Largest Cities in the World
I finally finished The Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston. It's all about the CDC (Center for Disease Control), the WHO (World Health Organization), and the campaign to eradicate smallpox. Along the way he visits the military, bio-weapons and virus engineering. Pretty grim stuff.
At the end of book he mentions the largest cities in the world and what would happen if a nasty bug got loose in one of those places. Which led me to look up the largest cities (spreadsheet above, taken from Wikipedia).
If COVID-19 was as contagious and deadly as some people claim, I would expect that we would be hearing about zillions of deaths from some of these places. It might be that I have my filters set too high and that is keeping such reports from reaching me, or maybe America is just so self centered that we don't have time to worry about the zillion COVID-19 deaths all over the rest of world. Or maybe the disease is just getting started and later on this year we will start seeing those reports. I don't think that will happen, and in any case I certainly hope it doesn't happen.
Which got me to thinking that this whole lock down, mask wearing paranoia thing is just people showing that they are part of the in-crowd, kind of like standing in line at Starbucks to pay $5 for a fancy cup of coffee, or waiting in line for 20 minutes to get an ice cream cone at Salt & Straw. Dang, I came across a story about this phenomena not too long ago and I thought for sure I linked to it, but now when I need it, I cannot find it.
And now we've got riots going on all over the place. Some people say it's because of the black man killed by the police in Minneapolis. That might have been the trigger, but I think it's because there are a bunch of people who are not happy about the way things are going. Yes, there are some people who are just attracted to social activity, the more active the better. But most people, if things are going well, have better things to do than protest. You put the screws to a large segment of the population, like our fearless leaders did to about half of the people who work for a living, and you're going to get some push back and this is what it looks like.
Problem is we have this fantasy that everyone deserves the same respect and treatment whereas in reality people range from savages to saints. You send a bunch of saints into the jungle to deal with a bunch of savages and you are very likely to end up with a bunch of dead saints.
1 comment:
I don’t know who “some people” are but I would only listen to people who are medical scientists, not politicians, internet gurus, or Norm at the bar. The WHO heard about a local outbreak of something in China at the end of November but China didn’t make a big deal out of it until the end of December. In January the medical scientists were suddenly peppered with questions about a brand new bug they hadn’t seen and had only what China had provided for information.
If your wife called and said she found a nest of snakes in the house that were pink with purple polka dots, would you tell her to pick them up and throw them out? No, you would tell her to exercise extreme caution until you could find out if the were venomous, aggressive, dangerous. There’s no information on the web, and only one person you can find has ever seen them before, so you listen to him, but he doesn’t know much except the multiplied very fast. For sure they have to be there before they can multiply.
The whole thing seems very melodramatic until your friends and neighbors start dying like mine are.
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