Nationals and Coronavirus.

There is a certain amount of hysteria around this, for sure. On the other hand, we are clearly at the very beginning of exponential growth of COVID19. One case prevented (or even delayed) right now might mean dozens or hundreds of lives saved. I attached a graph of the Phildelphia vs St Louis response to the 1918-9 Spanish Flu. St Louis had the "panic" response - and it proved to be the correct one. (Easy to look up with google or other search, if my graph doesn't post). Superimpose on that graph a line for "Maximum Health Care Capacity" and you can see plenty of justification for extreme reactions RIGHT NOW. That being said, my impression is that children are not only not generally affected by Covid19, and they are not even carriers of it. (Although that is "preliminary information." I expect that to be confirmed or disconfirmed in a few days. Day are precious at this stage of the pandemic.) So it is likely that closing schools and such is called for by political considerations, not medical/epidemiological concerns. The best I've seen in any media about Covid19 is Michael Osterholm on Joe Rogan: www.youtube.com/watch It's over an hour long, and has a lot of non-Covid stuff, so it's best to look at the comments for a topic list with time point links. I looked up Osterholm on Google news. He's been talking about Covid19 for months, making reasonable, measured, realistic statements. My impression is that Joe Rogan rarely achieves this high level of information, but he does a great job here of letting Osterholm make his points.

There is a certain amount of hysteria around this, for sure. On the other hand, we are clearly at the very beginning of exponential growth of COVID19. One case prevented (or even delayed) right now might mean dozens or hundreds of lives saved. I attached a graph of the Phildelphia vs St Louis response to the 1918-9 Spanish Flu. St Louis had the "panic" response - and it proved to be the correct one. (Easy to look up with google or other search, if my graph doesn't post). Superimpose on that graph a line for "Maximum Health Care Capacity" and you can see plenty of justification for extreme reactions RIGHT NOW. That being said, my impression is that children are not only not generally affected by Covid19, and they are not even carriers of it. (Although that is "preliminary information." I expect that to be confirmed or disconfirmed in a few days. Day are precious at this stage of the pandemic.) So it is likely that closing schools and such is called for by political considerations, not medical/epidemiological concerns. The best I've seen in any media about Covid19 is Michael Osterholm on Joe Rogan: www.youtube.com/watch It's over an hour long, and has a lot of non-Covid stuff, so it's best to look at the comments for a topic list with time point links. I looked up Osterholm on Google news. He's been talking about Covid19 for months, making reasonable, measured, realistic statements. My impression is that Joe Rogan rarely achieves this high level of information, but he does a great job here of letting Osterholm make his points.