Yesterday I saw one of those things that make me exclaim "Only in Romania!". There was a pharmacy and in front of it there was an old lady waiting her turn to enter, because there can't be too many people inside. Next to her, like a few feet away, there was a maskless man puffing away on a cigarette, his smoky exhalations reaching the masked old woman as she was trying to protect herself and the people in the pharmacy.

  And it made me more attentive to people around me. Bands of maskless high schoolers, with the loud talking, fake swagger and hysterical laughter typical of their age and need for attention were happily walking on the street, not a care in the world, their bravado, as idiotic as it was, clear on their faces. Then groups of parents, masks on their chin, smoking and talking to each other as they supervise their children playing, blocking access ways where people have to squeeze between them in order to pass. I know those people, too. They already believe that they have been exposed as much as they could be, that trying to protect themselves when their children literally exchange spit and snot is futile. Then the drivers, happy that they don't have to wear masks inside their own car, but pretending to forget to use them even when they have to get out to buy something or to get home. Meanwhile, the police has found some specific sweet spots where they hunt for people not doing their duty regarding the pandemic, ignoring all others. And of course, the noseholes. People who wear their masks because it's mandatory, but only on their mouths, because they breathe through their noses.

  And yes, all of these are selfish assholes, but that's not my point now. These people are contributing to the rise of infections, but only a few weeks ago, when the rates were plummeting, they were careful with the masks, the distance, everything. The first and simplest hypothesis on why this happens is that as people stop wearing masks, infections start rising, and it surely does explain a lot, but it's not enough. These people could have relaxed weeks ago. Why now?

  My theory is that as schools opened, the number of people not wearing masks on the streets increased. Whether due to parent fatigue (let's call it that) or idiotic bravado or because some of them are too small to wear masks, children have skewed the proportion of people being responsible. And like a switch being flipped, other have started copying the same behavior. It's not even something conscious. I have difficulty believing people are actually reasoning that if a four year old doesn't wear mask, they should stop, too. It's a social phenomenon, a monkey see, monkey do thing. This has nothing to do with charts or numbers or public announcements which clearly show that we have now reversed our trend and the percentage of sick people is rising again. Another subconscious trigger is that more light is coming from the sun as we head towards spring. People attach darkness with crisis and light with things getting better. And yes, again, without thinking about it.

  This means several things. One of them is that communication of the facts doesn't function as it should. This is on the media and their panic inducing way of reporting things. They only discuss the bad things, the shocking things, not the good ones. Numbers don't matter for people who have lived in fear for months. At one point or another they are going to break and act out. The solution is to reward people when things are going well, to inspire rather than scare people off. It would have been easy to understand and feel what is going on if, after weeks of smiling news anchors congratulation the population for their efforts, they would have turned sad and announced the trend is reversing. But they don't do this and that makes them responsible.

  Second thing is that statistically people are barely aware of their existence. Like automatons they live their lives and copy each other's behaviors without a single thought. If prompted, they will find rationalizations for their actions after the fact, then feel resentment towards the person that forced them to make the effort. There is no solution for this, I am afraid. It falls on the authorities to be aware of this and act preventively to ensure a healthy proportion of people looking like they are doing the right thing. Note: looking like. This can also mean good propaganda or spin. Who would have thought that I would ever advocate for that?

  Finally, this cannot be turned into another cat and mouse game, where the authorities are punishing people when they catch them, so people do bad things when the police is not there. This is not a carrot and stick situation. The ingrained distrust of authorities and petty selfishness we learned during the Communist era makes traditional measures from the government fail miserably or even backfire. This is the most difficult thing yet: change the ways the system works in order to reward people for their good work. This is anathema to Romanian life and politics, but it must be done. Social responsibility needs to be bred back into our national DNA. Otherwise we will remain a nation of assholes like the guy in the image.

  I am writing this post to make people aware of the changes that happen around them because of the Covid pandemic. How easy was it for them to pop up and how many of these "extraordinary measures" will stick with us after we get rid of the virus? 

  I wake up and turn on BBC News. First reporting of the day is the mass graves in the US. Yeah, I was surprised, too... but just a little bit. Mass graves? Aren't those things that happen when people want to kill a whole bunch of other people? Like conflict or ethnic cleansing or whatever the euphemism of the day is for war? And in the US? Home of the brave, the free, the rich and the apathetic? Apparently New York has had a special little island close by to use as the dumping ground for dead people that don't have money or relatives or names. It's been a human garbage bin for 150 years!

  Then I open up YouTube and watch this video that is unrelated to the virus, but at the beginning of the video they talk about "the virus that we cannot name". Apparently YouTube has rules to protect "the truth" by censoring free speech. And yes, it's not the government, it's a private company that pretty much can do whatever it freaking wants, and what it wants if for you to not speak some specific words. Facebook does it, your search engine does it, TV stations do it. I open a news site and I see an article about a conspiracy theorist who was "allowed" to speak on BBC about his dumbass ideas. Ofcom, the media regulator in the UK also has rules about what people can say or not on TV. Next article is about a movie about xenophobes in an elevator picking on an Asian woman who dares cough. The whole idea of the article was to wonder if the film was "unethical" or if it is too soon for Covid movies. Who gets to decide what is true or not, hurtful or not. This is an older question, but now it's come into contrast.

  I go out and I see a military police car, all armored, with a gun rack on top, police stopping cars passing by to check the papers of the drivers. Every minute or so a patrol car would pass, blinking lights on. And the new rules. We are now at the eighth iteration of a military ordnance telling civilians what to do. Governments have instantly given themselves as much power as possible, some using it to further their own agenda, like the prime minister of Hungary moving quickly to pick on gay people. And yes, Israelis laugh at the world going all brisly about these rules that most believe a bit extreme, regardless of how necessary, because in Israel they have these kind of rules into their regular constitution. This did not stop Netanyahu to get even more power and use it immediately when he could. And this without mentioning Trump. There was a scene in the American TV series Homeland where it is asked "What do weak presidents do to appear strong?" "They go to war". But we are not in war.

  How did this happen? How did we reach a point in which the military is telling everybody what to do, corporations and pundits and social pressure tells us what to say and governments get extra judicial power that they use however they see fit in a time of peace?

  When this whole thing started, the first thing I googled (again, Google) was what to do in case you are infected. And all the pages that came about were about Covid and the official recommendation from both politicians and doctors: stay in, wash your hands, leave masks to the medical professionals, don't self medicate, report immediately if you have symptoms. So I repeated the query, now with -covid so that I see what people were saying about what to do when you get a virus *before* all of this started. And lo' and behold, the advice was completely different: hand washing (or waving) doesn't really do much, do self medicate with anti inflammatory drugs to avoid a cytokine storm, take vitamin D (or generate it by being in the sun) and zinc, vitamins C and E also help, masks help with both sick and healthy and, most of all, keep hydrated by drinking lots of liquids, preferably warm, like soups. Slowly, the "expert view" is changing back to what people in the field were saying from before the declaration of the pandemic.

  This is also important: the definition of pandemic is a disease that is prevalent over a country or the entire world. Practically it became a pandemic from the moment the World Health Organization declared it so. Our belief in the terms that are vehiculated gives them power. I am not saying that Covid is not prevalent over the world, or that you should not take it seriously, but things only began to move when enough people were convinced that it was real. Before action, an ideological pandemic has to happen. The brutal decisions that are being taken in your name right now are based on your belief in various narratives that may be correct or not. BTW, if I search now on Google on the same thing a search page dedicated to Covid-19 appears. 

  The question is not of truth, but of utility. If it is not useful, who cares it is true? is the old adage. But then the question becomes: useful to whom? At first they wanted you to come to the hospital, so that they can have as much information and control as possible and to isolate you, then get all the people you came into contact with and do the same to them. It is good for us all as a community, but not particularly for the sick person who is now confined in haste, perhaps with other people that are infected so they can swap strains and being taken care of in medical systems unfit for that job. Wearing masks doesn't do much if you are in an infected place, but it can protect both you and others in more relaxed environments, like public transportation or on the street, not to mention that it's a simple way to remind you not to touch your face. But they were way more useful to medical personnel and so they spun this story where you should not use them unless you know you are sick. When the number of masks and the number of sick increased, the narrative changed to use masks, but don't come to the hospital.

  I've said it before and I will repeat it at nauseam because it is true, it is important and it is verifiable: the only reason the very deadly pandemic in 1918 was called The Spanish Flu was that Spain was neutral and therefore free to report on people getting sick and dying of a disease. All the other countries were caught in their little World War that killed way less people, but that put the military in power to enact censorship. It is also the reason why most of people today haven't even heard of the 1918 influenza pandemic. We are not in a declared war right now, but the reaction of authorities all over the world is kind of the same. It's impossible to hide things in this world of social media and non stop global TV networks, right? Wrong. There were news outlets in 1918, too, and they all declared themselves independent. There are a billion films and books and plays about the heroes of WWI. Where are the ones about a virus that killed so many people? Things don't have to be hidden from you, just depicted a little differently than reality in a consistent way. Doesn't the current situation appear similar? And we are not in a war.

  Ask yourself this: what narrative is being spun around you and who does it benefit? Have you looked at the problems you have and actively searched for solutions that were not pushed towards you by others? The truth is out there, but you have to actually look for it. Yes, we need to find a solution to the virus that has spread around the world and kills people, but we are not at war. We have a problem and we have to solve it, that is it. So the next time some solemn guy with a grave face tells you what to do, ask yourself, why the hell is he wearing an uniform? We are not at war.

Intro  

  One of the most asked questions related to the novel coronavirus is "what is the mortality rate of the disease?" And most medical professionals and statisticians will choose not to answer it, because so far the data is not consistent enough to tell. Various countries report things differently, have different testing rates and methods and probably different definitions of what it means to be dead or recovered from Covid-19. To give a perfectly informed answer to this is impossible and that is why the people we look to for answers avoid the question, while people who are not professionals are giving all of the possible answers at the same time. I am not a professional, so I can give my answer and you can either trust my way of thinking or not.

  In order to compute mortality with absolute certainty we need several things:

• the pandemic has to be over
• the number of deaths from SARS-Cov-2 has to be exactly known
• the number of people infected with SARS-Cov-2 has to be exactly known

 Then the answer would be the total number of dead over the total number of infected people (100*dead/infected). During the epidemic, though, people tend to use the numbers they have.

Panic!

 One of the most used formulas is: current number of deaths over the total number of infected so far (100*current deaths/current infected). This formula is wrong! Imagine there would be two people A and B. Both get infected at the same time and no one else gets infected after that. A will die from the disease in a week, B will recover in two weeks. If we use the formula above, for the first week the mortality of the disease is 0, then it becomes 50% after a week and it stays that way until the end. If B would die, too, the mortality would be computed as 0, then 50, then 100%. As you see, not much accuracy. In the case of Covid-19 the outcome of an infection is not known for three weeks or even more (see below).

  But let's use it anyway. Today, the 31st of March 2020, this would be 100*37832/786617 which is 4.8%. This is a large number. Applied to the entire world population, it would yield 362 million deaths.

  Accuracy comes from the finality of an outcome. A dead man stays dead, a recovered one stays recovered. A better formula is current number of deaths over the sum of current number of deaths and current number of recovered (100*current deaths/(current deaths+current recovered)). This eliminates the uncertainty of people who are sick, but still have to either die or live. If we would know with certainty who is infected and who is not, who died from Covid-19 and who recovered, this would actually be pretty accurate, wouldn't it?

  If we use it on Covid-19 today, we have  100*37832/(37832+165890), which gives us an 18.57% mortality rate. "What!? Are you insane? That's a fifth of all people!", you will shout, with immediate thoughts of a fifth of the world population: 1.4 billion people.

  So which number is the correct one? Neither. And it all comes from the way we define the numbers we use.

Reality

  OK, I kind of tricked you, I apologize. I can't answer the question of mortality, either. My point is that no one can. We can estimate it, but as you have seen, the numbers will fluctuate wildly. And the numbers above are not the extremes of the interval, not by a long shot. Let's explore that further while I explain why numbers derived from bad data cannot be good data.

  What are the types of data that we have right now?

• deaths
• infected (cases)
• recovered
• tested
• total population of an area

  And we can't trust any of these.

Cases/infected

  One cannot confirm an infection without testing, which is something that for most countries (and especially the ones with numerous populations) it is really lacking. We know from small countries like Iceland that when you test a significant part of the population, half of the number of infections show no symptoms. The rest of 50% are on average also experiencing mild symptoms. The number of severe cases that can lead to death is relatively small. The takeaway here is that many more people can be infected than we think, making the actual mortality rate be very very small.

  So, can we use the Iceland data to compute mortality? Yes we can, on the part of the population of Iceland that was tested. We can't use that number for anything else and there are still people that have not been infected there. What is this significant percent of the population that was tested? 3%. 3% right now is considered large. Iceland has a population of 360000, less than the neighbourhood I live in. 3% of that is 10800 people. The largest number of tests have been performed in South Korea, a staggering number of 316664. That's only 0.6% of the total population size.

  But, using formula number 2, mortality for from the Iceland data would be 100*2/(2+157), which is 1.26%. Clearly this will get skewed quite a lot if one more person dies, so we can't really say anything about that number other than: yay! smaller than 4.8%!

  We can try on South Korean data: 100*162/(162+5408) which gives us a 2.9% mortality rate.

  Yet, assuming we would test a lot of people, wouldn't that give us useful data to make an accurate prediction? It would, only at this time, testing is something of a confusing term.

Testing

  What does testing mean? There are two types of tests: based on antibodies and based on RNA, or molecular tests. One tells you that the body is fighting or has fought an infection, the other is saying that you have virus stuff in your system. The first one is faster and cheaper, the other takes more time, but is more accurate. In all of these, some tests are better than others.

  There were reports that people who were infected before and recovered got reinfected later. This is not how that works. The immune system works by recognizing the intruder and creating antibodies to destroy it. Once your body has killed the virus, you still keep the antibodies and the knowledge of what the intruder is. You are, for at least a number of months, immune to the virus. The length of time for this immunity depends not on how forgetful your immune system is, but on how much the virus mutates and can trick it into believing it is not an intruder. As far as we know, SARS-Cov-2 is relatively stable genetically. That's good. So the reason why people were reported to get reinfected was that they were either false positives when they were detected or false negatives when they were considered recovered or false positives when they were considered reinfected.

  Does it mean we can't trust testing at all and it's all useless? No. It means that at the beginning, especially when everybody was panicking, testing was unreliable. We can start trusting tests now, after they have been used and their efficacy determined in large populations. Remember, though, that the pandemic pretty much started in January and for many countries just recently. It takes time to make this reality the new normal and people and technology work in a "proper way".

  Testing is also the official way of determining when someone has recovered.

Recovered

  It is surprisingly difficult to find out what "recovered" means. There are also some rules, implemented in a spotty way by the giants of the Internet, which determine which web pages are "not fake news", but I suspect that the system filters a lot of the legitimate ones as well. A Quora answer to the question says "The operational definition of “recovered” is that after having tested positive for the virus (you have had it) you test negative twice, 3 days apart. If you test negative, that means that no RNA (well, below a certain threshold) from the virus is found in a nasal or throat swab."

  So if you feel perfectly fine, even after having negative effects, you still have to test negative, then test negative again after three days. That means in order to determine one is recovered, two tests have to be used per person, tests that will not be used to determine infection in people with symptoms or in people who have died. I believe this would delay that kind of determination for quite a while.

  In other words, probably the number of recovered is way behind the number of infected and, obviously, of deaths. This means the mortality has to be lower than whatever we can compute using the currently reported values for recovered people.

Deaths

  Surely the number of dead is something we can trust, right? Not at all. When someone dies their cause of death is determined in very different ways depending on where they died and in situations where the morgues are overflowing with dead from the pandemic and where doctors are much better used for the sick you cannot trust the official cause of death! Moreover, on a death certificate you can write multiple causes of death. On average, they are about two or three, some have up to 20. And would you really use tests for covid for the dead rather than for the sick or recovered?

 Logically it's difficult to assign a death to a clear little category. If a person dies of a heart attack and it is tested positive of SARS-Cov-2, is it a heart attack? If someone dies of hunger because they lost their job during the pandemic, is it a Covid-19 death or not? If an 87 year old dies, can you really say which of the dozen medical conditions they were suffering of was the culprit?

 So in some situations the number of deaths associated with Covid-19 will be overwhelmingly exaggerated. This is good. It means the actual mortality rate is lower than what we can determine right now.

Population in an area

  Oh, come on! We know how many people there are in an area. How can you not trust this? Easy! Countries like China and Italy and others have implemented quarantine zones. That means that the total people in Italy or China is irrelevant as there are different densities of the contagion in regions of the same territory. Even without restrictive measures, geography and local culture as well as local genetic predispositions will work towards skewing any of the relevant values.

  Yeah, you can trust the number of people in small areas, especially if they are isolated, like Iceland, but then you can't trust those numbers in statistics, because they are not significant. As the virus spreads and more and more people get infected, we will be able to trust a little more the values, as computed over the entire world, but it will all be about estimations that we can't use in specific situations.

Infectiousness

  An important factor that will affect the total number of deaths, rather than the percent of dead over infected, is how infectious Covid-19 really is. Not all people exposed to SARS-Cov-2 will get infected. They are not really immune, some of them will be, some of them will be resistant enough to not catch the virus. I need a medical expert to tell me how large this factor is. I personally did not find enough information about this type of interaction (or lack thereof) and I suspect it is a small percent. However, most pessimistic scenarios assume 80% of the world population will get infected at some point. That implies a 20% that will not. If anyone knows more about this, please let me know.

Mortality trends

  There is another thing that has to be mentioned. By default viruses go through the process of attenuation when going through large populations. This is the process by which people with milder symptoms have a larger mobility, therefore they infect more people with their milder strain, while sicker people tend to "fall sick" and maybe die, therefore locking the more aggressive strains away from the general population. In this context (and this context only) quarantines and social distancing are actually bad because they limit the mobility of the milder strains as well as of the aggressive ones. In extreme cases, preventing people from interacting, but then taking severely sick people to hospitals and by that having them infect medical personnel and other people is making the disease stronger.

  However, statistically speaking, I expect the mortality of the virus to slowly decrease in time, meaning that even if we could compute the mortality rate exactly right now, it will be different later on.

  What about local authorities and medical administrators? How do they prepare for this if they can't pinpoint the number of sick and dead? The best strategy is hope for the best while preparing for the worst. Most politicians, though, live in a fantasy world of their own making where words and authority over others affect what and how things are done. There is also the psychological bias of wanting to believe something so much that you start believing it is probable. I am looking at you, Trump! Basically that's all he does. That being said, there are a lot of people who are doing their job and the best they can do is to estimate based on current data, then extrapolate based on the evolution of the data.

  So here is another piece of data, or rather information, that we have overlooked: the direction in which current data is moving. One of the most relevant is what is called "the peak of the contagion". This is the moment when, for whatever reasons, the number of infected and recovered has reached a point where the virus has difficulties finding new people to infect. The number of daily infections starts to decrease and, if you can't assign this drop to some medical or administrative strategy, you can hope it means the worst is behind you. Mind you, the number of total infected is still rising, but slower. I believe this is the one you should keep your attention on. While the number of daily infected people increases in your area, you are not out of the woods yet. 

Mechanism

  Statistical studies closely correlate the life expectancy of a population with the death rate in that population. In other words there isn't a specific mechanism that only kills old people, for example. In fact, this disease functions like a death probability amplifier. Your chances to die increase proportionally to how likely you were to die anyway. And again, statistically, it doesn't apply to you as an individual. The virus attacks the lungs and depending on your existing defenses, it is more or less successful. (To be fair, the success of a virus is measured in how much it spreads, not how badly it sickens its host. The perfect virus would show no negative symptom and increase the health or survival chances of its host. That's how vampires work!)

  I have no doubt that there are populations that have specific mutations that make them more or less susceptible to SARS-Cov-2, but I think that's not statistically relevant. I may be wrong, though. We can't know right now. There are reports of Italian regions in the middle of the contagion that have no sick people. 

Conclusion

  We cannot say with certainty what is the mortality rate right now. We can't even estimate it properly without going into horrible extremes. For reasons that I cannot ascertain, WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced on the 3rd of March a mortality rate estimated at 3.4%. It is immense and I personally believe it was irresponsible to make such a statement at that time. But what do I know? A UK study released today calculates a 1.4 fatality rate.

  My personal belief, and I have to emphasize that is a belief, no matter how informed, is that the mortality of this disease, by which I mean people who would have not died otherwise but instead died of viral pneumonia or organ failure due to SARS-Cov-2 overwhelming that very organ over the total people that have been exposed to the virus and their immune system has fought it, will be much less than 1%. That is still huge. Assuming a rate of infection of 80%, as many scenarios are considering right now, that's up to 0.8% of all people dying, meaning 60 million people. No matter what proportion of that number will die, it will still be a large number.

  The fact that most of these people would have been on their way anyway is not really a consolation. There will be loved grandparents, people that had various conditions and were happily carrying on with their first world protected lives, believing in the power of modern medicine to keep them alive. I really do expect that the average life expectancy, another statistic that would need thousands of words to unpack, will not decrease by a lot. In a sense, I believe this is the relevant one, though, in terms of how many years of life have been robbed from people by this virus. It, too, won't be easy to attribute. How many people will die prematurely because of losing their job, not getting medical attention when they needed it, getting murdered by people made insane by this whole thing, etc?

  Also, because the people who were more likely to die died sooner, or even got medical attention that they would otherwise not gotten, because pollution dropped, cars killed less people, etc, we might actually see a rise of the life expectancy statistic immediately after the pandemic ends.

  Bottom line: look for the daily number of newly infected people and rejoice when it starts consistently decreasing. After the contagion, try to ascertain the drop in average life expectancy. The true effects of this disease, not only in terms of mortality, will only become visible years after the pandemic ends.

  Update: mere days after I've written this article, BBC did a similar analysis.

  I didn't want to write about this. Not because of a false sense of security, but because everybody else talked about it. They all have opinions, most of them terribly wrong, but for me to join the fray and tell the world what I think is right would only put me in the same category as them. So no, I abstained. However, there are some things so wrong, so stupidly incorrect, that I can't maintain this silence. So let's begin.

  "The flu", "a cold" are not scientific, they are popular terms and they all relate to respiratory infectious diseases caused by a variety of viruses and sometimes bacteria or a combination thereof. Some of them affect us on a seasonal basis, some of them do not. Rhinoviruses are the ones most often associated with the common cold and they are seasonal. However, a whooping 15% of what is commonly called "a cold" comes from coronaviruses, thus named because of their crown-like shape. Influenza viruses, what we would normally call "flu" are a completely different type of virus. In other words, Covid-19 is more a common cold than a flu, but it's not the seasonal type. Stop wishful thinking that it will all go away with the summer. It will not. Other famous coronavirus diseases are SARS and MERS. The SARS epidemic lasted until July, the MERS epidemic spreaded just fine in the Middle Eastern summer weather. This will last. It will last for months from the moment I am writing this blog. This will be very important for the next section of the post.

  Also, there is something called the R-naught (R0), the rate with which a virus spreads to other people. It predicts, annoyingly accurate, how a disease is going to progress. This virus has an R0 probably twice as high as that of the influenza virus, which we all get, every fucking year. Draw your own conclusions.

  The only reason we got rid of SARS and MERS is because they are only infectious after the symptoms are apparent and the symptoms are pretty damn apparent. Covid-19 is very infectious even before the first cough, when people feel just fine. Surely masks will help, then? Not unless they are airtight. Medical masks are named so because medics use them in order to not cough or spit or breathe inside a patient, maybe during surgery. The air that the doctor breathes comes from the sides of the mask. So if you get sick and you wear the mask it will help the people that have not met you while you had no symptoms yet.

  Washing the hands is always good. It gets rid of all kind of crap. The primary medium of spreading Covid-19 is air, so you can wash your hands as often as you'd like, it helps very little with that. Stopping touching your face does little good, either. There is a scenario when someone coughs in their hand, touches something, then you touch it, then you pick your nose. Possible, so it's not all worthless, it's just statistically insignificant. What I am saying is that washing your hands and not touching yourself decreases the probability a very small amount. That being said, masturbation does increase the activity of your immune system, so be selective when you touch yourself.

  The idea that old people are the only ones affected is a myth. Age statistically correlates with harsher symptoms because it also correlates with negative health conditions. In other words, people with existing health conditions will be most affected. This includes smokers, obese people, people with high blood pressure, asthma and, of course, fucking old people. The best way to prepare for a SARS-Cov-2 virus (the latest "official" name) is to stay in good health. That means healthy food, less alcohol, no smoking and keeping a healthy weight. So yes, I am fucked, but at least I will die happy... oh, no, I am out of gin!!

  Medically, the only good strategy is to develop a vaccine as soon as possible and distribute it everywhere. It will lead quicker and with less casualties to the inevitable end of this pandemic: when more people are immune than those who are not. This will happen naturally after we all get infected and get healthy (or die). All of the news of people who got sick after getting healthy are artefacts of defective testing. All of it! Immunity does not work like that. You either got rid of it and your body knows how to defend itself or you never had it or you had something else or somebody tested you wrong.

  That being said, fuck all anti-vaxxers. You are killing people, you assholes!

  Personally, the best you can do is keep hydrated and eat in a balanced way. You need proteins and zinc and perhaps vitamin C (not sure about that). Warm bone broths will be good. Zinc you get from red meat and plant seeds. There was a report of drinking green tea being negatively correlated with influenza infections (different virus, though). And don't start doing sport now, if you haven't been doing it already, you can't get the pig fat one day before Christmas. Sport is actually decreasing the efficiency of your immune system.

  This is the end of the medical section of this post. There is nothing else. Probiotics won't help, Forsythia won't help, antibiotics will certainly not help. The only thing that fights the virus right now is your immune system, so just help it out. If there was a cure for the common cold you wouldn't get it each year every year.

  But it's not over. Because of people. When people panic, bad things happen. And by panic, I mean letting their emotions get the better of them, I mean not thinking people, not zombie hordes, although sometimes the difference is academic.

  Closing schools and workplaces and public places has one beneficial effect: it makes the infection rate go down. It doesn't stop the spread, it doesn't stop the disease, it just gives more time to the medical system to deal with the afflicted. But at the same time, it closes down manufacturing, supply chains, it affects the livelihood of entire categories of people. So here is where governments should step in, to cover financially the losses these people have to endure. You need money for medical supplies and for keeping healthy. Think of it as sponsoring immune systems.

  The alternative, something we are seeing now in paranoid countries, is closing down essential parts of national economies with no compensation. This is the place and time for an honest cost vs. gain analysis. Make sure the core of your nation is functioning. This is not one of those moments when you play dead for a few minutes and the bear leaves (or falls down next to you because he really likes playing that game). This is something that needs to work for months, if not a year or more. This is not (and never was) a case of stopping a disease, but of managing its effects. Some people are going to die. Some people are going to get sick and survive. Some lucky bastards will cough a few times and go on with their day. Society and the economical system that sustains it must go on, or we will have a lot more problems than a virus.

  Speaking of affected professions, the most affected will be medical personnel. Faced day in and day out with SARS-Cov-2 infections they will get infected in larger numbers than the regular population. Yes, they will be careful, they will wear masks and suits and whatever, but it won't help. Not in a statistical way, the only way we must think right now. It's a numbers game. It's no longer about tragedies, it's about statistics, as Stalin used to say. And these people are not regular people. They've been in school for at least a decade before they can properly work in a hospital where Covid-19 patients will be admitted. You lose one of these, you can't easily replace them. Especially in moron countries like my own, where the medical system is practically begging people to leave work in other countries. The silver lining is that probably, at the end of the outbreak, there will be a lot more medical people available, since they went through the disease and emerged safe and immune. But there is a lot of time between now and then.

  Closing borders is probably the most idiotic thing one can do, with perhaps the exception of countries that had real problems with immigration before. If sick people don't crowd your borders in order to take advantage of your medical system, closing borders is just dumb. The virus is already in, the only thing you are stopping is the flow of supplies to handle the disease. Easter is coming. People from all over the world will just move around chaotically to spend this religious holiday with their family. It will cause a huge spike in the number of sick people and will probably prompt some really stupid actions taken by governments all over the place. One could argue that religion is dumb at all times, but right now it makes no difference. It's just an acceleration of a process that is already inevitable, Easter or no Easter.

  Statistics again: look at the numbers and you will see that countries get an increase of 30% in infected cases every day. It's an exponential curve. It doesn't care about your biases, your myths, your hopes, your judging. It just grows. China will get infection cases as soon as travelling restrictions relax. Consider the ridiculous situation where one somehow protected their country against infection when the whole of the world went through a global pandemic. It doesn't even matter. It's not even healthy, as sooner or later that virus will affect only them. The best they can do is manage the situation, bottleneck it so that the medical system can cope with it.

  Do you know what the most important supply chain is in this situation? Medical supplies. A lot of countries get these from China and India. Because they are cheaper. So they can sell them to you at ten times the prices and make those immense profits that generated the name Big Pharma. It's not a conspiracy theory, it's common knowledge. What do you think happens when you close your borders with China and India?

  In this situation, the globally economy will stagger. It will be worse than the 2008 crisis. But while that was a crisis generated by artificial and abstract concepts that affected the real economy, that of people working for other people, this one comes as real as it gets, where people can't work anymore. That means less money, less resources, scarcity of some resources, less slack to care of the old and sick in your family. It's a lose-lose situation: the most affected by the pandemic will be affected either by people not being able to care for them or people giving them the disease while caring for them because they must make much more effort and human contact to get the supplies needed. Now, some countries can somehow handle that by employing a healthy transport infrastructure and care system, but in others, where they can barely handle normal quantities of sick people that come to hospitals themselves, they will never be able to cover, even if they wanted to, the effort to give supplies to previously affected people.

  So does that mean you have to go to the supermarket and get all the supplies you might need for months to come? I am afraid to say that it does. The reasonable way to handle this is for the governments of the world to ensure supply and financial support for everybody. Then people wouldn't need to assault shops to get the last existing supplies. If you can trust your government to do that, by all means, trust you will always have a nearby shop to sell you the goods you need to stay alive and health. But I ask you this: if you got to the farmacy and bought their entire stock of some medicine that you might need and then you hear your neighbor, the person you greeted every day when you got to work, died because they couldn't get that medicine, what then? What if you hear they need the medicine now? Will you knock at their door and offer it to them? Maybe at five time the price? Or maybe for free? What if you are the neighbor?

  And you hear that some country has isolated the virus and are making a vaccine. Oh, it's all over, you think. But before they even start mass producing it, they need to test it. People will die because of how overcautious and bureaucratic the system is. People will die when corners are cut. People will die either way. It will take time either way. This thing will be over, but not soon. After they make it, you will still have to get it. That means supply chains and money to buy things.

  Bottom line: it's all about keeping systems going. In your body, the immune system has to be working to fight the disease. In your country, the economy must be working in order to handle the effects of the disease. Fake cures and home remedies are just as damaging as false news of the crisis not being grave, getting over soon or going away by itself.

  Here is a video from a medical professional that is saying a lot of the things I've listed here:

[youtube:E3URhJx0NSw]

  One more thing: consider how easy it was for this panic to lead to countries announcing national emergency, a protocol that gives extraordinary powers to the government. A few dead here, a few sick there, and suddenly the state has the right to arrest your movement, to detain you unconditionally, to close borders, to censor communications. Make sure that when this is over, you get every single liberty back. No one it going to return freedom to you out of their own good will.