So, YOU know how it is… you’re booking these tours, you’re running these open mics, you’re doing all this stuff and then plague breaks out and no-one wants to use the microphone and they hear you’re going through a plague-ridden state and they don’t want you to come to their house any more and holy crap CHINESE FOOD’S GOT PLAGUE!!!
The end times.
Novel Coronavirus. The disease you can get from bad beer AND a book!
Generally speaking I’m not freaking out. I’m aware of going on with my Life sans too much interruption, but it reminds me of a movie where in the background the newscasts are giving you little ominous tidbits of a world ignoring strange circumstances, threatening signs, lights in the sky and a funny anecdote about the walking dead. And Trump is talking about how it’s not that bad, and China is panicking, and people are hoarding… Trump says “the tests are perfect… like the phone call!” there’s a nightmarish to the absurdity of it all. It’s like a bad snowstorm that you hear is going to hit and you sort of ignore it because YOU’VE got toilet paper and food for the next couple of days… and it all seems so far away….
And now it’s Montgomery County and DC and Maryland’s declared a state of emergency and they canceled SXSW! So I figured it was time to do the math.
A friend was talking about how he was reading about how many people it’s affected, and the flu kills so many, many, many more people, and if this is just another bad cold people can catch, what’s the big deal? It’s just people making it political, price gouging a panicky populace and using it as a way to garner clicks… right?
Yeah. Math.
I guess the point is that this IS something new. And it’s spreading… well… virulently… and if it became as wide spread as the flu it’s actually a pretty terrifying thing.
A friend had pointed to a link to a Johns Hopkins breakdown on the similarities and differences betwixt the flu and the Novel Coronavirus, or Covid-19 or whatever and pointed out that if we’re not worried about the flu killing about half a million people every year then why should we be worried about the under-4,000 people killed so far by Covid-19? And I thought… YEAH – why are we freaking out?
And somehow Johns Hopkins kind of buried the lead by NOT completing the math. If – as of this article – there’s only been 102,472 cases of Covid-19 and it’s killed 4,000 people… well, that’s a 0.03% mortality rate. Trump at least got that right, and on first glance I agreed that that wasn’t a big deal. But then doing the math on the flu killing half a million people out of one BILLION cases every year – those are hard numbers for anyone to parse but it equates to ONLY a 0.000646% mortality rate… which is infinitesimal…
Looking at my Friends List on Facebook and thinking with a 0.03% death rate, if my ENTIRE Friends List somehow caught Coronavirus… chances are ONE person might die*. Who’d notice that? (Sorry Friends List)
And then I remember the math… Because if Coronavirus scaled up to the infection rate that the flu has, hitting 1 BILLION people? That 0.03% mortality rate = 30 MILLION people. It might not ever kill anyone I KNOW but that’s a huge number.
Of course, that’s also a huge IF. The flu being so wide-spread is kind of a misnomer. If we weren’t so good at detecting diseases nowadays, we’d probably just shuffle Covid-19 along into “the flu”, up it’s mortality rate and maybe never know the difference. The flu’s caused by a whole bunch of DIFFERENT viruses. So – it might be like worrying about the spiders in the house because there was a scorpion in a neighbour’s basement.
I’m no expert. Would never claim to be. But I do feel like I can be pretty intelligent when looking at the world around me and the people who’re dismissing this as simply politics or bad-news-SELLS-news need to think it through. And do some math.
In any case. I’m wiping my mics more often. I’m respecting personal distance. I put out a statement reminding people that coming to the open mic sick just isn’t cool. And I’m going to ramp up my webcasting game. Because we might lose some gigs even if we don’t lose any fans. A little panic goes a long way.
*Currently if my whole Friends List caught Covid-19, statistically speaking 0.94 people would die. However… if I count MYSELF among my friends…
