Author: No Name

I’m pretty sure the collective group of liberals have lost their ever lovin’ minds. Don’t get me wrong, I have considered myself a liberal for years because I felt that liberals were educated, logical beings who considered their positions beyond the end of their nose.  Maybe now I have to rethink that position.  I always thought that liberals looked at a problem, did as much research as they could, and then through logical and unbiased non-emotional analysis reviewed that information and made a decision.  In no way did I think they would fly off the handle, have knee jerk reactions to hyperbole, and basically put their hands over their eyes and ears before putting their head in the sand so they didn’t have to listen to anything that didn’t fit into their pre-determined political agenda.  But here they are…killin it!

When COVID-19 first hit the U.S. shores it was pretty clear that the Republicans and the President weren’t too worried about it.  Should they have been?  Duh.  It’s obvious to anyone with a second-grade education and a heartbeat that had things been done sooner, this wouldn’t be the cluster fuck it is today.  But is it as big a cluster as the liberals want it to be?  Not really.

Don’t get me wrong, no one wants to get sick and no one certainly wants to see grandma die a week earlier than she needs to but come on, it’s not like this disease is going to end all life as we know it.  That’s reserved for this massively ridiculous reaction to it.  Look below here for some simple facts from the CDC:

The following was a study of a cohort (look up the word) of 44,000 patients who had the disease.  Given that someone from China currently has a .008% chance of getting sick, the chances of you dying from Covid if you live in China are statistically insignificant.  So…if by chance you even get sick here’s how the condition plays out:

• Mild to moderate (mild symptoms up to mild pneumonia): 81%
• Severe (dyspnea, hypoxia, or >50% lung involvement on imaging): 14%
• Critical (respiratory failure, shock, or multiorgan system dysfunction): 5%

So…if you happen to get exposed (very unlikely…even your chances in the US are actually less than .3%), and you happen to get sick (again, low percentage if you are healthy), you have a 5% chance of being critical.  If you become critical…guess what…you still only have a 2.8% chance of dying and that’s only if you’ve been smoking all your life, have a constant diet of twinkies, or already have one foot in the grave.  Still, the news likes to find that one person who has had the disease with no pre-existing conditions.  They have to dig deep for those.  It’s rare.  However, I surmise that it is likely they have some underlying condition formerly undiagnosed.  However, the news never seems to report any findings AFTER the autopsy.  

Add all this to the fact that New York needed less than 6000 of the 30,000+ ventilators that they claimed they needed makes me think they doth protest too much.  No matter though.  Now they say they will need them because this will all come back with a vengeance unless they get more.  For those not privy to politics “we need to keep this crisis going until Trump is out of office.”

Democrats hate Donald Trump and, ask them, they would even crash an economy to ensure he is not re-elected.  The left has their base so afraid to leave the bathroom for fear of losing toilet paper that it’s likely none of them will vote in November anyway.  However, I have a theory that ALL the Democratic governors will open the flood gates come November just to get their base out to vote.  Then, if their guy loses, they will lock the gates back up and claim all over again that the world is ending and it’s Trump’s fault.  So really, the only way we’re getting out of this is if Biden wins.  If that’s not the case, we’ll be stuck inside until 2024.

In a CBS News report recently the Urban Institute found that because of this fiasco millions of Americans can’t afford food and rent.  They quote that “More than 4 in 10 of Americans whose work was affected by the pandemic said they weren’t able to pay the rent, mortgage or utility bills; skipped medical care, or were at risk of going hungry.”  It’s that last one that is the greatest risk to the country.  Even Trump and is second grade mentality is capable of knowing that little gem.  USA Today reports that Trump plans to order meat packing plants to stay open during this crisis.  He knows for sure he has to at least keep the base in red meat.

To further stress how this cluster has impacted the community and how remarkably silly and unproductive the lockdowns are, here are two physicians who practice today making the argument that what we need to do is open up the economy before things get much, much worse and use this time for us to build up a tolerance to the threat.  I mean really…having a partial lockdown is like having no lockdown at all.  This isn’t communist Russia, no matter how much Mitch McConnel wants it to be so. Two independent physician groups the ACEP with the AAEM put out a joint statement refuting the claims by the two physicians, however their claims are based largely on CDC data so not sure who they are disputing.

We need to get everyone to calm the fuck down.  Guess what, you might get sick.  Then again, it’s more likely that you will not.  However, if we keep up the current status it is guaranteed that more people will die from child abuse, spousal abuse, alcoholism, drug addiction, or whatever other iction they might have long before they ever even get exposed to a virus that, while can be deadly to the weakest among us, is really not as much of a threat as they’d like it to be.

Rex

I am officially done with this stay at home bullshit.  I live in a community that has one person for every square mile.  In New York there are 27000.  We’ve been sheltering in place since c1840.  Treating this place like its New York city is the most idiotic decision since New Coke.  Still, has my life changed much since this all happened?  Nope.  Do I fear I will catch some incurable disease and die over all this?  Nope.  Do I think there is a chance that I could be carrying something that might kill someone?  Yep.  And the reason I’m carrying it is because people have lost their fucking your minds!

If you don’t think this government is a cluster looking for a fuck, then you’re not paying attention.  At every turn they have made decisions that put lives in danger.  COVID-19 is one thing but shutting down a global economy to get people to take a bath is insanity. Not only that people who buy thousands of rolls of toilet paper, drink bleach and fishbowl cleaner to cure a disease, or who think that some fake billionaire daddy’s boy gives a flying fuck about them should be enabled to allow nature to take its course.

Crashing the economy is a friggin danger.  I know you left wing mamby-pamby breast feeding wannabes think that hiding under your parent’s couch is a good plan, so just cover your eyes and think of safe spaces on your college campus so no one can disagree with your warped, fake, fluffy unicorn world.  Go on princess…hide your eyes.  Mommy will be by to feed her little boy his bottle.  Jesus…no wonder we need gender neutral bathrooms.  You’re all wearing your hear in a bun so it’s impossible to tell which of you has the vagina.  

The danger we are in now is crashing an economy that runs a planet.  That’s right, WE run the planet.  We keep the majority of the world fed.  We keep the masses from turning into a group of armed, frustrated, uncontrolled, hangry wackos.  Think a zombie apocalypse isn’t possible?  Oh the fuck it isn’t.  You should see me if I miss an afternoon snack.  It’s a wonder I haven’t stabbed someone.  Keep me unfed for a couple of days and I’d become such a killing machine that World War Z would seem like a comedy.  There’d be more bodies on the deck than you could count, and I’m just one guy.  Add millions to that number and you’d have a mass riot that no military in the world could control.  Remember, we’re not Russia.  We are not China.  We’re the United States of America!   330 million pissed off wholey entitled assholes!  

I’m not kidding.  If you think this virus is the biggest danger to humanity, then you need to read up on some history.  Almost every revolution in this world was caused because people were poor, hungry and pissed the fuck off.  Just you wait.  If this shit lasts for another 18 months and millions of people are out of work, children are dying from mal nutrition, and families going hungry because they can’t buy food, then the virus that you so fear will massively pale in comparison to the utter destruction you will see when man begins to prey on man for no other reason than they need a simple meal. 

As we sequester ourselves in our homes, a lot of us are with our family and secretly plotting their death.  Being in close proximity to those you love can cause an enormous amount of stress in the best of times.  When you’re sitting there waiting for the next guy who didn’t wash his hands to come knocking at your door to infect you and your family, then nerves get a little on edge.  With me it’s a little different.  I love being with my wife, and our two dogs.  She is my lover and my best friend (you’re singing Rod Stewart right now…you’re welcome). 

The problem now is that we are not together.  Every year on Halloween weekend, my wife leaves me to go trick or treating with her grandkids and then sequesters herself to a beach condo in Ventura County California until Memorial Day.  That means that with all this craziness my wife and I are separated.  While everyone in the world is complaining about spending too much time with their family, I’m in the opposite boat.  I’m not spending enough time with mine.  My family is my wife, and our girls, and I miss my family.

I absolutely adore my wife.  I miss her dearly, and I want her to come here where it’s safer.  It’s really easy to benefit from social distancing in an area that has hundreds of square miles of wilderness area.  A city outside of L.A., not so much.  However, she’s a bit stubborn, and really hates snow, and the weather here was 32 degrees this morning.  So, listening to the sound of the waves, getting some Yolanda’s Mexican food, and chillin with her oldest grandson even if you can’t walk on the beach is more important to her than me and the cold. 

I guess what I’m saying is that if you are stuck in a house with your family, consider yourself lucky.  I’m over a thousand miles away, alone in a house with nothing more to keep me company than the sound of my own breathing.  I do love my alone time, but I always look forward to getting back to see my wife.  In the entire time we have been together I have never come home and wished she wasn’t there.  I have always taken for granted that she will want to go out and see a movie and eat popcorn, even if she’s stuffed to the gills with whatever we had for lunch or dinner. 

That’s why very shortly I will be taking a trip to California.  I need to see my wife.  I need to know she is OK, and I need to make sure she is safe, because in the end if she wasn’t there, I’m not sure I’d know what to do with myself. Obviously I wouldn’t be able to clean the kitchen right, mop the floors right, or well…do anything right.  I’d be lost.  I love you my girl.  In spite of you thinking I only want to be alone.  Well…you’re not wrong.  I do want to be alone.  I just want to be alone with you.

Rex

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 1/3^rd 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 13^th 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

It’s been about a week since everyone lost their ever lovin minds.  Things are starting to settle a little bit now and people are getting used to the “new normal.”  That’s an interesting term “new normal.”  What’s interesting is that people think this is all new, as if something changed.  Like when Trump got elected and every white person with a brain and a miniscule of integrity figured out that half the country was racist.  Nothing has changed one damn bit.  The only thing that’s changed is you now get to see how unbelievably selfish we all are.

I spent the first week of this enormous cluster fuck in Florida, visiting Kennedy Space Center, Disney World, and Universal.  Up until the Friday before they all announced they would close on Monday (I mean why kill the weekend), no one down there got the memo that anything was remotely wrong.  Life was pretty normal.  No one was wearing masks, people were just their normal, sweaty and rude selves.  When I got to the airport to come home I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it was just the normal travel Monday with a packed airport, and a packed plane.  The only eventful experience was that I was in first class with a reclincing seat and a foot rest for my four hour flight back to Denver.  Every flight should be like that!

When I landed in Denver it was no big deal either.  I had seven phone messages and 228 emails from my office from people who needed answers to various questions, or just trying to justify their jobs.  This was normal. Then when I did my 90 minute drive to Colorado Springs and stopped at the grocery store, that’s when I saw it.  Everyone had lost it!  The first thing I noticed was that every paper product, down to coffee filters was gone from the shelves.  There was no milk, bread, beef, or cheese either.  

What I determined from all this is that you all eat like shit!  It’s no wonder the country is so fucking fat!  I had my pick of fish, chicken, vegetables, and healthy choices were everywhere.  What was goine was all the sugary cereals, fatty foods, and processed EVERYTHING.  It made me wonder why any of you are worried about his invisible virus.  You’re all dying before you’re 60 anyway from heart disease, diabetes, and a host of other co-morbidities associated with poor food choices.  In fact I’m surprised any of you made it this long.

Oh, and what the hell did you people think before you started washing your hands?  Seriously…I need to know.  I myself have been in more than one men’s room and walked out of the restaurant when I saw the cook leave the bathroom after wiping his ass to go prepare food.  Did you not know that you needed to wash?  Is this something you just learned?  Did you spend all these years wondering why you had the shits?

The last thing I can say is that I am completely confused as to why, during a crisis, people think they need 17 cases of toilet paper and paper towels.  What is going on in your little brain that you think “hey…a crisis is coming…I may not be able to breath in a couple of weeks, I need some Charmin!  Seriously…I wouldn’t rely on any one of you in a crisis.  When the Titanic finally does go down, I’m launching the first lifeboat with my wife and just gonna sit by and wait until you idiots reorganize the deck chairs.

Rex