Thursday, May 7, 2020

Honey, Relax. We're all going to get it.

This virus will get to us all eventually. It's just who and when, which are both interesting questions.  Say you're old and vulnerable. Do we lower your odds enough so you can live to the fullest (if your current living status counts as that for you) before it eventually gets you and does you in (or not). Or, do you infect yourself NOW while you're just young enough to fend it off, hopefully, and then live a nice long resistant life after that? At what age are we most likely not to come out of it healthy? Does that matter? If you're my age (coming up on mid-50s), I'd say I want to be infected now because there's a good chance with my history, that I can come out of it OK. Yes, there's a risk that it'd kill me and I don't know what that is yet, because we're not able to test everyone yet. (Let's get on that by the way, so we can. And while we're at it, let's figure out the post-infection immunity situation -- do I become immune when I recover or what? Come ON! Again, I know that's going to be a function of testing everyone).  So threading that needle between those getting it, it's a crapshoot anyway. How long do you want to wait before you get sick? How much older? 1 year? 5 years? So far, it looks like we're not coming close in most areas to reaching anywhere near capacity in our ability to treat the disease with what we have or can get, should the situation escalate. How will the second wave look? Don't know. But will loosening (not removing) the quarantine put us on a better trajectory -- meaning more cases than we have not but still not enough to overtax our resources.

Second big picture: Why does not being able to do business (for small businesses) or work (for people) for 2 months totally blow the coop? Are we individually and are our institutions really that fragile that they cannot last 60 days of not working before they can't pay their bills? And what about the landlords. For those who are sucking off the juice of another, are they so overextended and living so far out of their means that they can't go 60 - 90 days without getting their rent from paying customers? What is going on in this country? What the hell? 

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