Crisis Management under Trump
You can’t reason with a virus. It doesn’t stop because you negotiate or make a deal with it. You can’t impress it with your fine character and exceptionalism, nor does it listen to your demands and decrees. Wishful thinking and magic don’t stop it either.
Viruses operate at their own pace and by their own methods, and you are their prey. The only way to handle a virus, is to learn about it, study how it behaves, and to understand how to keep out of its way. If we study it long and carefully enough, we may devise more effective ways of killing it, but that takes work, dedication and discipline. In the meantime, strict adherence to the rules that keep us safe is absolutely necessary.
A virus has no mercy and no moral compass, it will continue to spread and infect us, if it’s given the opportunity. Period.
Too many of our leaders engage in magical thinking about this crisis. Over and over again, I hear public officials, journalists, and regular folk assert that our case numbers will just simply vanish one day. They’ll look at China or South Korea’s numbers and claim that ours must go away too, any day now, as if by magic. They’ll make these claims of course, without any intention of engaging in the hard work that China and South Korea actually did to protect themselves. Our leaders, especially Trump, claim entitlement to those results, without any effort. They believe that we’re so exceptional, that the laws of physiology simply don’t apply to us. This level of denial is deadly.
I apologize for subjecting you to this, but I think it’s vitally important. Decisions are being made right now that will determine whether many thousands of us live or die, and those at the helm seem to remain utterly clueless, in absolute denial of what we’re facing. Here is a perfect example:
These people are beyond delusional, they lack the fundamental tools of basic math and science, and they are walking us into an abyss. They’ll look at a list of cases by state, and say that those with low numbers are nothing to worry about, and that those numbers will either disappear spontaneously, or erupt later, at some distant date when the crisis has already passed in NYC. They don’t understand what an infection rate is, what it measures, or how fast it grows. When the problem hits them, they will be as blind-sided as we were at the outset.
They seem to believe that somehow, out of the blue, any day now, angels are going to fly overhead shitting out anti-virals and medical supplies, and all will be well again. The numbers will drop by magic, and we’ll all go back to work. We don't need to do anything at all, the numbers will simply go away, just because we're exceptional.
Imagine that you want to be a physician, but you think you don't need to study math, or science, or study, or endure long hours and hardship, or otherwise rigorously prepare and work for it. No, not at all, if you just wish hard enough, you believe that an MD degree will somehow magically grow upon your fucking wall some day, complete with all of the concomitant knowledge thereof, just because you're so fucking special, and everybody knows it. Anyone would call such a view dangerously naive and delusional.
They preach hard work and self-reliance, yet they think that bending the curve happens by magic? That numbers go away all by themselves? That the rising figures we see are some sort of random variable?
This needs an intervention, hundreds of thousands of lives are at stake, maybe more.
Look at the number of Covid-19 cases we’re facing, nationally and by state, and remember the rule of 72. Things double quicker than you may think… eg a compounded 10% rise doubles in 7.2 time increments. Considering this, know that cases that increase by 10% per day double in a week. Caseloads that increase by 20% per day increase by more than 3.5 times in a week. A 30% daily rise gives you more than six times as many cases in a week, and a 40% daily rise, as we’re seeing in some places, results in adding a zero to your number after a week… yes, more than 10x the number of cases, in just 7 days. A state with 2500 cases today will have some multiple of that in a week, and a multiple of that in two weeks. It all depends upon how rigorously we adhere to quarantine, and keep ourselves and our loved ones safe.
Our numbers are exploding across the board, and yet too many of our state and national politicians and journalists are talking about getting back to work, and how we’re going to have better results than China without doing any of the things that they did.
Don’t listen. Stay home. Stay safe. Wash your hands. Isolate until this passes.
It’s the only chance we’ll get.
P.S. Here’s a guy who gets it, the President of Malawi, Peter Mutharika, has declared a national emergency over Covid-19, and has taken protective measures, despite there being no confirmed cases of Covid-19 in Malawi yet. Would that we had such a timely response when we heard the warning signs.
