We're not ready

[John Clark]

Only 1.9% of the people who got the 1918 flu died of it,  but so many got sick it ended up killing 675,000 people in the USA alone and 35 million worldwide. Because it's so new the death rate for the Corvid 19 virus is more uncertain but it's estimated to be between 2% and 6%, and it shows a disturbingly long incubation period during which a person is infectious but displays no obvious symptoms of being ill; it can be diagnosed with DNA detection kits but those are in extremely short supply. Administering large amounts of Corvid-19 antibodies would almost certainly cut the death rate considerably but you'd need massive amounts of it and, like DNA detection kits, we no longer have the infrastructure to rapidly mass produce it.

Obama created a pandemic czar to deal with just this sort of thing and to coordinate the activities of the various federal agencies, but in the spring of 2018 the pandemic czar position was eliminated and the entire chain of command was fired, and the disease fighting budgets of the Centers for Disease Control, the National Safety Council, the Department of Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services was cut by 15 billion dollars. The infrastructure can be rebuilt but that takes not just money but also time, and that is time we may not have. In 2017 Bill Gates told national security advisor H.R. McMaster that cutting the disease fighting budgets of federal agencies would "significantly increase the probability of a large and lethal modern-day pandemic occurring in our lifetimes". Maybe Corvid-19 will just peter out but I wouldn't count on it, it's looking increasingly likely that Mr. Gates was right. We're not ready.

John K Clark

[Lawrence Crowell]

Never fear, t'Rump put Pence in front of this. Pence, a member of the "Brotherhood" who want to restore theocracy, will pray a lot.

When it comes to science Republicans get everything wrong. Then to make things worse they often have pseudoscience and ideas that "just ain't so," that passes for what they think is science. 

The Covid-19 appears to have a lethality of 2.3% of those who contract this infection. The rate of infectivity is unknown. So with this epidemic we might get a situation similar to the 1918 flu. The 1918 flu had a higher lethality rate because of pneumonia as a secondary infection, and now that is curable and treatable. As I see things it is possible that 1% of the world's population could die in the next year and that amount to nearly 80 million people. 

LC

[Brent Meeker]

If you start to feel poorly, find your nearest Trump rally.

Brent