Data illiteracy

I never read the news reports about what the virus is doing in my home state. I just look at the data that is posted online and form my own conclusions. I occasionally see something about how the cases are still rising and that there is some kind of spike, but I just dismiss that as yet another attempt to manipulate people to have the desire response. The levels of infection are basically sitting at a pretty consistent level while testing goes up and hospitalizations and death are in a steady decline. 

It's ultimately the hospitalizations and deaths that really matter. The virus will continue to spread. This is something people just need to accept. It's not going to stop spreading anytime soon. We're not talking about huge numbers of people here. A thousand cases a day sounds like a lot, but it's not that many when you're talking about a population of millions. 

Sure there are places where the virus never really gained a foothold and kind of petered out. New Zealand is an example. The prime minister is getting all the praise, but she got a huge boost from the fact that she leads a sparsely populated island nation. The population of New Zealand is very close to Colorado's. The largest city only has a bit of a million people. Iceland gets praised for beating the virus. It's also a sparsely populated island with very little population density. Other places that haven't had much of the virus were probably more lucky than effective managers of pandemics. And most of them will not be able to let people from outside their geographically isolated lands visit without having to pass through quarantine first. It's hard to take a vacation in Hawaii when you have to spend two weeks in quarantine before you can actually visit the island.

The people who claim to have all the answers and know the right answer to all the questions really know nothing. You can't do some math and have all the answers. You have to take reality and what's actually happening into account. Sure, stopping your little bits from interacting will stop the virus from spreading, but real people don't perfectly adhere to the instructions of computer code. We don't know if we're early in the cycle or late. We don't know if there will be a second wave. The way talk of the second wave has shifted shows that people just don't know. The early talk was that the second wave would be even deadlier than the first wave. We know which people are most vulnerable to this virus. We could have a huge second wave of infections with virtually no mortality if we just did a better job of protecting the nursing homes. The riots may trigger a spread of the virus, but it's not likely to trigger a wave of deaths (as long as the protesters stay away from their grandparents). 

There is so much effort on keeping the public in line, there aren't many people talking about ways we could mitigate the effects of the virus without treating everybody like their sick. That may be the best way to prevent the spread of the virus, but doing out best to stop the spread of the virus is not the best tactic at this point. The only way out is through.