The $64 Question

Bad, wicked, naughty, evil Zoot.

A month ago I was worried we might have 10-20 cases of Kung Flu. Instead, we have nearly 20 deaths. That means those people got it up to a month ago, from other people who didn't know they had it either.

So far, most of them are elderly, and/or with other co-morbid conditions.

But sooner or later, a relatively healthy 40- or 50-year old with no predisposition is going to croak. Maybe a teacher. Or a school janitor or lunch lady. Then everyone will lose their shit.

The school will be closed. But that person will have infected 40-200 kids, who won't be symptomatic, who will then be locked up at home to infect their whole families, and you'll have a blossom of 1000 cases. Some of whom will still be going to work infected and asymptomatic, and give it to co-workers, who'll give it to their kids, and so on, and so on.

That's how a pandemic marches onwards.
And it will be everywhere.

Take a pair of ordinary dice. There are only 36 possible combinations (6x6). So the raw chance for any roll is a hair under 3% (2.77% for the anal retentive math geek crowd). If coronavirus only has a 3% chance at being transmitted, every time you're out and about, you're rolling the dice. Except you touch things 1000 times a day, and your face about 500 times. (We'll forget about droplets, mucous membranes, and inhalation vectors from coughing and sneezing people for the moment). So, roll the dice every day, and see how long before snake eyes comes up. Remember those thousands of touches, and 500 times touching your face.

After rolling dice 164 times, your chance of getting snake eyes is 99% probable.

So being out and about, in a world becoming saturated with asymptomatic carriers, you're not just likely to get Kung Flu, you're going to get it .

For probably 80% of all persons, two weeks to a month of PITA. For some of them, they may not even know they have it! For 10-17%, you're going to the hospital. But unless you're dying, you aren't getting in. And about 3 people out of every 100 are going to die from it.

If everybody in CA gets it, that's up to 1.2M deaths. Leaving us with 38.8M swinging Richards afterwards. For Texas, it would be up to 870K dead, and 28M still there. Nationwide, up to 10M dead, and 320M still here.

That's if mortality holds at 3%, and everyone gets it. Juggling those numbers around on the slide rule gets you any answer you want.

Bad for the 10M dead, and the 20-50M hospitalized/laid out, but that's not the catastrophe, per se.

The real problem is, the only way to stop this is to send everyone - everyone - home, until 30 days after the last case gets well or dies. Even the idiots among TPTB will figure this out, after exhausting all other half-assed options (just like in China).

If you do nothing, you lose 10M outright, and 50M who can't work for months, and 100M more out for up to a month, but not all at once.

That's the problem. Either of those options screws the economy like a $2 hooker, which is why the stock market is in freefall, why Italy and China have thrown in the towel, and why Korea and the rest of Europe probably will too, before we figure it out.

And until you self-quarantine, and don't pop positive in the next month, you won't know you don't have it already either.

So the $64 Questions is, how long can you miss work, school etc., and how much money, water, food, medicine, and other necessities do you have, to stay home for what may become a mandatory extended quarantine? Will you have a job to go back to when it's over? Will anyone?

We'll leave the discussion of how you hold a valid general election for the President, 1/3 of the Senate, and the entire Congress amidst this sort of thing, for another time.


Local observation:

I note for informational purposes that the local bookseller, B and N, is suddenly light on disaster/survival/preparedness books, which had formerly just been gathering dust, and is now missing every volume on first aid. Because I check those aisles 2-3X/week, and probably know them better than store staff.

Some people are getting edjumicated, apparently.

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Also, over at WRSA, one of the He's-who-shall-not-be-named observed accurately that contrary to all dystopian fiction, the stores remain open and unburnt, rather than the popular "stripped to the walls in 48-72 hours".

Allow me to respond:

Food isn’t coming here from China (unlike N95 masks), the trucks are still running, and you’re still free to travel, and not under draconian quarantine.
Yet.

So there isn’t any national emergency, for the moment.
{cf. 1940: Phony War. Compare and contrast with Dunkirk, and the Battle of Britain, a few months later.}

Once you can’t go out, it won’t matter what’s on the shelf. The average person and family has three days' food at home. (If you have more, by definition, you’re above average, just like the kids at Lake Wobegone. That also means somewhere there’s some jackass who has less than three days on hand.)

So, how long do store shelves stay stocked (and not gloriously aflame) when the trucks aren’t rolling, and Trayvon Diversity and his posse go emergency shopping after midnight, with a brick and a machete?

And what happens when people who depend on prescriptions, made from precursors that aren’t coming from China, and haven’t been for the last month or two, start getting shorted on their Rx meds, esp. the ones that
a) keep them alive, or
b) keep them sane and functional?

Just curious.
Feel free to extrapolate at your own leisure, as you see fit, considering those new data points.