Officially, Legally Locked-Down

Governor Jay Inslee has ordered everyone in Washington State to Stay Home, Stay Healthy.

More details on the Governor’s Medium page

I normally work from home this time of year and most of my days include phone/internet calls with people from across the country and other continents. If you are not living in a hot spot, stock up on non-perishable food now, as this same order is coming to your state and country in the next few weeks.

The latest graph (above) from the Financial Times help illustrate this point. Except for a few outliers, every country is doubling in positive tested cases every 1-3 days.

South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong’s massive testing have slowed their growth rate, providing that method works. Italy’s growth rate in the past few days has slowed down to double only every four days, showing hope that lock-downs will work in Western countries.

But note that 7 days ago I posted the FT’s graph and the top line was 20,000 cases, with only China above that. Now Italy is above 50,000. And even more scary, the U.S. 7 days ago had less than 3,000 cases. In a day the count will surpass 50,000.

So again, if you are in a city or country with a handful of cases, you are only a month behind Italy, Spain, and Washington State. It is inevitable now that we’ll see a lockdown in New York City, probably before the week is over.

Lastly, for anyone listening to the nonsense from the “other Washington”, the one where the disease is inside both Congress and the White House, the one that is saying this will all be over in a few weeks, those are neither facts nor beliefs, they are at best platitudes to calm the masses, but more likely simply outright lies.

People are dying! Far more people will soon be dying. You can all save lives, and it’s simple. Stock up on food, stay home, and stay safe.

Two years into this global pandemic, many misguided people are still comparing Covid-19 to influenza. 1,600 death in a week in 2018 was tragic, but those influenza spikes are barely visible when compared to the tragic scale of Covid-19, and even more so given a simple cloth mask and vaccines that prevent most deaths. Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on...

Two years ago was the first known case of Covid-19 in a human being. That makes this week a very unhappy anniversary, one that we’re likely to “celebrate” for quite a few more years before this pandemic is finally history. Looking back at the 5+ million lives lost so far, despite those losses and despite the historically fast rollout of vaccines, the overall trend of cases is...

The influenza pandemic of 1918-1920 killed at least 25 million people globally. Here in the United States 675,000 people are known to have died from that massive outbreak of flu. As of this last week (middle of September 2021), more people have died of Covid-19 in this pandemic. 682,000 as of today, with another 2,000 Americans dying every single day. While 675,000 is the population of a city and...

If only people looked back into history to learn from past mistakes, the masses would stop repeating so many past mistakes. Here in 2021, it’s the ideas that vaccines are worse than the disease and that vaccines take away one’s freedom. This long tweet stream tells the story better than I could (emphasis is mine, unrolled into text and images to make it easier to read): This is a good...

Back in March 2020, when the first lockdowns hit, The Hammer and the Dance was published on Medium predicting the future of the pandemic. This is a great piece of analysis. Unfortunately, like my predictions written way back then, this author had an assumption that proved false. Specifically, that people would prioritize life. That people would behave so that the fewest number of people would die...