I see your point about opening up a bigger market for men seeking multiple wives,
@Phillip, but you may be mixing apples and oranges when it comes to your statistical analyses. Currently, the death rate
for those who have been tested (which is skewed very greatly from the death rate for those who will eventually get the virus) is only 1.6% in the United States. Eventually, we will get a much better picture of why such higher percentages of people are dying in other countries (Italy, in particular), but, while NYC now has over half the number of identified Wuhan Flu victims than does Italy, NYC's total death toll remains lower than Italy has exhibited in one week's time, and don't make the mistake of thinking that it's just a matter of us being a couple weeks or a month behind Italy; they
never had a death rate as low as 1.6%. Currently NYC actually has a
lower-than-American-average death rate (less than 1%, so you see the direction in which we're headed), which actually makes sense to me, because I've always seen this as being something that would start off looking way worse than it would eventually turn out to be. Not that this pandemic is a good thing, but we have a pretty stable medical health environment in this country, and every year we have .1-.2% of our population die from flu and other similar seasonal ailments associated with viruses and bacteria. For the most part, the same part of the population is most at risk of expiring with Wuhan Flu. So, in NYC, which has approximately half the current known U.S. cases, we're already seeing that the curve is beginning the flatten, the death rate is decreasing -- and two factors pretty much ensure that the picture will only improve percentagewise: (1) because we've done this slow-the-spread thing [which likely won't prevent more than a handful of people from getting it
eventually, but it will
slow the spread enough to get us further prepared for providing treatment], we haven't even reached the peak concentration of active infection, after which death percentage will decrease due to the most vulnerable [who are also the most susceptible] having already been taken out; and (2) in practical terms, we haven't even
begun to test the vast number of people who fall into 3 categories:
a. Those who've already recovered but had either no symptoms or such mild symptoms that they didn't even know they had it but now have antibodies (these are the people I believe we should have been seeking out in order to jump-start herd immunity as was generally practiced back when I was a child) and cannot only no longer be significantly affected by Wuhan Flu but could be passing on their antibodies to others;
b. Those who begin to exhibit mild symptoms in the future; and
c. Those who contract it later but exhibit no symptoms.
Once we test everyone (either in actuality or by extrapolation), the death rate is very likely to be no higher than it is for more normal influenzas.
The typical seasonal flu tends to invade 25-40% of our entire population every single year. That's why the death rate is so low for those flus. Most people who get them get sick, but for
most the sickness is rather minor, and only the compromised elderly and significantly-compromised middle-aged and young people succumb to them or develop other opportunistic diseases as a result. Flu deaths vary from year to year but average around 25K annually in the US. We've had years in recent history with 60+K flu deaths. What I suspect is that, when we add this winter's other flu deaths to Wuhan Flu deaths, the total is going to be in the Bell Curve part of the flu death distribution pattern.
Which means this, and please forgive me if this sounds insensitive, but I believe we should have calm heads when considering issues of such monumental import across entire large societies, given how forced preventive measures can have such a monumental impact on everyone else besides those who are most vulnerable to acquiring something like Wuhan Flu: even setting aside my faith that each person's time is determined by our Father, the vast majority of the people who die of this disease were likely going to be seeing the Grim Reaper this year anyway.
Here's something I wrote to my first cousin (once removed) earlier this week in response to his assertion that this is going to be something like a tidal wave:
"I’ve been listening to all sides. Here’s what remains unanswered to me, though, because I have no problem grokking that social isolation will slow the spread, and I even fully recognize that the Spanish flu was as devastating as it was partially but significantly because social isolation wasn’t utilized or promoted. However, we only know what happened with the Spanish flu. We don’t know what would have happened had the world been able to coordinate social isolation. How long will this social isolation have to last, especially given what Fauci said yesterday or the day before about the fact that this has in common with MERS that it’s unlikely that summer temperatures will kill it off? No global effort of social isolation has ever been accomplished before. If the Wuhan flu were like bedbugs, we could undergo social isolation for 12 months and be rid of it forever (by the way, this social isolation is certainly going to slow the spread of bedbugs!), because we could systematically fully quarantine anyone who turned up with Wuhan flu until all of the hosts died – and then just wait them out for their maximum 11-months (like bedbugs) survival without hosts.
But, given the supposed 3x normal contagiousness, and given that we have no persuasive information (at least not yet) that we’re going to be able to find some way to entirely eradicate COVID19, isn’t all we’re really doing just delaying the inevitable while inadvertently diminishing the collective immunosuppression response, because with social isolation also comes a decrease in the ongoing building up of immunity due to exposure?
We will not know the answers to these questions for months, at least, if not years or decades. In the meantime, we are shuttling to the sidelines time-tested strategies from the past – like herd immunity – that could be protecting us better in the long run.
A statistic to watch for – if one can find it, given that those benefitting from the current strategy (think not only Big 'Health' but all the regular fearmongers) won’t want it focused on – will be to note world-wide and nationally what this year’s combination of Wuhan flu deaths and all other flu deaths is compared to previous years, because those labeled as most vulnerable to COVID19 are basically the same individuals always most susceptible to death through normal flus (or 100+-degree temperatures, etc.). It really could be the case, statistically speaking, that the vast majority of those who succumb to Wuhan flu this year would have succumbed to some other flu or ailment this year, anyway. Our world has become so prone to being in denial of mortality that we insist on giving a cause of death for almost everyone who passes away, when, for the vast majority of people, death only comes years after what the lifespan was for 99% of the people circa 1950. We have extended life with science and medicine, but we cannot extend it indefinitely, and we’d perhaps be more honest with ourselves if we would acknowledge that, for the most part, people die because . . . they are old . . . or worn out . . . or used up . . . or were too lazy to take care of themselves . . . or pushed the envelope too far with risk and/or self-abuse and/or other questionable behaviors. To me, it’s just plain foolishness to believe that heart disease is the number one cause of death. Kenny Rogers passed away at 81 during the past 24 hours, and it was refreshing to hear that he “died of natural causes.”
I, for one, am predisposed after my work in the 1980s with gay groups to distrust life-long bureaucratic meeting-attending, non-medicine-practicing, swamp-dwelling CDC functionaries like Anthony Fauci who don't even see the irony in claiming that their expertise is based on the way they handled the AIDS crisis 35 years ago (I invite anyone to read
Inventing the AIDS Virus, Peter Duesberg's brilliant chronicling of how the National Institutes of Health's Robert Gallo inadvertently, through avarice and greed, orchestrated the deaths of thousands of individuals by improperly labeling their illnesses as being caused by HIV and giving them medicine rushed back into production that had been abandoned back in the 1950s as chemotherapy because it killed its hosts faster than it eradicated their cancer).
There will be benefits to all this social distancing, but they will mostly be a matter of delaying the inevitable, and we are going to be paying the price of this social experiment for many years to come. One must always be careful when they advise that we put our well-being in the hands of 'experts' who have spent the vast majority of their professional careers sitting around conference tables imagining that the ideas they slap each other on the back about will save the world.
Now . . .
. . . back to the point of your thread,
@Phillip: you now have me paying attention to an additional dynamic of this situation. We're being told that anywhere from 60-80% of the deaths from Wuhan Flu are men. If that is the case, we could potentially see an uptick in women finally realizing that they aren't the buyer in a buyer's market marriage-wise. However, there's always another possibility worth watching out for among us: we're going to have to analyze what
kinds of men are getting knocked off by Wuhan Flu. Elsewhere we discussed the analysis of personality types among men (mostly sigmas and alphas) predisposed to seek more than one wife. If Wuhan Flu takes out mostly alphas and sigmas, instead of the world becoming more conducive to polygamy we might come out of this seeing even more dominant women with Sensitive New Age Guys on their leashes.
