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The only upside I've heard about this whole virus business is that the "stay-at-home" order is likely to result in fewer teen pregnancies. I guess that's a good thing.
When I was doing my PhD, half the lab I worked in was computational modelers working with epidemiologists to predict disease spread (https://www.mobs-lab.org/). I worked with them a bunch and took courses with the director of that group to learn the basics of epidemiological spreading models and how to predict these types of things.
100% of that group is freaked out, and 100% of the people they work with are freaked out. It's hard to understate how much this is not a drill, how real it is. The talk about this being just like a bad flu year misses a few things:
1. We didn't have to have any deaths (look at the South Korea model),
2. The reason it's not like the flu is manifold but one important one, why we don't talk about the flu instead, is simply because this isn't priced in as something we have to deal with on a recurring basis,
3. the 100k-200k band of deaths we are talking about is *assuming we take all the social distancing measures*. Without that, the predictions are in the 1m-2m range.
If your concern is that you don't trust the experts, I advise you to start working on your A&P and CFII certificates as you may not trust those experts either. In fact, may as well go mine some bauxite to start designing your own plane, since those Beech engineers don't know enough either probably. Expertise is hard-fought knowledge and it's not something to discredit when it feels counter to ones gut. Society tries *very* hard to put experts outside perverse incentive mechanisms, and 100% of them are ringing the alarm on this one. Anec-data about personal trips outside don't do much to refute any of the evidence and actually bolster the argument that social distancing is probably working.
As an aside, deaths in the US has actually dropped precipitously in the last few weeks, not risen. I understand and can see the logic behind the "actually the cure may be worse than the disease" but that's not what the evidence says so far.
Sorry for a long loaded post - this is serious! Experts are saying it's serious! Please explore why you disagree with the experts and figure out if you're willing to make a wager on a gut feeling they're wrong.
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