The data I'm not seeing reported on the Chinese Flu

There are two data points that are being reported: number of total cases and number of deaths.  This is unsatisfactory, because these data do not (directly) measure the most critical concern, the reason that we've shut down our whole economy and thrown 10M+ people out of work: the capacity of the health care system.  This (stolen from Gorges) sums up the inadequacy of the data as reported:

We're missing something.  Clearly if we overload the system then all sorts of Bad Things happen, but the data don't show this.  So the question is: are we overloading the health care system?  We need different data to understand this.  I would propose the following:

• Number of admissions to the hospital
• Number of ICU beds in use
• Number of ventilators in use
• Number of discharges from hospital
• Number of discharges from ICU

I quite frankly have no idea what the numbers are for this, and haven't been able to find them.  I'm pretty convinced that these are the figures to look at, which will be key in deciding when (and how much) to reopen the economy.

If anyone has a link to where some of this can be found, I'd be very appreciative.

UPDATE 5 April 13:18: Lots and lots of really good, thoughtful comments.  I highly recommend everyone read them as well as this post.

Hector Berlioz - "Resurrexit" from Messe Solennelle

The Church of St. Roche

This is an appropriate composition for Palm Sunday: it was performed twice before the score was destroyed by the composer, but he missed a single copy which was rediscovered almost 200 years later. It was resurrected, you might say.

Hector Berlioz was an interesting fellow.  He was a free thinker and a rebel in a rigidly conformist period, and so his music runs a wide gamut from groundbreaking (like his Symphony Fantastique) to pedestrian (but commercially successful).  He wrote this piece when he was only twenty years old, and it is clearly in the "groundbreaking" category.  Beethoven was still alive, but this is very like Wagner, who would write decades in the future.

The Mass was performed only twice, initially at the Church of St. Roche in Paris.  Berlioz then destroyed all the copies of the score, preserving only this particular piece (Resurrexit).

Palm Sunday calls for triumphant, and this is nothing if not that.  And it is also somewhat poignant, a Mass lost for 167 years and then resurrected.

It's good to kill a Navy Captain, to encourage the others

Respect is often demanded, but always earned.  The crew of the USS Theodore Roosevelt gives an ovation to CAPT Crozier as he leaves his ship for the last time.

Mais dans ce pays-ci il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un Amiral pour encourager les autres. 

There is no doubt of it; but in this country it is found good, from time to time, to kill an Admiral to encourage the others. 

- Voltaire, Candide

The Navy Brass can kiss my ass.  And SECNAV Modly needs to make up two new envelopes.  The CNO and CINCPAC as well.  If you need to start shooting Admirals, there are a bunch in the E-Ring.  Nobody will miss them.

And a note to folks who comment that CAPT Crozier bypassed the chain of command - of course he did.  What we haven't seen is all the communication he had with the E-Ring types before that, where they basically told him "We don't want to hear 'but sir'; we want to hear 'yes, sir'".  Anyone who thinks for 2 seconds knows this.  If you want to leave a comment on chain of command, make sure to address this topic.

And also address the following: if the only rational approach to the Chinese Virus From Hell is to shut down f***ing everything in America because it is the Only Way To Avoid Pandemic Disaster, then why is shutting down a Navy Plague Ship not the Only Way To Avoid Pandemic Disaster?  Note: any comments along the lines of "the military needs to suck it up during an emergency" will be deleted without mercy.  Yes, I'm pretty steamed about this.

SECNAV should be keelhauled in the Tidal Basin while all the inhabitants of the E-Ring are forced to watch.

House Armed Forces Committee Democrats to Acting SECNAV: Make up two new envelopes

Bravo Zulu to the Democrats on the House Armed Forces Committee:

Senior members of the House Armed Services Committee called the firing of USS Theodore Roosevelt Capt. Brett Crozier on Thursday an “overreaction” by Navy leadership that would endanger service members, hurt the fleet’s ability to fight, and discourage other service members from speaking out on critical safety issues.

“[W]e are very concerned about the chilling effect this dismissal will have on commanders throughout the Department of Defense,” wrote committee Democrats, including Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) and Subcommittee Chairs Joe Courtney (D-CT), John Garamendi (D-CA), and Jackie Speier (D-CA) in a press release.

“Dismissing a commanding officer for speaking out on issues critical to the safety of those under their command discourages others from raising similar concerns,” they said.

...

“While Captain Crozier clearly went outside the chain of command, his dismissal at this critical moment – as the Sailors aboard the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt are confronted with the COVID-19 pandemic – is a destabilizing move that will likely put our service members at greater risk."

[Stands]

[Clap] [Clap] [Clap]

When the Chairman of the Armed Forces Committee is publicly rebuking the Acting SECNAV, it's time for him to make up two new envelopes.  Oh, and other House Democrats are sore, too:

Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) also blasted Navy leadership for the decision to fire Crozier.

“I learned on my first day in the Marines that having the courage to speak truth to power is grounds for respect not grounds for relief,” Moulton tweeted on Thursday. “This is far from the first time in the last several years that Congress is going to have a lot of questions for Navy leadership—on leadership.”

This.  A Million times this.

BZ to the House Democrats.  I don't think I've said that before.

On a personal note, I've watched this unfold over the last week because my Son-In-Law is on that ship. The families of the crew had been receiving daily emails from the Captain explaining what was happening and what he was doing.  Every day.

That is the kind of transparency earns respect.  That's leading from the front.  Acting SECNAV Modly is not leading from the front.  On the contrary, he appears to be nothing but a stuffed shirt desk jockey.

Make up two new envelopes, matey.

Hat tip to The Queen Of The World, who's about ready to keel haul the SECNAV.

This is not the Zombiepocalypse I had been promised

Shamelessly stolen from David Drake.

An open letter to the Acting Secretary of the Navy

To: Acting SECNAV

From: Borepatch

Subject: CO, U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt

Dear Acting SECNAV:

An old story from the world of professional football may clarify the current situation of you vis a vis CAPT Crozier, CO of the aircraft carrier USS TR who you are about to s***can for acting in the interest of keeping his crew functional in the face of the Red Chinese Virus Plague from Hell (RCVPfH™).

A losing team fired their coach and brought in a new one, to get the team back on a winning track.  As he was moving into his office he found two sealed envelopes in the desk.  One was labeled "Open in the first crisis" and the second was labeled "Open in the second crisis".  He thought this was a little weird but tossed them in the back of the desk drawer and forgot about them.

The new season opened, and it did not open well.  The team was losing, and losing badly.  The fans and the home town press started questioning what he was doing, and whether replacing the old coach had been a good idea or not.  He was putting in 18 hour days trying to turn things around, and in the wee hours of the night, he found the envelopes in his desk.  Figuring that this was a crisis, he opened the first one.  It read, in its entirety:

Blame everything on me.

He called a press conference and talked about how he had inherited a completely messed up team.  He went on about how the previous coach had let a thousand flowers of failure bloom, and that he was working on weeding out the old, bad regime and laying the seeds of success.

And it worked.  The boos weren't as loud, and the press backed off.

But late in the season it came back.  His respite was gone, and the boo-birds and scathing media were back in full swing.  He figured that this was the second crisis, and so went to his office and opened the second envelope.  It read, in its entirety:

Make two new envelopes.

POTUS Donald Trump is really good at firing people who he puts in a management position in order to fix particular problems.  Your predecessor did not support the people under his command, and is now enjoying more time with his family.  Observing how you choose to deal with people under your command - particularly CPT Crozier who looks like he is doing his best to suppress the virus outbreak on one of our capital ships so it can get back into action - suggests this as your next career step:

Make up two new envelopes.

Love, Borepatch

P.S. I had higher hopes that you might raise my estimate of the caliber of the inhabitants of the E-Ring.  It appears that I was misinformed.

P.P.S. Don't let it hit you in the derriere on the way out, bucko.

UPDATE 3 April 2020 10:49: I'm not the only one steamed about this - the House Armed Forces Committee is pretty blunt that SECNAV screwed up here.

Sonny Terry & Brownie McGee - Midnight Special

If your only introduction to these gentlemen is from the Steve Martin film "The Jerk", then there's a lot more to the World than you suspected.

Just how lousy are the climate models?

I posted this ten years ago, and it is still as relevant today for the ZOMGTHERMAGEDDON!!!!11!!!eleventy!! hype.  It also is important to chew on when you look at the models for Kung Flu deaths.  A healthy skepticism is always in order when you hear reports of model projections.

Remember, all models are wrong; some are less wrong.  Your mileage may vary, void where prohibited, do not remove tag under penalty of law.

Originally posted April 1, 2010.

Climate Model software

There's a very interesting comment that I missed last spring, over at an Armed and Dangerous post. Ken Burnside writes on how they work, in some detail.

1. Ken Burnside Says:
   April 19th, 2009 at 11:05 amI have old-but-direct experience with the models, circa 1999, about the time of the Mann graph.
   
   I was a science reporter in Madison, WI. And got asked to interview Dr. Reid Bryson at the UW Madison. Bryson is, for all intents and purposes, the figurative founder of atmospheric and climate sciences.
   
   I wouldn’t know where to look for the bugger factors in the models. 
   
   However, he and I spent about 3 weeks running three of their models through their paces.
   
   We started using the data sets they gave, and got the results they indicated.
   
   We then looked at the data sets given and compared them to historical temperature proxies, and found some discrepencies, and noted that it treated the H20 storage capacity of the middle atmosphere as being infinite (major problem).
   
   We then ran historical data from 1900 into all three models, and let them run (each modeling run took about 4 days, so we ran them in parallel.
   
   One had the oceans boiling off in the 1950s, because the temperatures in the 1930s triggered a runaway greenhouse effect.
   
   The other two were less spectacular – they had temperature rises of about 5-6 C and 6-9 by the end of the century.
   
   We then tried to isolate the forcing factors and see what they were; we ran the most extreme model with a solar input constant that was HALFED (EG, we did the equivalent of moving the Earth to Mars’ orbit). We postponed the boil-off effect to the late ’90s by doing that.)
   
   So, we take the data sets they give, we run corroborations, we can’t replicate the historical record.
   
   So, who is it that doesn’t understand the scientific method? 
   
   Atmospheric observational scientists don’t report anything CLOSE to what the predictions make.
   
   The Dean of the American Society of Statistical Sciences (Wegman) says, in essence, that if the statistical methods used by most of the climate sciences were used that way on a Freshman stats class, he’d flunk them all – and says, before Congress, that they cooked the books for a political agenda.
   
   I write models for a living – I design games. This doesn’t mean I’m up to all the tricks of cooking models that are out there, but I do know how to do bounds checking on them, how to run a chi-square, and look for hot spots. I have discovered that I’ve got more day to day use of my stats and calculus classes than most of the professional working scientists I know, or have as customers.
   
   If I’d gotten a historical wargame submission this bad, I’d've sent it back with a reading list on the topic and told the author to try again.

That's six months before ClimateGate.

The whole post and the entire comment thread makes for very interesting reading. Very interesting. If this is your bag, baby, then you should go look. Plan on a good 15 minutes or more - there are 266 comments.

Entertaining During Self Isolation - a Brigid Hijacked Post

I know I haven't posted on here, with your good graces, in a long time, but I couldn't resist this.  Home Entertainment During Self Isolation. - Cheers, Brigid.

Double damn

I had mentioned that my Son-In-Law is on the USS Theodore Roosevelt, where there had been an outbreak of the Kung Flu.  It looks like things are spicy:

Theodore Roosevelt captain makes urgent plea for individual quarantine sites as COVID-19 cases multiply

The commanding officer of aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt is urging the Navy to step up its response to COVID-19 and secure individualized isolation for the ship’s crew as COVID-19 cases aboard the ship continue to multiply, according to a new report. 

... 

“Sailors do not need to die,” Crozier wrote in the letter. “If we do not act now, we are failing to properly take care of our most trusted asset — our Sailors.”

Crozier said the situation would be different in a time of conflict, because “in combat we are willing to take certain risks that are not acceptable in peacetime.” 

...

Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas said that the Navy “doesn’t disagree” with Crozier, and noted that the Navy has been working to remove sailors from the Roosevelt for days. But limited space in Guam is created some challenges, he said. 

“The problem is that Guam doesn’t have enough beds right now, so we’re having to talk to the government there to see if we can get some hotel space, create some tent-type facilities there,” Modly said in an interview with CNN Tuesday.

SECNAV getting involved does not suggest that this is no big deal.  I'd think that a Navy ship at sea is a pretty good petri dish for the Red Chinese Virus.

Hat tip to The Queen Of The World, who has pretty sharp eyes for family stuff.

Free videoconferencing service available

Cisco's WebEx videoconferencing service is probably the market leading service for big companies to have videoconference meetings.  They've made it available to anyone for free.  This stuff is the real deal (I work from home and use this every day).

If you work with a group that could use this - or if you can use it by yourself with friends or family - go get you some.  All you need is a browser.

Full Disclosure: I work for Cisco, but get no sales commission on these $0 orders.

So what happens when you shut down a country's economy?

Interesting things:

The ‘conservative’ Spanish newspaper/site abc.es. has a report about the food situation in Italy (in Spanish) which indicates the following, something our media seems to ignore, per my translation:  

‘Increasing woe in Italy due to the coronavirus: almost 3,000,000 people need food aid’ 

There’s a 10% uplift there, as the report gives a breakdown with more details. 

In Campania more than 530,000 people need food, almost 9% of the region’s population. More than 364,000 in Sicily, almost 283,000 in Calabria. Even Lazio has more than 263,000 people in need. One analysis says around 2,700,000 people need food aid. 

There is much discussion of raids on pharmacies and supermarkets, with police guarding them. 

And this is interesting:

And how long here before our food supply chains might disintegrate, when people have to laboriously shop 2 meters apart, queueing to get in, queueing to pay, as the capacity of the shops to serve customers is throttled, whether or not the products are limited or in short supply. Is there any modelling of how long this can go on, never mind if it should at all?

Here in Maryland there is a State-wide shelter in place order.  You can't go out except for urgent business, or you face a year in jail.  Can't wait until you need a reservation to shop at the supermarket.

Joe Diffie, Rest In Peace

Dead at 61 from Coronavirus.  I posted about him in the early days of this blog, on the topic of shuffling off the mortal coil.  I didn't expect to dust it off so soon, for someone taken from us far to young.  His music sure made me smile, and I hope that you've gone to Glory singing this.

Rest in peace, Joe, and thanks for all the great music.

(Originally posted 4 April 2009)

Joe Diffie - Prop Me Up Beside The Jukebox

Matt G has a serious post about what he wants done after dies. The comments are serious as well, and well worth a read - the whole subject is one that a true adult should address

square on, without flinching.

Until JayG arrived:

I've got one word and one word only for after I shuffle off this mortal coil:

Taxidermy.

Both of my reader's will be shocked to discover that I have more than a little of this sort of sense of humor myself. Which leads us to today's Saturday Redneck.

Joe Diffie was something of a Country music sensation during the 1990s, with 2 platinum and 2 gold albums, with 5 songs reaching #1 on the US Country charts and 17 in the top 10. His specialty was songs with a sense of humor - sometimes called "novelty" songs - like his 1994 song Third Rock From The Sun.

But today we're interested in his album from the previous year, with a song that hit #5. Prop Me Up Beside The Jukebox (If I Die). I love this video, because it captures the 1990s so well - mullets, big hair, and Larry The Cable Guy style ("wife beater") shirts. It's also completely slapstick comedy.

Matt G, there's a serious discussion on the serious topic of passing on from this vale of tears. Unfortunately, it ain't here.

Prop Me Up Beside The Jukebox (sognwriters: Howard Perdew, Rick Blaylock, Kerry Kurt Phillips)

Well I ain't afraid of dyin', it's the thought of being dead
I wanna go on being me once my eulogy's been read
Don't spread my ashes out to sea, don't lay me down to rest
You can put my mind at ease if you fulfill my last request

Prop me up beside the jukebox if I die
Lord, I wanna go to heaven but I don't wanna go tonight
Fill my boots up with sand, put a stiff drink in my hand
Prop me up beside the jukebox if I die

Just let my headstone be a neon sign
Let it burn in mem'ry of all of my good times
Fix me up with a manequin, just remember I like blondes
I'll be the life of the party even when I'm dead and gone

Prop me up beside the jukebox if I die
Lord, I wanna go to heaven but I don't wanna go tonight
Fill my boots up with sand, put a stiff drink in my hand
Prop me up beside the jukebox if I die

Just make your next selection and while your still in line
You can pay you last respects one quarter at a time

Prop me up beside the jukebox if I die
Lord, I wanna go to heaven but I don't wanna go tonight
Fill my boots up with sand, put a stiff drink in my hand
Prop me up beside the jukebox if I die

Oh, prop me up beside the jukebox if I die

What the media is not reporting about the virus

38 year old Michigan Man says drug combo recommended by Donald Trump saved his life:

Santilli said he became seriously ill March 18 “with severe cardiac and respiratory issues” and was admitted to Henry Ford Macomb Hospital in metro Detroit.

According to Gruber, “Santilli said the biggest problem was waiting for test results that took four days to come back. In the meantime his condition worsened by the hour, and he thought he was going to die.”

“Santilli says he was slowly drowning and was convinced he ‘would not live until midnight.’ That’s when doctors made a decision he says changed everything,” Gruber said.

The survivor said the drug combination began to work “within a few hours.”

Santilli credited Trump for his survival.

“Donald Trump recommending that medication combination saved my life and a lot of other people’s lives,” he told Gruber.

Santilli criticized Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) for her recent threat against doctors and pharmacists, and believed it is a “terrible decision,” adding, “She is sentencing people to death.”

Confirmation today from a larger study in France, too.  If I get this damn thing (assuming I haven't already) then I don't care if the combo isn't "proven" - I'd want it.

Oh, and the Michigan Governor is a twit.  If this combo actually shows that it saves a lot of lives, I don't see how she gets re-elected.  Dumbass.

Oh, and it sure would be nice if the media would actually cover stories like this.  Eventually they will have to, if the drug combo turns out to be effective.  But this is why way more people trust Trump about the virus than trust the media.

The Basilica of the Hagia Sophia as a musical instrument

The Hagia Sophia was for a thousand years the most famous church in Christendom.  Built by the Roman Emperor Justinian I in Constantinople, the church is unlike anything that came before, or since. When the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453 and finally put an end to the Roman Empire, the Hagia Sophia became a mosque for a while.  Ataturk turned it into a museum in the 1920s.  You can visit it if you find yourself in Istanbul.

But there is to this day a ban on any musical performance there.  Since the Eastern Orthodox liturgy is sung, there has been no way to know what it sounded like back in Justinian's day.  Except now the science of acoustics and digital signal processing has brought this sound back to life after more than 500 years.



This is a very unusual edition of my Sunday Classical posts - the focus is less on the music than on the building.  The experience of the divine was captured in a unique way in the church, one that could not be experienced in the same way anywhere else in the world.  The architecture merged with and changed the sound in a way that was entirely sui generis; the rising (or setting) sun lit the interior in a way that was described as liquid gold.  While we cannot experience that today, we can get a feel for what it must have been like with the musical recreations of the group Cappella Romana, electronically enhanced to match the acoustics of the Hagia Sophia.

This is a very different experience from western church music, which we have seen here many times.  There is an outstanding (and long) discussion of this experience and how they recreated it at the podcast Byzantium and Friends.  It covers different aspects of the religious experience in that church - the sound, the decoration, the lighting, and how they all came together as much more than the sum of the parts.  I expect that Peter Grant, Lone Star Parson, Rev. Paul, and maybe Tim Wolter might want to listen to it despite the length (over 60 minutes).  Other people might want to click through that link which will lead them to a documentary about how the sound was recreated, which is included on the DVD of Cappella Romana's performance of Lost Voices Of The Hagia Sophia.  I expect that the DVD experience will far surpass MP3, because of the surround sound effect.

Hat tip to Peter Grant, who posted about this a couple weeks back; I ran across the podcast which adds a ton of depth to what he wrote about.  If you, like me, are a history nerd, then this is a great way to spend some time while you are isolating at home.

Something wicked this way comes

This report from an ER doc doesn't sound good at all.

The Queen Of The World explains things

TQOTW posted this on Facebook, and I thought I'd reproduce it here in full:

Warning - rant ahead!
One of the most isolated places people can be right now is jail, especially if no visitors are allowed in. So why are jails and prisons releasing prisoners due to the virus??? It’s happening all over.
Cities are refusing to arrest criminals due to the virus.
Suddenly places notorious for supporting more gun control laws are seeing gun and ammo sales go thru the roof.
Blaming it all on the virus that the media has blown out of proportion.
In the beginning the democrats wouldn’t listen to Trump. Later they blamed him.
It’s time to wake up!!!
Yes the virus is real, yes people die. But it is still no where near the numbers seen every year related to regular flu virus.
So why would the media and the liberals want to blow this up?
Think about it - the economy was going better than it has for many, many years. Jobs were brought back to America. Unemployment was way down. Women, blacks, and Latin Americans were supporting Trump. Crime is going down. There was no Russian collusion. There was no improper phone call with the Ukraine. Illegal immigration was waning.
And now we’re seeing democrats trying to take advantage of emergency aide efforts by tacking on all kinds of bills to support their everyday causes and thereby holding up whats needed now. Blackmail! Give us what we want or screw all the people that need help right now! Instead, if they have their way, people will need to first become desperate and then HAVE to rely on the causes they’re trying to tack on now. (Example: Unemployed, homeless, and hungry - I need planned parenthood because I can’t care for a baby now)
They tried scandals, they tried collusion, they tried Impeachment, they fought allowing illegals in, they pushed gun control. This is the only means left to reverse the economic growth, reverse the unemployment, reverse support for the president.
And it’s a misuse of power, a lack of concern for the people of this country, and a purely evil political agenda!
Think beyond the daily headlines, ask why there is so much conflicting data, have you heard of any prison deaths due to the virus, why wouldn’t every politician put aside their political agendas and differences and do all they can to help people and the issues related to this virus now, how and why can anyone blame the president for this - how can you blame AMYONE for this? They didn’t blame Obama and didn’t go this overboard - why?
Why hasn’t the CDC been held more responsible for their enormous blunders?
So many questions to be asked and they come to you if you think it thru instead of taking whatever the media throws out there as gospel.
Releasing criminals is where this rant started. Just one more attempt at reversing the winning we’ve been enjoying over the past 3 years.

Yup.

I wonder if I have had - and recovered from - the Kung Flu

I had respiratory trouble - graduating to bronchitis and then pneumonia - last month.  It's actually been a long slow recovery over the last two months.  Given the reports that Kung Flu cases are underreported by a factor of ten, I am really wondering if I caught it and (mostly) recovered.

I guess the only way to tell is a test for the presence of antibodies and nobody is going to do that as I (mostly) feel better and am (mostly) asymptomatic.  This is a good example of what I've been talking about - the data are notoriously incomplete.

Damn

My Son-In-Law, a Chief on the USS Theodore Roosevelt, is in quarantine.  One of the men on his crew tested positive for the Kung Flu, and so now he's in (sort of) isolation.  He feels fine, but I guess we'll know more in 7-14 days.  I hope it turns out like this:

Wonder what's happening in the People's Liberation Army Navy?

There are no good solutions

pessimal: /pes im l/, adj.[Latin-based antonym for optimal] Maximally bad. “This is a pessimal situation.” Also pessimize vt. To make as bad as possible. These words are the obvious Latin-based antonyms for optimal and optimize, but for some reason they do not appear in most English dictionaries, although ‘pessimize’ is listed in the OED.

Aesop writes about how everything seems to be going wrong about the response to the Kung Flu:

Pandemic suppression may indeed fail.

Probably because too little, too late, and kabuki theater screening at airports, when we should have shunted everyone into mandatory quarantine for 30 days before entry was allowed, starting in early- or mid-January.

If only the CDC hadn’t pooch-screwed the test kits so hard that the dog will never walk right again.

You're going to need a bigger blog post to list everything that the Fed.Gov, State(s).Gov, and Local.Gov are doing wrong, not to mention the Solons who run the Hospitals (and who are threatening to fire nurses who wear masks).

I would add to his list:

• Failure to designate a single hospital in a city/region as the Kung Flu Medical Center, and isolating all patients (and a significant portion of the PPE) there.  At the very least this will slow the spread of the virus among medical workers and protect capacity for non-virus emergency care.
• No centralized procurement of cloth masks (of course these are not as effective in preventing infection as disposable ones, but given the massive mask shortage a million cloth masks that can be washed in bleach daily isn't nothing.  Probably more important for general population and first responders, but not nothing.
• No non-crappy models of Kung Flu disease spread.  Granted, all computer models are always wrong to a greater or lesser extent, but what we have right now makes the climate models look like Nostradamus.  Add in the terrible data being fed into the models and you are better off simply ignoring all model output.
• The entire western world is being driven into a depression.  Millions are out of work, with more on the way.
• The pain is falling disproportionately on the working poor.  Since a lot of these live in proximity to the Gimmedat community, their suffering will inflame anger in the group most likely to loot and riot.  I think we're two weeks away from the first big one, probably less than that.
• The Fed.Gov is ramming through a $2T, 2000 page "bailout" law that is guaranteed to be larded with goodies for everyone other than the people who are most hurt by the shutdowns.  If 50% of this money does anything other than line the pockets of well-connected special interests it will be a miracle.  This by itself will do further damage to the economy, putting more people out of work or raising inflation (hurting the working poor).  Or both at the same time.

Quite frankly, I can't imagine how things could be worse.  Aesop's worst case scenario of a melt down in the medical community seems to be happening, and every government response I see looks like another toe gets shot off the Body Politick.

Pessimal.

It may be that there just is no solution.  I wish I could be more optimistic, but I don't see anyone doing anything remotely sensible.