COVID-19 # 67

Of course, we still have cases going up just about everywhere. The world is now over 8 million positives. But you've got to keep your eye on days-to-double-cases. It took us about 5 weeks to go from 4 to 8 million, and that's slower than all the previous doublings. That's good.

Here's the thing though. To get from 1 to 8 million, you need to double about 23 times. To get from 8 million to 8 billion ... that's everyone on the planet ... we need to double only 10 more times. I don't think we'll do all those in 5 weeks a piece, but if we did, it would take about a year. When I look at numbers like that, I think we're likely to get to global herd immunity before we get a vaccine. Of course, the hard part of that is we might get 100 million deaths along the way.

Most readers of this blog have had me for class, and know I'm really optimistic about nearly everything.

I'm not optimistic about COVID-19. I'm increasingly coming around to the view that organizations like the CDC and WHO are ... actually sugar coating the situation.

While I'm an optimist, I also tend to be fairly contrarian. It's an ugly feeling to be have many people around me suspicious that things are not as bad as we're being told, and to be thinking to myself that the math seems worse than the worst case scenarios in the legacy media.

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In case you missed it last week, the President of Burundi died. There's is strong suspicion it was due to COVID-19. If so, he would be the first leader of a country to succumb.

They had a cluster at Orlando International Airport, so they tested all 800 employees of the airport. A third of them tested positive. And, if you missed it, Florida fired the person in charge of publishing their data because she repeatedly stated publicly that they were lowballing their numbers. She is now publishing a renegade site.

Brazil has pretty much stopped making an attempt at publishing honest numbers.

The U.S. is re-opening their consulate in Wuhan. This is a good sign.

Meanwhile, China has an outbreak in Beijing. And the BBC has noticed that the scale of lockdown does not seem like a good match for the small number of cases.