I Hate To Say I Told You So

On March 11th I published a thought piece telling people to stop telling me to calm the fuck down about COVID-19, and largely I was ignored. I kept getting told to calm down, that it wasn't that bad. Now there are over 200,000 people dead and over 3 million cases globally. Nearly a third of those are in the United States cases and a quarter of those deaths are in the United States. Why? Because you chuckle-heads thought that this was some liberal hoax, spun up by the main stream media?

The amount of ineptitude being displayed by Americans at this moment is both incredibly disheartening and also incredibly cruel. There have been protests around the country that people don't want to shelter in place anymore. In interviews held with these people, who are despite saying that the virus isn't real, and that Jesus will protect them, are still decked out in full PPE, which could be used by hospital workers, they wave guns in the air and say things like "my body my choice."

Cool, so when you want to go outside, and effectively murder 3-7% of your loved ones, then it's your body, your choice, but when I want to make decisions about my own reproductive health, everyone has the right to legislate me? Got it. These morons go parading around in nearly half the country and put so many people at risk, they need to be tried for murder. Anyone forcing people to go back to work right now needs to be tried for murder. Looking at you Georgia.

In about 11 days we are going to see a dramatic uptick in the death toll. You know how I know that? Because I have read a god damn history book. Because when I discovered how truly devastated the American Education System is I took it upon myself to find peer-reviewed, science to further my education on my own. You can buy dictionaries of medical and scientific terms so that you can decode the mumbo-jumbo in those peer reviewed papers, did you know that? Well you do now. And in no time at all, I had a nice healthy pile of non-fiction ranging all over the place in topics. And then, when I was in my early twenties, I discovered intersectionality and started reading history books NOT written by white men. Whooo! What an eye opener that was!

Did you know that we have done this whole song and dance before? Global pandemic, millions dead, been there done that, got the t-shirt. When? 1918, with Spanish Influenza. People got sick, up to 20,000 people dying per week in some places, and then once it started to decline, people started to whine about being kept in their homes. They started to say that no one had the right to tell them what to do, and you know what happened? The second wave was so much worse. Over 60,000 people dead, a week.

Imagine, 60,000 dead. In less than half a year you would have more people dead than the entirety of the Vietnam War. The R0 for Spanish Influenza is 0.9-2.1. The suspected R0 of COVID-19 which was originally though to be about 0.5 is now thought to be closer to 5.8.

Now because I know a lot of people are probably asking what the fuck R0 is. let me tell you. R0 or R-naught is a what we use to indicate how contagious an infectious disease is. Meaning, as the virus gets passed from one person to another, it reproduces itself and gets other people sick right? We know that, we know how germs work. The R0, tells you the average number of people who will get sick from coming in contact with one person who is already infected.

So let's say you're one of these wonder-children marching in the streets of Michigan, and you're sick but you don't know it yet. You come in contact with 10 people, you have made 5 or 6 of them sick. But then now they have the virus and they come in contact with 50 people each, and so on and so forth, before you know it, not just the people at your idiotic rally are sick, but people that stayed home, that maybe bought something from one of these COVIDiots, or had something delivered by one of them.

By simple, careless action, we kill the world. We drive ourselves to the point of extinction through lack of foresight into what this means for the people we interact with. To shed some comparison, Primary Pneumonic Plague has an R0 of 2.8-3.5.

I know that staying home sucks, I know that it is pointing out all the really horrible things that you would rather not know about, like how you and your partner don't get along anymore, and how what you thought might be just some bad moods, is actually abuse, and how not ready you were to be a home school teacher, or a parent, or whatever. I know that tempers are short and days are long, and I know that this sucks. But it's either suck it up, or kill the people you love.

It's that simple. You stay home as long as you possibly can, or you murder.