I do on a solo canoe trip, but I would work.

  My PERSONAL feelings are that at my age 71, I've live most of my life. I have no desire to die anytime soon but I rather take a little more risk rather than see younger people with families and the responsibilities that burden puts on them, lose EVERYTHING they worked so hard to have because of a virus that for MOST of them isn't going to be fatal.

That's my personal view. I'm sure others will have far different views but that's their right too.

  This is an interesting article. I think when this pandemic is history there are going to be a lot of assumptions that some very smart people made proven to have been wrong or way overblown.

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  Oh, one more thing. CHINA needs to pay for this BIG time, one way or the other.

Magicpaddler wrote on Apr 17^th, 2020 at 6:57pm:


FWIW, I'm fairly certain the US and SK had their first cases a day or two apart at most and CV is not the flu.