Agreed, the world is grossly overpopulated, in terms of what it can support, especially with the ever-growing resource and energy demands of each person. We've also reached a point where we think science and medicine should be able to cure everything and any deaths are too many. We will all depart one day, we just hope it's not too soon and not before achieving something useful, for ourselves, for others and maybe even for the environment.
Since the beginning I've been struggling with this whole lockdown / quarantine thing. In the months running up to this, I've been a bit depressed and things were just starting to look a little better before all this kicked off and everything got closed down. I cancelled a flight from Geneva to see my parents so as not to place myself or them (or by implication my grandparents who they might see, or indeed anyone else I might encounter) at increased risk. Some neighbours of mine, who are scientists and hail originally from a country that had Communism until 30 years ago, thought it absolutely right that we do this, but I pointed out the effect on society and more importantly the economy would be catastrophic and they looked rather blankly at me.TSR2 wrote: ↑02 Apr 2020, 17:21Yes, this current disease is a horrible thing, and I wouldn't wish anyone to be in pain or suffer. But to put some sort of perspective on it... Circa 500,000 died from the flu last year. Approx 650,000 people in the USA from Cancer last year. I think we're less than 100,000 globally for this. Trillions of dollars have been spent. Millions have lost their jobs and are unable to provide for their families.
At a very low point the other week, my mind was persuaded that the lockdowns were futile, all we were doing was destroying jobs and livelihoods. The authoritarian police state seems to have risen almost everywhere in a flash and seems to be accepted by most people. I've read about homeless people "out after curfew" in SA being shot with rubber bullets and watched Indian police douse migrant workers, walking home to their villages, in bleach. Many in developing countries will starve due to their inability to work or get out to get food. Since then I've also seen some pretty awful scenes from hospitals in the West struggling to cope, but this graph from Switzerland where I live, shows some hope that the social distancing strategy can work. I (and probably many others) have been at home since March 17th, and we see from the data, the rate of increase of new cases starting to fall off from March 21st onwards (graph from corona-data.ch, white envelope curve crudely drawn on in MS Paint by yours truly):
Most of the data is rubbish, even that on the otherwise wonderful Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Map. In China, I'm pretty sure both cases and more importantly deaths have been grossly underreported. In most countries, we're not testing as much as we should and we're not testing random samples, only people who present with symptoms or people admitted to hospital. In the UK, deaths from outside of hospitals have been underreported and in Italy, anyone who dies in a hospital with coronavirus is deemed to have died of coronavirus, which if there were other medical conditions at play, may not be correct. The only vaguely reliable data was probably the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which became a kind of unintended experiment: 3711 passengers, 712 infections, 12 fatalities and 18% of infected persons were asymptomatic.
So for me, I'm getting used to being stuck here. One walk a day, most days, trying to avoid other people. Do my shopping twice a week, work from home and have a long list of other tasks to do. I hope all of you, particularly those with health conditions or those over a certain age take extra care and rely on those younger or fitter where needed!
