Sometimes people talk about the mortality rate of the Coronavirus as though it has a line of DNA reading "2%" or 1% and our job is to find that number.

Then I remember the 90% survival rates for *Yellow Fever* that @historyof found at the Philly Lazaretto in the 19th C.

By contrast, in Philadelphia in 1793, Yellow Fever killed 5,000 of the 11,000 people who got it.

What saved the people at a quarantine hospital a few decades later? Not a cure, not even germ theory. Care work saved them. Nursing.

So I think about my brother, who is a nurse on the night shift and I'm grateful to him (and afraid for him). But also I think about all the factors of health that get disappeared because they are too much about carework.

I think again about Richard Epstein, Trump's virus guy, who thinks that viruses just get less virulent because evolution, not because people do work.

And I think about all these rat bastards who are all on here now saying "oh actually turns out this was just a 60,000 person killing virus, why on earth did you all get so hysterical."

And I think about all that care work vanishing into air.

and then I go to bed mad. Apparently.