Letter to Corona
By ice rivers
- 676 reads
Scientists measure the spread of an epidemic by a number called R0, or “R naught.” That number is calculated this way: for every person who develops the illness, how many other people do they give it to before they are cured (or dead) and no longer infectious? The R0 for coronavirus appears to be a number close to 3 – an extremely frightening number for such a deadly disease.
Suppose you catch the virus. You will give it to 3 other people, and they will each give it to three others, and so forth. Here is how the math works, where you, the “index case,” are the first line:
1
3
9
27
81
243
729
2,187
6,561
19,683
59,046
177,147
531,441
1,594,323
4,782,969
14,348,907
Here's the deal though.
In case you haven't realized it by now, life is castrophically non-linear. This means that we can get something good going and it looks like it's gonna keep getting better and better until damn something effed up happens and all of a sudden we're going in the opposite direction. Take most of our love lives for a quick example. We're going along fine until boom disillusion, disenchantment, disenfranchisement and finally dis sucks and I'm getting the hell out of dis (but it's not my fault or yours) etc or as Johnny Lennon once asked "how can I go forward when I don't know which way I'm facing."
Well guess what virus....you're alive right? everything's going your way right? Look at those numbers. You're kicking ass and taking names right? You're black swanning everybody and having the time of your shitty life. Bad news asshole. It's not gonna last. If you're alive, you cn count on catastrophe and fuggedaboud linearity.
Ya finally had the balls to come over to America. Well guess what? After we stop bungling around and get past the misinformation, we're coming after you. We got the full court press on your ass right now. We're socially distancing and spiritually connecting. Yeah, we're staying indoors. Yeah the schools are closed. The kids are driving us crazy. We're bickering. We're washing our hands like maniacs. We're coming for ya asshole. Nobody wants to piss off the good old USA and our motto: we won't fuck with you but if you fuck with us we gonna fuck you up. We're taking your ass seriously now. We're starting to mobilize. Nobody spends more money on defense than us and we're about to declare all out war on you Corona.
You're gonna join the rest of those virus a holes like cholera and the plague and the Spanish flu and whatever else is rotting on the scrap heap of extinct chumps. Nobody's gonna miss ya. You're going down as a real asshole who overstayed your welcome and you were never welcome in the first place.
We're coming at you with money with society and with spirituality. Remember when Moses came down from the mountain he said "don't covid thy neighbor's wife" and "don't covid thy neighbor's goods". Well we're taking it one step further. We won't covid our neighbors period. We're gonna watch out for each other. We're gonna stay at home and man did you pick a bad time to make us "stay" at home.
We've got teevee. We've got internet. We've got facebbok. We've got Twitter. We've got Kindle. We can get virtually anybook we want and we can read our asses off. We can go on walks and it's gonna be Spring soon. we can spend quality time with our families. We don't need your ass around here.
Yeah, we're gonna lose some folks around here but you ain't seen nothing like the courage of our health providers nor the brilliance of our researchers nor the generosity of our government nor the flexibilty of our economy nor the spirit of humanity that is still rocking in the freeworld.
Have your putrid fun, scumbag. We're gonna getcha. Get used to it. GTFO.
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Comments
It's called exponential growth
It's called exponential growth. This virus instance is a kind of a super chain-reaction but what you did leave out in your explanation is it also depends on how quick the average infection takes to be passed on. A time factor but in the longer run it doesn't make much of a difference.
The best you can hope for is to survive once you get infected. It does sound as if the mortality rate is very low and most cases completely recover. Then you can have what's left.
I think what the authoraties do is to slow down so the situation can be controlled not just sudden impact WHAM!! Nothing will be left. Next question, what's next?
What a boring subject. We had rain, still hoping for a rainbow!
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I read what you explained of the "R0"
I read what you explained of the "R0" the traditional idea of a kind of "half-life" would be more useful, a "doubling-time" measure the time the infected population doubles. Although it would probably also work better in the beginning because there are other considerations too for instance the infected population always has to be less than whole, the total.
Keep well, all the best, Tom Brown
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