Monthly Archives: March 2020

Someone TP’d the house across the street from us last night. Reminds me of the time someone was passing counterfeit gold coins made out of platinum.      

Richard Epstein has a piece out on coronavirus. He’s a well-known libertarian legal scholar – even I had heard of him. He thinks that the number of cases, worldwide, will peak at under one million,  with total worldwide deaths under … Continue reading →

I was re-reading this Heinlein classic: it’s about alien parasites that take over and control people. And no, you don’t have to look at it from their point of view. Our heroes have discovered this: they’re about to tell the … Continue reading →

He emphasizes the cruise ship ( why ignore other whole countries?) and he distorts that example. Most never caught it: of those that did, all had excellent medical care. That’s no longer possible when many millions get infected – resources … Continue reading →

SARS , like Wuflu, hit people over 60 very much harder.    

Italy was in WWI for about 1200 days.  They lost ( this is one of the lower estimates) around 317,000  men – those died on the field or were missing in action. That’s about 264 per day.  Right now, in … Continue reading →

Is Wuflu bound to evolve to become milder?  No. That does not always happen.  For example, smallpox remained highly lethal for thousands of years. Falciparum malaria remained dangerous over thousands of years, as did sleeping sickness. Consider myxomatosis, introduced to … Continue reading →

It’s easier to understand what’s going on with Wuflu if you’re used to visualizing equations and playing with simulations, but knowledge of  relevant history also helps.  Knowing the  basics about perennial plagues like smallpox and falciparum malaria , or short-term-visitors … Continue reading →

We need enough lockdown and social distancing  to drive the R0 below 1.0 – that doesn’t require much more effort than the intensity required to ‘flatten the curve’ and it has an enormous payoff – new cases fade away instead … Continue reading →

There has been a lot of talk about ‘flattening the curve’ – slowing down the rate of growth of Wuflu so that it doesn’t overwhelm health system capacity.  like this: But this is the wrong idea. You have to get … Continue reading →