Okay. Thread on scale, Coronavirus, and the big scary Twinkie.

Diseases have a lifecycle. Once the genie is out of the bottle, it’s assumed it runs through the entire population. The only question is when. This is your basic graph.

The original doomsday estimate of 2.5mil deaths was on the assumption everyone would catch Corona, and apply the 1% fatality rate.

This is where social distancing came in. The idea was to slow the spread, so hospitals wouldn’t get overwhelmed.

This is where the bell curve comes in. Bell curve is number of new cases, which is the change in total cases over the previous time period. Let’s examine it.

The one place where you have exponential growth is the very beginning. When the disease has no barriers and can multiply freely. But we see it quickly loses that exponential character.

This is where the panicmongers steered you wrong. They claimed double the cases, every three days, until we are in course to infecting everybody and killing 2.5 million (and many said more)

If that were true, we’d still be in the period of exponential growth. Now our politicians are telling us we are almost at the peak. So what does the real bell curve versus the projected bell curve look like?

Something like this:

From 2.5 million to 60,000 fatalities - projected. We were literally “preparing” for a 600lb Twinkie and just got a twin pack at most. And I say “preparing” because they were all photo ops.

Understand that the height of the bell curve represents how many beds we need to treat the patients. “Flattening the curve” meant to stretch it out so it doesn’t go too high.

Instead, it’s too low.
Instead of bursting hospitals, they’re sitting empty.
Instead of overworked doctors, they’re being furloughed.
And our politicians make no adjustments.

Over the next few weeks you’ll be seeing more and more misleading charts trying to justify it, resting on meaningless statistics.
The ultimate question is scale. Or as I ask my plumber, “how many zeroes?”
Don’t forget the difference in scale of the two bell curves.