Don't Be Those Guys

Kindly pay attention, folks.
Some stuff I know because I read...nearly everything. Always have.
Some stuff, because I've studied it intensely, either from necessity, or avid interest.
Some stuff I know because my analytical skills are pretty finely honed, and even more so doing it for a living.
And some stuff I know because I not only read about it, and practice analyzing it ever other day, but because I've been doing it for twenty-five-plus freaking years. M'kay?

You can't short-circuit that to get to the answer you want just because you, too, have a keyboard and an internet connection, no matter how much you wish it were otherwise.

I put out what I told people last week regarding corona virus.
And using the same informed judgement I did during two different Ebola outbreaks.
(Where, if I was doing random blind guessing, I had a 3/4ths of 1% chance - .0075 - of getting it exactly right, which I did.)
But the reaction of the Headless Chicken Posse in all three instances can best be summed up as follows:

"We sang a song and you didn't dance,
we played a dirge and you didn't mourn."

In short, some people are so deliberately contrary, owing to an inability to digest logic, that if they fell in a river and drowned, you should look for the body upstream.

So what?

Well, so this kind of happy horsesh*t:

 and any eleventy versions of it on the intarwebz. To Paraphrase Jayne Cobb's math:
"...bullsh*t, times bullsh*t, carry the bullshitsh*t...equals bullsh*t."
 

Two twats twittering about what they don't know they don't know, then forming opinions about things far beyond their paygrade is not the same things as wee little things like data, analysis, or reasoned conclusions. It's like getting your stock picks from two retarded kids based on how the windows of the respective companies taste when they're licking them.

So, once again, for the brighter lights out there:

1) All data from China is based on information received from one of the most managed and controlled infolie-formation sources on the planet.
The exact number of how many cases of corona virus, when and where they happened, and how many fatalities they have noted, from China, may be expressed with maximal accuracy as "a lot".

No further precision is possible.

Not by me. Not by you. Not by the CDC. Not by ABCNNBCBS, or the lesser minions of media fucktardation who are hard-pressed to discuss nuclear anything without pronouncing in "nuke-yuh-lar", let alone grasp the finer points of anything as scientific as freezing water to make an ice cube. You'd think you might have learned what utter morons most reporters and editors are by now (let's be serious, these are the kids who were too stupid to get into engineering, business, medicine, or legal graduate studies, which should have been a big clue). And sure as hell not by Tweedle-Dumb and Tweedle-Dumber on sociopathic media. Fucktards gonna fucktard.

2) Blair Witch Project shaky-cam YouTube videos, with sensational build-ups, and breathless "I'm sitting here in my hotel room and I'm scared shitless" color commentary by Suzie Stupid whose visit to the Great Wall was interrupted this week tell you Jack and Shit about anything. It's noise and heat, but no light.

What you can say about this outbreak boils down to pretty much what I told you before:

1) There is an outbreak. It appears to be a corona virus.

2) The Chinese have known about it for at least a month-plus before they deigned to let anyone else in on the secret.

3) Anything they tell you about it now has been pre-digested, sanitized, altered, spun, folded, and mutilated beyond all recognition, and no one from the king to the village idiot can tell you the who, what, when, where, why, how, or how much, anywhere on the planet. You would get more information if they had released it via barks from Lassie, while you tried to interpret the statement from collie to English.

So srsly:  fuck off with telling or extrapolating anything from that steaming pile. You're trying to predict pony location and quantity based on a mound of horseshit.

4) The "quarantine" in China started after half the local population had self-evacuated. Unlike, say Liberia or the Congo, the number of Chinese who can afford international air fare is literally legion, as 30 countries and as many U.S. States can attest.

5) Pointing an IR FLIR at people's faces for 30 seconds, for a virus that can incubate for 2-14 days is like trying to stop a football team from scoring by putting all 11 defenders on the line of scrimmage, and then looking stupidly surprised when Team Virus lobs a 2 to 14 yard pass over their heads, and scores a touchdown every play.
This is the "genius" response of the CDC to the outbreak.
(cf.: Ebola 2014. Different presidents, same assholes in charge of the communicable disease chicken coop. SSDD.)

6) Yes, the Chinese admit to having bio-research facilities in Wuhan. Like cops and counterintelligence agencies, I'm not a big believer in coincidence, but beyond that, no one who says, knows, and no one who knows, is saying. So park the Speculation-Mobile in the Bat Cave (which is probably where this virus, like Ebola, came from originally too. But even that, nobody knows.)

7) If you get Ebola, somewhere between 6 out of 10 and 9 out of 10 times, you're going to die. That's only based on every outbreak of it since the 1970s.

7b) But, the experimental (because doing double-blind placebo testing is unethical to the same degree as Dr. Mengele's concentration camp science experiments) RSV-ZEBOV Ebola vaccine is 95+% effective against Ebola. Unlike ever before.

8) Corona virus, OTOH, will kill you between 3 and 5 times out of 100, not 10, by contrast.
That's bad - especially for the dead ones - but not planetary extinction bad, m'kay?
Now, look and find exactly nowhere where I said it's not a problem at all, then STFU.

8b) But there's no vaccine for it. Like always, and for most viruses.
(Hey, kids, good with chemistry, biology, and want to help mankind and make a great living? Medical school awaits!)

9) And, like influenza and other viruses (all of which are currently epidemic in the U.S., and will be until after Easter, when the sun comes out and people go outside instead of staying inside and coughing and slobbering their germs all over their entire families, co-workers, and fellow students), corona virus is much easier to catch than Ebola is.

10) Especially when it's had a two-month head start, and "control" measures best described as idiotic, bordering on moronic.

All of which means that since school started in September, you should have been washing your damned nasty hands frequently, particularly before you eat or drink anything, and should also stop touching your face. (The average person touches their face 250 times a day and touches surfaces and their cell phones 2000 to 5000 times a day). Gee, I wonder where the problem could be? And let's remember that youngsters don't just touch their faces, they go deep-mining for booger nuggets, sticking half their hands in their mouths, and their friends' mouths, and suck their thumbs.

What about handwashing? Take this as a reliable indicator: every touchscreen at 8 McDonald's locations in the UK tested postive for fecal bacteria (that would be sh*t, boys and girls). Which means people don't even wash their hands after they wipe their asses. Think about that when you grab a store or office door handle, shopping cart, or use an ATM.

Let me know when the penny drops.

And corona virus is smaller than fecal bacteria, and easier to transmit.

I repeat, yet again, wash your goddam filthy hands, you hairless baboons.
They don't beat this rule into doctors and nurses with a zeal usually reserved to Jesuit priests for nothing. It saves lives and prevents millions of infections every day.

Handwashing has saved more lives in hospitals than antibiotics and surgery, swear to God.
You could look it up.

Washing your hands, provided you have intact skin, obviates the need for gloves.
(Proper glove use requires handwashing before and after, in hospital protocols.)
But if you want to indulge your OCD, go for the gloves.
(And stop touching your face.)

An N95 mask in public situations, if the virus becomes a pandemic here, will be more than sufficient for most of the droplets you're worried about.

Now, for the half-informed Anonymous keyboard commandos in comments, in 3, 2...:

Yes, the N95 won't filter out viruses per se, which are far smaller in size than what it's intended to stop.
But, my little half-informed wingnuts, the virus isn't floating around free, it's contained in droplets from sneezes and coughs, and those vapor droplets are big enough to handily get trapped by the N95 filtration. If you're panicky, get an N100.

And you're free to wear goggles if you're an utter maroon, but unless you're standing toe-to-toe with someone sneezing and coughing, droplet to eye transmission among the general public is so low it can't be measured with existing instrumentation.

The CDC recommends eye pro for medical personnel, who routinely deal with hordes of the infectious all day long, and perform close proximity procedures, some of which generate even more aerosolized virus loads, whereas Joe Average does not. But no one's stopping you if you're hyper-spastic paranoid. At the end of the day, it's your ass, do as you like. And if you're caring for a sick relative with a suspicious infection, then, by all means, you have become "medical personnel", and the rules apply to you.

Corona virus is here. More of it is going to get here. It will kill between 3 and 5% of those infected.
Most will overwhelmingly be under 12, over 65, or immune-compromised (transplant patients, chemo patients, etc.).

And I remind you, yet again, that from 1/1/2019 through 12/31/2019, common garden variety influenza, just in the U.S., probably killed between 8000 and 20000 people, as it has annually since fucking ever, and no one lost their collective minds, nor did breathless around-the-clock live broadcasts of how many bodies hit the floor.

Learn a freaking lesson, would ya please? Breathless hyperventilating panic isn't going to help you, and it's pissing me off.

Now, you want to make sensible preparations, for any one of a dozen possible problems, in case this thing gets to full-blown pain-in-the-ass level?

Like having a few months' cash on hand in case you can't go to work for a month or three?
Like having food, water, and all -all!- the other necessities of life, to deal with three to six months of being self- (or mandatorily-) quarantined in your domicile?

YES!
Now you're talking.
Common sense.
Foresight.
Thoughtful planning.
Adapt-Improvise-Overcome.
And not being a headless chicken.
Which are only good for digestion, not cogitation.
ROWYBS

Nota bene, when Noah was charged to build an ark, he started collecting wood. AFAIK, he did not, for one example, make graphs to explain to his neighbors the dangers of a sudden flood.

None one gets out of here alive anyway.

And the CDC is right there, saying "More cowbell."

Proof that some unknown percentage of people will grasp none of what I said will follow along presently. I have every confidence that the 10% of those of you determined to be That Guy will demonstrate your lack of common sense in comments. Like always. More cowbell, geniuses.