Norbert Haupt

If you had shown me this chart six months ago, and asked me to guess what it means, I would have had no idea.

If you had urged me to just guess, the word “yesterday” in the title notwithstanding, I would have said it must be the number of deaths due to gun violence last year, but I would have been suspicious that the numbers for Japan and Germany were as high as they were.

If you had then told me that the numbers reflected daily infections of a new and highly contagious disease, I would not have believed it.

I would not have been able to reconcile that our country, with a medical establishment (science, research, medical schools) second to none in the world, would have an infection rate of 250 times as bad as Germany or Japan.

With our population being about four times as large as Germany and three times as large as Japan, we can safely divide the rate again by a third and state that we’re about 100 times as bad as those countries.

Then I hear arguments that this is still not real, since we’re testing so much more than other countries right now (which I actually don’t believe and see no evidence of, but that’s another matter to investigate). So let’s say we’re testing twice as much per capita as Germany and Japan. This would reduce the factor from 100 times to about 10 times the rate.

[I really should be using an equation like the Drake equation to show this in more scientific terms, but this ‘back of the napkin calculation’ makes my points]. We’re still off by a factor of 10.

Something is very wrong in Denmark… ahem …in the United States.

There are voices out there now that claim that “wearing a mask is living in fear” and similar assertions. Others proclaim their rights are being infringed upon. Whatever happened to the old “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service” policy we had no problem with in grocery stores in the olden days? If I ran a store, I’d put up a sign that says “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Mask, No Service” and be done with it.

I wear a helmet when I ride a motorcycle. Heck, I wear a helmet when I ride my bicycle. I wear a helmet when I go rock climbing. I wear a seatbelt when I drive a car. None of those self-protection measures have ever had me cry that my freedom is lost. Of course, I still freak out when I travel in Ohio and people ride motorcycles without a helmet. Any old idiot on the road can not see you on the motorcycle, and hitting your head on the pavement at 60 miles an hour with just your jaw and teeth to protect you is not a pleasant thought.

In our country, we now have 2.4 million people identified positive for Covid-19. We have 125,000 people dead due to Covid-19. That is a horrifically high death rate of 5% for a disease if you catch it. Since older people are much more vulnerable, the death rate is even much higher. I am over 60.

I have done rock climbing. I have done skydiving. I have ridden motorcycles on the highway. None of these activities are even within a factor of 1000 close to the death rate of Covid-19.

And worse, if you survive the disease after weeks in ICU, you have a 7-figures hospital bill.

So if I can wear a mask at the grocery store and give myself a slightly better chance not to catch this bug, I will take it.

I am not living in fear, but I am not very interested in dying, or having a million dollar hospital bill ruin the rest of my life.

Interestingly, we had a slight bending of the curve that gave me some hope, but it looks like the fear of living in fear and the aversion to lack of freedom with a mask is turning it the other way again:

This graph does not show the infection rate of a country that is conquering this virus.

Darwinian effects will quickly take care of this “living in fear” argument, but in the meantime, we’re prolonging the agony of a country shut down, we’re burning out our doctors and nurses, and we’re keeping the economy on a life support system.

If you think living in fear is bad, try going on like this for another few months, after the hospitals finally do run out of capacity.

Where do you go?

If you catch this nasty virus, and you need to be hospitalized, if it’s serious and you survive, you’re financially ruined.

This survivor in Seattle had a 181-page hospital bill for $1.1 million.

Here are the risk levels related to activities:

You sure you still want to go to that political rally?