As with any crisis, there are winners, whiners, losers and delighters. Much of my day job is crisis management. You can guarantee that during a crisis, dozens of little hatchlings gather around the cube of the most ill-informed individual in the organization and begin drawing wildly far-fetched conclusions. My job is to look at the entire picture and not just the latest event. I always look at the how, and the why, so I can ensure that any decisions made are the correct decisions based on accurate data, and not kneejerk reactions that can crash a system.
Current events are a perfect example of the problems I deal with on a daily basis. We have a reporting community that thrives on chaos. Their goal is not to provide clarity. To be clear, it’s not to cause confusion either. It’s to do neither. Their goal is to make money. The only way to do that is to have their readers and viewers riled up enough to review their content. They are doing exactly what they are designed to do. It’s up to the reader to determine if the information they are providing is helpful.
The President, the only other loud voice in the room has an agenda as well. His agenda is to get re-elected, and to keep the market booming. He has failed on the latter and will likely win on the former. For him it’s not about solving problems but about optics. He wants to look like he is the leader of the boat. He is the perfect example of someone who says “Where are my people going? I must find out so I can lead them?”
So, with all that I’m going to dig into the numbers to provide some facts around all the noise. Before I get into the three countries that are making it into the news, let me start by showing the numbers for the world. See below:
According to this there have been 15,418 deaths world-wide with almost 1/3rd recovered in a population of 7.8 billion souls. But rather than getting into the fact that more people die in the US in one year from heart disease (640,000) than are sick world-wide, let’s work through the individual country numbers. In the end, that’s where the information lies.
China (GINA for you Republicans)
China is recognized by EVERY…SINGLE…EPIDEMOLOGIST as the epicenter of this disease. In fact, it has been the epicenter of every Coronavirus ever including SARS, and MERS. No amount of liberal attempts to distort that fact are going to change its existence. The idea that Trump uses it to shore up his base is just a feature. However, the unbelievable poor health standards of public markets in China gave us a disease that crossed species and invaded human populations. Again, nothing the conservatives say is going to change the fact that humans are just animals.
So, let’s look at the numbers for China:
So what do the numbers mean? First of all Wuhan China was the epicenter of the pandemic. The Chinese government was incredibly slow to react and did their level best to downplay any health threat. This meant that in the land of a 1.39 billion people, the virus spread. That’s right, 81,093 out of 1,039,000,000 people have contracted the virus in China today. So, what’s the threat to the general population in China? Not much according to the numbers. The country has very poor health systems and can’t really respond to a crisis like this especially in the smaller provinces. Still, if you take the population of China 1.39 Billion and divide it by the number of deaths of infected then your risk of contracting the disease is .008% today. If you get the disease then your chances of dying are very low if you are healthy, and slightly higher if you are not. On average the percentage is 3270/81093×100 = 4%. That’s not huge, but I’d still rather be here than there. That’s 4% with a miserable health system.
It is also important to note that the total cases in China have flattened and they now have fewer new cases than there are people getting well. In fact the daily new cases have gone down dramatically. It’s also important to note that this happened in two months with February 13th being the worst day. The number of active cases has taken a dramatic dip since the height of the disease in China.
China is a good example of what happens when you don’t wash your hands and you have zero health standards in the food industry. On the upside, they will put you to death in China if you lie about company profit, so at least there’s that.
Italy
Italy is an entirely different scenario than China when it comes to viruses. They currently have 63,927 cases 6077 deaths and 7,432 recovered. So why so many deaths in Italy? It turns out that most of the people in Italy are by far older than most other countries, and the majority of deaths are patients in their 80s and 90s. Also, the country is culturally different in that the young interact a lot more with the elderly than they do in other parts of the world. So, when most people kick their kids out of the house when they are 18, in Italy, junior is hanging out with grandma until he’s well into his 40s. I have no doubt that when the younger kids got sick their grandparents and parents helped care for them and then died for the effort.
United States
OK folks, let’s look at the United States where folks who have a raspatory threat go out and buy massive amounts of paper towels and toilet paper. That’s like buying a pool cue to go snow skiing, but who am I to judge? Anyway currently in the United States there are 43,449 total reported cases of Covid-19, 545 deaths and 295 people have recovered. That’s a death rate of around 1.3% for those infected. Your chances of actually getting the disease are .01%. To be clear we are on the upswing of cases. Still, the percentages are greatly lower during the same timeframe as Italy and China. Why is that? Well, we have better healthcare for one, and we got a nice leg up on warning. In fact we should have been much better off had the government done more earlier. During the Obama Administration we had H1N1 and the response was nothing like the ridiculousness we are seeing today. Still, the the world is still not coming to an end.
The graph below shows the upswing we are in right now. If we follow the trend of South Korea, which is very likely we will reach the peak in another week and things will start to trend downward.
Now, for fun let’s look at the number of flu cases in the United States last year. For 2019.
There were 13,000,000 flu cases and 900,000 hospitalizations. Of those 80,000 died, 180 Children. The flu also doesn’t really care much if you are young or old, however, having multiple comorbitities can pose a problem. Now if you are paying attention there were more flu cases in the U.S. last year than Covid-19 cases world wide. In fact, THERE WERE 34 TIMES MORE FLU CASES IN THE US LAST YEAR THAN COVID CASES WORLDWIDE!
So, why all the hubbub? Who knows? There are many factors if you think about it. If I were a man subject to conspiracy I’d say the biggest reason is profit. It turns out that several prominent politicians divested themselves in hotels and other companies that were going to be hurt by the an economic crash caused by this disease and invested heavily in healthcare companies supporting the health efforts. In addition, the bail out packages by Republicans is in the billions for businesses, and a few hundred or a thousand for individuals. You can bet if politicians gamed the system, so did a few millionaires and all the billionaires. That could be part of it. However, I think the following is more likely:
The U.S. government did not create this crisis. Trump had no part in it, nor did any of his cabinet. However, Trump and his clan are certainly capitalizing on it. So are all the news organizations. Everyone is making a ton of money off of this and they’re not going to stop until they have drained the last nickel out of this crisis. In fact it is so obvious that I will predict now that Trump will be re-elected in 2020 by a complete landslide. Why? When’s the last time you saw something about the Democratic candidates in the news? Two weeks ago, they were all the rage. Now it’s Trump, Trump, Trump, and Covid, Covid, Covid. If you ask me, he’s made the perfect play. Have all his decisions been correct? Nope, but he’s got his face out in front, and he did a pretty good job of determining where his people were going, and started leading them.
This disease won’t kill many of us, but another eight years of shit for brains certainly will. Now…go wash your fucking hands, and quit whining like a little bitch.
Rex
Flu data provided by CDC.org. All other information from worldometer.info/coronavirus