The news reported the total number of cases reported, 824,716, and then number of deaths, 14,846, as well as other statistics like how many are in the hospital, how many are on ventilators, and so forth.
What they did not report--and have not reported--is that the "total number of reported cases", 824,716, is for all of 2020. That's not the total number of active cases of COVID-19 in Illinois, but the aggregate number of everyone who has tested positive for the virus since this nonsense began.
Because the death rate for the thing is miniscule--1.8% if we divide the simple number of deaths, 14,846, by the total number of cases, 824,716--it means that 98.2% of the cases are alive and well. Someone who got sick in March either died 1.8% of the time, or lived 98.2% of the time. The guy who lived through the thing in March or June or August is still alive now and doesn't have the disease and wouldn't test positive for it unless they did an antibody test.
Simply put, there are not close to a million people walking around in Illinois with active cases of the thing.
Now, let's go further. 70% of cases don't show symptoms, and we're told that if a person has an active infection but is not symptomatic, he's not contagious. That would mean that 70% of the people who did test positive in the last two weeks aren't at risk for transmitting the disease. And rather than close to a million infectious people with the virus spreading potential viral death around, the number is going to be closer to MAYBE one-tenth of that. Let's be generous and say it's one hundred thousand people.
It means that, given the populatio of the state around 13 million, 0.7% of the state has active infections...and only 0.2% of the state's populaion is contagious.
...yet we have to cancel Christmas and shut down the state to prevent the spread of this thing?
How about this: IF YOU'RE SICK, STAY HOME. If you've got a comorbidity which makes you a high risk, STAY HOME. Everyone else, go ahead and get on with your lives, business as usual, but IF YOU GET SICK GO HOME AND STAY THERE UNTIL YOU'RE BETTER.
This is not that complicated.
I hadn't worked the numbers out. Now that I have, I've come to understand just how much of a TOTAL NON-ISSUE this shit really is. That's why the media report the total number of cases, rather than the total number of active cases.
It's all bullshit. I mean, I was pretty sure it was bullshit before this, because of the reportage about all the massive number of bodies piling up in Texas and the fake stories about how overwhelmed Missouri's medical system is. The simple fact is that the media are lying to us about this thing.
Is COVID-19 deadly? Sure. For the most part, it's deadly to people who are already really sick, or who are elderly. Our government has made sure to maximize the number of deaths by saying that hydroxychloroquine can't be used to treat it. But COVID-19 isn't dangerous to children, so there's no reason for the schools to be closed. It's not particularly dangerous to people under the age of 30. It's merely hazardous to people under the age of 60.
--and, hey, if you're one of the exceptions? You know, if you've got some comorbidity that makes it a crapshoot for you, then absolutely, stay home!
But don't make the rest of us hide like hermits in our houses because you're afraid of getting a cold.
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Another thing that occurred to me today: thinking about what the Democrats want to do to our energy economy, it hit me in practical terms what it meant.
So, the Green New Deal has been foisted upon us, and lo we have "upgraded" our homes to electric heat and done away with fossil fuels. Anywhere wind blows and there's a few square yards, a windmill has been constructed. The roofs of all the houses are festooned with solar panels.
And we have a bitter cold winter, like the winter of 1978, when we had huge blizzards and bitter cold afterwards and a whole load of no fun for adults. (It was great fun for kids, who had days off school in addition to the Christmas vacation).
Where does the electricity come from? Windmills? In extreme temperatures (high or low) there's usually not much wind. Solar power? You're going to be scraping feet of snow off a lot of roofs to get it, and the systems they sell right now that get the big government subsidies don't provide power to the house they're attached to, but to the grid.
...and so what will happen is, in fact, a hell of a lot of people will be freezing in the dark.
Not the Democrats, though! They're important, so they can have gas heat!
Actually, my thoughts were less extreme but produced no less dire an outcome. Electric heat, windmills and solar panels, yada yada--electricity would end up costing a lot, probably on the order of fifty cents a kilowatt-hour. Because of how electric heat works, it's bleeding inefficient. The electricity does a fantastic job of heating up heating elements but air has a relatively poor specific heat capacity (especially dry, winter air) and transferring that heat from the heating element to the air does not happen very easily.
A friend of mine lived in a house with electric baseboard heat. He said it cost a packet to run the heat, and that was with electricity costing about eight cents a kilowatt-hour. At fifty cents it would be prohibitively expensive to keep a house warm unless you were a rich Democrat politician like the representative from Little Somalia, whose net worth went from $65,000 to just under $3,000,000 in the two years she's served as a congresscritter.
You, prole, would have to choose between heating your house and making your rent for the month, but that just goes to show that you're a stupid cretin who can't take care of himself, because if you weren't, you would have gone to Harvard or Yale and been a big important elite, and then you'd be able to afford to keep your house warmer than fifty degrees in the winter and cooler than ninety in the summer.
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Dear gutless anonymous communist: GO FUCK YOURSELF.
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This post explains in detail why they hate Trump so much. They hate Trump because Trump isn't one of them and doesn't work for them.
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Oh that's so CHEESY and CIS-MALE and OH NO I AM DROWNING IN TESTOSTERONE or pick your bullshit.
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This camera was very close to the landing pad for SN8 and damn what a cool video it is!
Damn, I love SpaceX!
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Dinner tonight is a sausage and giardinera pizza from Dozeli's, with extra cheese. It's so damned delicious, it makes me want to punch myself in the face.
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In the "stupid technology" department--
They've taken down our imaging system for maintenance, and it's down until next week. So, Tuesday I started my machine downloading the "off-line" image. It's 78 GB and it took two days to download through the site's vintage 1996 internet connection.
Though the speed tests I run claim that my download speed is about a megabyte per second, I only get about half that because I'm sipping through a straw at both ends--from one company server to my computer.
But that's not the worst part.
Once the download completed (at 1 AM on the 10th, today) I needed to image a USB drive in order to use it. Now, I bought a 128 GB USB 2.0 thumb drive from Amazon (SanDisk, brand name, $15-ish). USB 2.0 has a maximum throughput of about 60 MB/s and flash memory has a sequential write speed of about 45 MB/s.
So, if I want to copy 128 GB of data to the thing, it should take about 45 minutes to fill the thing up. Admittedly, that's writing one big file, so let's give it some time for overhead by doubling that estimate. One and a half hours to fill a 128 GB flash drive to the brim with tens of thousands of regular, normal, practical files of various shapes and sizes.
Extra-generous: say it takes two hours to do this.
I started making the bootable flash drive at 8:30 AM. By the time I left work at 5 PM, IT WAS STILL NOT FINISHED.
Four times as long as it would take just to do a regular filesystem copy from one directory to another. THERE IS NO EXCUSE FOR THAT SHIT. There is no earthly reason for the damned thing to take eight freaking hours to write the ISO--which isn't even eighty gigabytes!--to the flash drive.
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Listen to me: getting irritated because it took two days to download a file I couldn't have even stored locally twenty years ago. Definitely got them twenty-first century blues!