This isn’t a ramble. I have a number of lines of thought I’ve been stewing over at work all weekend, and I’ll be going down each one until I’m done.
Let’s begin.
4000
8000
16000
32000
64000
128000
256000
512000
1000000
2000000
4000000
8000000
16000000
32000000
64000000
128000000
256000000
512000000
4000 is the number of confirmed cases of coronavirus in the U.S. now.
(That we know about. Reality could be 100,000 or more.)
If that original number doubles seventeen more times, the product is a number larger than the populations of the U.S. (330M), Mexico(137M), and Canada(37M), combined. IOW, it’s virtually everywhere in North America at that point. (No, I’m not particularly concerned about the banana republics between Mexico and South America in this regard. They can lump it.)
What I’ve read is that the outbreak is doubling every 4-6 days. So somewhere between 68 and 102 days from today, the shit sandwich on this continent reaches full maturity.
If the spread of the disease is moving at that rate.
If the current voluntary measures don’t halt that growth, or even slow that pace.
If it doesn’t run out of people stupid enough to keep doing things to spread it.
With the above caveats:
May 22nd, to June 26th, give or take.
It crests 100M cases a week to two earlier.
Long before then, we’ll have a great view of how lethal it is, and how many cases are serious. So by somewhere between mid-May and Mid-June, we’ll either have metric f**ktons of people requiring hospitalization, and dead, or not. How much better or worse it is then will be a foolproof look at whether this is a nothingburger, or Spanish Flu. Oh, and if there are really 100,000 cases now, we get there a full month earlier.
Now maybe you can figure out why POTUS said this will last through July or August, at minimum.
