To be honest, I am not certain what matters, the question is massively personal. We tend to focus on what matters to us, yet when I look around me I see that people are in the setting of what matters to the media and the fear mongers. It is simple, I have a case of the common cold, I have it twice a year (on average) and it tends to set me back 3-4 days, and as luck would have it, for the most always including a weekend. Yet this time around with the propagated fear of the Coronavirus, which is apparently not a fear of drinking Corona beer, that fear is taking absurd proportions.
Consider the headline ‘Coronavirus latest updates: global infection rate climbs towards 100,000‘, consider that 100,000/7,700,000,000 gives it a 0.00000001298% chance that you will get it. More important than that, 80% of all these cases are in China, so unless you know anyone who travelled to China, or if you did, the chance of you winning a lottery is larger than you getting the Coronavirus. out of the remaining 20% 13% is in South Korea, Italy and Iran, so where were you lately?
Then after that we see some idiot in the White House proclaim “Donald Trump declared live on television on Wednesday night that he did not believe the World Health Organization’s assessment of the global death rate from coronavirus of 3.4%” and in this instance I am calling President Trump a blatant idiot. There are 3,356 deaths recorded, there are 98,088 Caorona virus cases and when we devide the two we get 3.4214175%, it was simple math, a simple math issue and this elected US president and his advisors are unable to do the fraction equation that we all get in primary school, I wonder how stupid I made him sound.
Perhaps that same idiot, I apologise, the current elected president of the United States of America could give us an explanation why the federal bank cut 0.5% of the interest rate under the guise of ‘to combat coronavirus slowdown‘ (source: CNBC), you see either we are being hoodwinked by one side, or the other, but we are getting hoodwinked. Perhaps we will see a reference to whitewashing a wall soon enough (source: Tom Sawyer).
And all this comes to blows on a daily basis as we give into fear and the fact that it ends up being fatal to 3.4% of the cases who ACTUALLY got the disease. There are at present more annual accidents involving using a cell phone in a car.
There is actually more against the White House administration at present, you see, their nationalistic approach gives us another number, there are 221 Americans who had the corona virus, and 12 of them passed away giving us 5.42986%, which is avtually higher, so where did President Trump get his 1% from? The fact that he ignores 221 Americans in all this is also an important election question to propose, you cannot have it both ways and I get to slap certain people twice this way around, a nice alternative, is it not?
Beyond that
Yet beyond all the false bravado from politicians and media, I need to look at a larger picture, there is a larger picture in all this, I could state that the deadlier the virus becomes (which would be a massive statement of falsehood), the less unemployed people we would have, the smaller the shortage of housing and the better career paths would become for the survivors, as it hits the elderly more than the young. That last part is partially true, the elderly have underlying health conditions, they tend to have a ravaged immune system and so forth, as such the Coronavirus would be a great thing to have in this world, so why was the Federal Bank lowering expectations by 0.5%? As we are told from many sources ‘Fed Slashes Interest Rates as Coronavirus Concerns Mount‘, we need to wonder why this was not the case as Aids concerns mounted a few decades ago. You see more than one source is giving us ‘Recession fears in US spike as yields hit record lows‘, yet EVERY US administration has always dreaded the ‘R’ word in their economy (Recession), there has been no exception to that, never ever. So as we see “The decline in US yields has now brought Wall Street closer to many other developed markets, where about $15 trillion of bonds are yielding negative returns as a fallout of the rush to chase safe-haven assets. Yield curves in Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands, for bonds maturing in 30 years, are already showing a skew, with billions of dollars of bonds yielding nothing.” (Source: Times of India) we actually see a much larger issue in play and it is not the economy. Even as we are given “According to the Federal Bank of New York, the probability of a US recession next year is 25 per cent, the highest reading since 2008.” there is a much larger fish to fry, the national NHS stages that we have also show a much larger strain and in this the Corona virus has an impact where it matters, in healthcare. We can argue that a functioning healthcare during a recession is a work of fiction, but that is what the US, UK, Netherlands, Germany and Australia will face in 2021. And at present it is being drained by false Corona fears, so if we do not put a stop to it, national healthcare systems in several countries will buckle and the people who all were happy to play the Corona card, will demand services that they helped dwindle to zero, that is what matters, as this is a longer term view that is rising to a 70% certainty in more than one nation.
So whilst we waste our money on facemasks in places where there is no Covid-19 it becomes a much larger setting and we all need to wake up. Australia (the island NW of New Zealand) has 60 cases, with 2 fatalities on an island with a population of 25,000,000. As such the chance that someone will get the disease is roughly 0.000000024%, the lottery gives better chances, and we need to wake up! At present China is the only country where the global reactions make sense (optionally Italy too). If we cannot see this, then we get to live with the hell that we have created the hell we need to live in in 2021 as hospitals send us home because funding is no longer available. You all helped in getting there, you all get to live with the consequences.
At times life is that simple!
For now, I will set my mind to dream mode and consider the TV mini series I created in my mind, all about two space stations and a travellink to the Sombrero galaxy, that is until the Expanse season 5 opens up, why vent a series when I can enjoy the creativity of others, that too matters to me, my creativity is fuelled by that of others, that is how it always was. and it also hands me writers that bring things that matter, to be honest until the Expanse season one was released I had never heard of James S. A. Corey, which turns out to be a pen name for Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, and they created the Expanse series which at present has 8 books. I believe that our creativity is fuelled, it almost always is and books are a great source of fuel, even as I believe that creativity fuel comes in many forms, it can come from idea’s we nurture, it comes from unasked questions that we ask ourselves and when that question turns into an answers with the response ‘that is just common sense’ that is the moment that we have a jackpot idea. Yet in all this fake fears tend to remove the fuel to our creativity, it dwindles down our pattern to dream to a pushed state of nightmares, it literally solves nothing but the stage of hope we rely on and the media exploits that part too often, just look at the newspapers and see where they actually do something productive with factuality, it is only when they meet up with governments who tell them ‘that is enough’ they tend to continue and that is what we see, even as the articles are still laced in facts, how many have given you the factual dangers of people getting infected?
In this case Sweden is a great example. On the 3rd of February (one month ago) I wrote “The one from Sweden is perhaps the most illustrative one. “The patient is a woman in the Jonkoping region of southern Sweden who had visited the Wuhan area of China. She sought medical attention after arriving in Sweden on Jan. 24. “One case doesn’t mean that we have a virus outbreak in Sweden,” said the agency’s Karin Tegmark Wisell, who added that the country’s health-care is well prepared to deal with the virus.” I do not disagree with Karin Tegmark Wisell, yet she was a carrier and passing on the disease before the patient knew she was a carrier, as such she would have been in Arlanda (most likely), then a train or a car with stops and for some time she was unaware that she was sick. There is every chance that she infected 3-50 people“, they had one case, which I stated in ‘Corona? I Never touch the stuff!‘(at https://lawlordtobe.com/2020/02/03/corona-i-never-touch-the-stuff/). Now they have 94 cases, yet in a population of 10 million, it amounts to a 0.0000001% chance that a Swede gets the virus, and there is a 0.00000000394% chance it kills a person, in the end, if everyone in Sweden gets the disease, there will be up to 29,411 dead people, that is the darkest number I can come up with when the disease spreads to 100% of the Swedish population, yet that is what we will focus on and not the two extremely small numbers we see. As such we see the impact of the darkness that the media exposes us to. There is no chance that 100% will get the Corona Virus and the fact that only 3.4% will be fatal (at best), sets the larger premise, all this whilst we see that Sweden at present has no fatalities, at present neither has Norway, Belgium or the Netherlands.
What matters is not merely what we need to see and what we do see, it is also what we need to prevent, what matters is that the ‘death numbers’ that we see projected are for the most true, but so is a lottery ticket and in the end only one person gets the grand price, when you realise that, the overreaching fear mongering that we see should have have no impact now and the degree to which we overreact now might have a detrimental effect next year when those resources are no longer available, we need to realise that part a lot faster than we currently think.
Lawrence van Rijn - Law Lord to be 