What I'm thinking

I am just a formerly intelligent man who follows the news -- straight news aggregated from the Washington Post and some other more mainstream organizations, and hybrids of news and analysis and even opinion from a spectrum of lesser-known sources. Not everything I've read has been verifiable, though I try to vet before passing anything along. I don't waste time with broadcast news. I do read accounts of Trump's pressers, because it's important to know what he plans to do (today), but I believe myself adept at knowing when he's been scared straight and when he's blustering and when he's just lying. I bring my own biases to this process. I have no science background or really any science proclivities; I can only dig in so far before I'll get lost. My main strength, as I see it, is a genuine interest in gathering accurate-as-possible high-level data and anecdotal accounts and interpreting them and aggregating them into a coherent picture in hopes of having a decent idea of what's ahead of us. I want to see what's gone on elsewhere, how those places have approached it and how those approaches worsened or mitigated the damage; to compare that information against the situation here -- both how prepared we were before this year and how prepared we are now, which in turn is greatly determined by the approach in this country -- and feel comfortable about my estimation of what will happen. I haven't predicted, to myself, exactly how long quarantining will last, or in what month the peak truly will come, or a specific number of cases or deaths. I'm not remotely qualified. And I am regularly surprised by events; I did not foresee the arrival of additional PPE last week, which will make at least some difference in some places. But I can tell you that the broad outlines I've seen coming have so far proven true. I am not special for having seen back in January that we would be dealing with this. Many others got the same sense of scale from looking at Italy that I did. Plenty of people I regularly read have seen the same things I have in the administration's mishandling of it, or expected the same arrogant, defiant stupidity and disobedience from too many of the country's local leaders and people, and predicted the same trends I did in my head. But perhaps you don't know any of these others. Or perhaps you're just tuning in now. My point is, most of what I see is not represented in the media that I think most people see. Much of what *has* been in the media, of course, has been way wrong. You have no real reason to think I know what I'm talking about. But in case someone wants to hear an informed guess at what's to come, if only to treat it as a worst-case possibility in their planning, here is mine. I believe that there will be waves of infection across the country, prolonging the crisis. I believe there are waves still to come in Italy, where people from Lombardy fled elsewhere in the country ahead of the lockdown. I believe that there will be at least one more wave in China; it might already have started. I believe the infection numbers will crest in different places around this country and then shift back to some places the virus has already visited. Whether due to faulty tests or possibly recovered patients contracting it a second time, I think it will be 2021, when a vaccine is approved and made available, before infections decline to anything like acceptable. I think the only x-factor — that we know about today — that might change this is the plasma replacement being discussed now, involving plasma from recovered patients. I wonder who would pay for this, were it in fact successful. How many could afford it? What will infection rates look like in the remainder of the population? I believe that the administration, and parts of Congress, and Business will be unable to abide that timeline, and will essentially force people back to work well before it's advisable. I believe this will contribute to the incidence of cases remaining high. I believe the numbers of cases and deaths will still be high enough to cause those governors who've been smart enough to help their states, so far, to keep their states as shut down as possible at least through September. I believe there will be no baseball season, that the NFL will not begin its season in front of fans. I believe the smart states will not reopen schools in September. I believe that there will be supply problems at hospitals, and I believe healthcare professionals will contract the disease at the highest rates. This will have a snowball effect; not enough masks/etc. means not enough doctors and nurses, which soon will mean not nearly enough doctors and nurses, which will mean many, many more deaths. Even the number of ventilators will be almost immaterial by that point. I believe the actual number of cases will be unknowable, due to inadequate testing. But I believe between 50% and 70% of us will contract it, and that there will be municipalities where testing is widely enough employed to extrapolate that number, that health analysts will publicly say at some point that the rate is likely that high nationally. I believe the actual number of deaths will be unknowable, for a number of reasons, including that we won't have the resources or motivation to determine the causes of all of them. But I believe the number of deaths reported will be close to ten million, and that this is an extremely conservative estimate — and that there will be more deaths than that when factoring in those who die of other causes due to not receiving proper care due to constrained resources ... in other words, the number of deaths we'll have this year compared against the number in 2019. I *believe* that the number of deaths will actually be higher, like a hysterically high number, but I can’t find the data to support that belief right now. I would love to be embarrassed someday at how wrong I’ve been. troy 4.1.2020