Napkin Math For F**ktards, With Actual Numbers

New York F**king City has a population of about 9,000,000.
To date, they have 18,000 Kung Flu dead.
The rosiest (for the "just the flu, bro" @$$clowns) circular reasoning "surveys" there have put penetration of the infection there at about 20% of the city.
Meaning, granting such silliness arguendo, it's yet to get to the other 80%.

Los Angeles (city of)has a population of about 4,000,000.
They have almost 1,200 Kung Flu dead.
The rosiest recockulous "surveys" there put infection penetration at under 5% of the city, meaning 95% of them have yet to have any contact with it.

In the one documented smart decision of his life, Califrutopia Gov. Gabbin' Nuisance closed things down early, and widespread. That's largely why NYFC has a death rate between 2 and nearly 7 times worse than L.A. (You can argue pop. density and public transport all you want. NYFC isn't locked down, and L.A. is. One city took this serious, and one didn't. The results of each decision, particularly the number and rate of infection and deaths, speak for themselves. QED)

NYFC is an exemplar of what doing nothing about Kung Flu gets you.
They've run the subways every day during the outbreak, and only started disinfecting them every night starting yesterday or the day before. WTAF?!?

If we extrapolated NYFC's death rate to the country as a whole, that would get us about 660,000 dead, so far, with only 20% infection.
(330M ÷ 9M x 18K = ___X___.)
If it penetrated to everyone, worst case, that's 3,000,000 dead.
(X x 5 = ____Z____.) [Math breakdown included for Common Core grads.]
That's two months of real-world experience, kids, not magical models.
Who's up for going full-speed ahead to kill another 600,000 of your friends and neighbors?
Beuller?
Beuller...??
Ferris Beuller...???
Anyone...????

Neither of these numbers is "just the flu", and both those numbers (660K and 3M) are what represents the lower and upper limits of this pandemic, if we'd listened to the Flu Bros since Day One. We didn't do that, but the fact of that doesn't therefore disprove the projections based on the outcome of following that course. We repeat this for the kids who'll read it, but dropped out in middle school following ingestion of too many lead paint chips and suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome.

It also demonstrates that the numbers projected if we did nothing line up vastly closer to the 2M dead estimated by the British projections, versus the recockulous Ioannidis fairytales that this was, indeed, going to be "just the flu".

Forty-two states went into hard lockdown mode, which stopped this everywhere but the one city where they didn't do any of that. The seven other states that declined to do so benefitted far more from the widespread lockdown, rather than suffering for the behavior of idiots in NYFS and NYFC, and this was mainly by dint of vast geography between NYFC and them.

And yet, being a moron is apparently an irresistible siren's call, because some people still want to pretend NYFC (and Italy, and China) never happened. And emulate their non-response, in perpetuity!

{Nota bene: Someone in comments elsewhere suggested some silly-ass projection that this would peak at 67K total dead, by August 4th. This was just a few days ago. We noted then that we would achieve that dubious milestone by more like May 4th. We leave it to the reader to pop over to the Johns-Hopkins Kung Flu Dashboard this weekend, and decide who's been speaking from common sense and reality on this topic, and who's been smoking hopeium and talking out their own @$$#$.}

This embiggens. Oh Lookie here! Note the date, and the number of US deaths.

Should we therefore stay in lockdown everywhere, forever?
Hell no!

Not because this isn't a thing, but because it is. Today, the federal response guidelines (and they were always thus, not mandatory regulations, so any beef you have is with your own governor, not with Orangeman) expired.

Some governors will be stupid on the too strict side of lockdown-lifting, and others will be stupid on the too loose side of lockdown-lifting. We are not going to go 49-0 everywhere other than NYFS. Expect TPTB to f**k this up. It's what they do.

Eventually though, after exhausting all other options, the republic will muddle through.
That's what we do.

An endless total lockdown kills healthcare by giving them no patients.
No lockdown kills it by giving them too many.
Both extremes kill healthcare for everyone.
Something between those two extremes is therefore called for.

We aren't doing magic in hospitals.
Nothing we do cannot be done for most of society.
If people would calm the fuck down and stop panic-hoarding, we can get to having enough masks and gloves for everyone to use.
Some number of monkeys might even be taught to wash their goddam hands before touching themselves. (Don't get offended and butthurt; this is even hard for doctors and nurses, who nominally know better.)

We also know that the virus dies outside on warm sunny days in less time than a Superbowl commercial break. So the places we should be opening, weather permitting, are parks, beaches, golf courses, pools, etc. (Indoor movie theaters and malls, not quite so much.)Opposing this obvious common sense on days with temps in the 90s is why Gabbin' Nuisance's one moment approaching normal IQ was a fluke, and challenging that ignorant fascist fuckwittery in court, as half a dozen OC beach city mayors are doing, is God's work. And the first superior court judge predictably failed the same IQ test, but the battle continues. Nazi Bitch Gov. in MI is another exemplar of How Not To Do This, and the flip side of the ignorant laissez faire of NY Gov. Cuomo [D-Five Families], who is yet the spiritual kin to some numbnutted red-state governors in the Flu Bros camp.

When the stupidity on Left and Right is indistinguishable, those terms are hardly helpful. The battle here is between science and intelligence, versus irrational kneejerk stupidity. There's more than enough of the latter on both sides of the political aisle to kill another several hundreds of thousands of people, given the opportunity. Let's not do that.

As I noted in comments elsewhere, on a long enough time frame, modern medicine achieves 0% success. Because everybody dies. The goal is not to save everyone, because that's impossible.

But ignorant fuckwittery, just like malign intent, can make trainloads of the soon-to-be-dead, and neither side ever seems to lack volunteers to load the boxcars.

Cheerfully ignoring the volunteer applications for those, and beating them about the head and shoulders with a stout cudgel, is therefore always in style, because the goal is also not to go ahead and kill everyone we can as fast as we can, because reasons, and "I want to go to Starbucks NOW!"

So what we should be aiming for is picking out a sensible middle ground of getting ourselves out of this mess, while pushing as few people into the woodchipper along the way as is reasonably possible. Wearing a face mask in public (gloves optional, but highly recommended, as long as you're smart enough to change them before you touch your uninfected stuff or self), and maintaining some distance between people in public, while continuing to find better ways to treat the most seriously infected by this virus, is a great part of that. It's also no great social burden.
And witness the normally-idiot mayor of L.A., opening up Kung Flu testing to all comers, almost like someone with a brain has been advising him or something. Mirabile dictu!

He announced that, he said, because the test centers were only seeing a fraction of their daily capacity. That kind of common sense will get us through this, however occasional or spotty that coverage is from TPTB. Celebrate common sense whenever and wherever found, and the marketplace of ideas will drive the Stupid People out of business. Like it does.

Staying in perpetual lockdown is idiotic, to the exact same extent as doing nothing is.
But if you like your Kung Flu, you can keep your Kung Flu.

Just move to NYFC.
I promise, no one will miss the left end of the IQ bell curve if all of them move there.
They'll be among friends, I assure you. They can lick the stripper pole, and pee on the third rail, and the rest of us can just watch the YouTube Fail videos of their exploits.

Paraphrasing the iconic Inspector Calahan,