On the bright side, I have finally been back on the water. It was a short foil session where the wind dropped, and my finger tips hurt the entire time because it was a bit cold, but it was sunny, and I got flying a few times. It was pretty much exactly one year after last year's
disaster session, so we'll count it as a big success.
On the not-so-bright side, it seems the US is largely ready to give up the fight against COVID-19. The federal guidelines on social distancing, meager as they were, have expired, and 30 states have announced "re-opening" plans. The likely result is
at least 700,000 deaths from COVID-19 in the US, and possibly more than a million. Time to switch to picture mode.
The
model that the White House loves predicts zero daily COVID-19 death by the end of June. "
It will just disappear".
Well, it did disappear in China. The curve above is for the Hubei province where Wuhan, the original epicenter of the epidemic, is in. The super-smart scientists at the IHME figures that it must just happen the same way in the US.
That's an overlay of the two graphs. Quite a clear picture, right?
Let's have a quick look at the streets in Wuhan during the lockdown:
They were completely empty. Private traffic was
verboten. Nobody was allowed to leave the city.
How about the US? Here's an image from Atlanta, a city that has a lot of COVID-19 cases and death:
Not empty. On Cape Cod, the rentals for summer guests are full, and the streets are as busy as in any other year. Beaches are crowded, but not yet as crowded as in California:
Surveys show that many people in the US don't bother with masks. Pictures show the same:
About a month after "social distancing" was
recommended in the US, it is ignored by many.
Most flight have been canceled, but some flights still operate, and leisure travel is allowed:
For comparison, China
increased the strictness of measures against the spread of COVID-19 several times in Wuhan. About a months after the first measures, teams were going door-to-door to check Wuhan citizens for COVID-19 symptoms like fever:
Anyone with symptoms was put in quarantine camps, and released only after two successive PCR tests came back negative after at least 2 weeks.
I am not advocating the same measures in the US. But it is important to understand that they were much more drastic, and therefore much more effective. Some measures remained in effect after the eventual "re-opening":
Meanwhile, the governor of Massachusetts has deemed landscaping an "essential business" that is allowed to ignore the stay-at-home order. God beware the horror of overgrown lawns! Priorities are priorities.
The result is quite predictable:
About 6 weeks after the federal guidelines were announced, and more than a months after most states have issued "stay-at-home" guidelines, the number of cases per day is almost unchanged for the peak. Compare this to the very rapid decay for China in the second model - there really is no comparison. The IHME model is 100% based on the assumption that the "Wuhan curve" applies to the US. That's a 100% wrong assumption. The model is braindead. Worse, it appears to be
intentionally misleading by predicting a completely unrealistic low number of death.
Wuhan and New York City both have about 10 to 11 million inhabitants. New York City ended up with a much higher number of COVID-19 deaths, and a higher infection rate. China prohibited all travel out of Wuhan until the number of cases was near zero; NYC residents are, and always have been, free to travel wherever they want to. But the so-called president calls armed and masked protesters like these "good people":
He encouraged protests against his own guidelines while they were still in effect:
The US had at least one month more warning about COVID-19 than China had. Now, the US has 14 times more COVID-19 deaths than China, and is on track to have 50, 100, or even 250 times more. No attack on China will fool anyone with half a brain about who is responsible for this.
