It's all still a senseless panic, on top of that. The majority of the panic is coming from raw speculation and news articles
designed to whip people into a frenzy because if there's one thing that can generate attention and ad revenue, it's convincing everyone that there's a pandemic rushing up to their doorstep, so they sit there breathlessly slamming their face into the F5 key.
Newsweek
begrudgingly told the truth about COVID-19, but only after vomiting up more panic into your eyes. Compared to other epidemics, this isn't even that dangerous. The only reason that it's causing any damage is because everyone is freaking the fuck out and when China hit the brakes, it dragged the world's economy to a halt along with it. An insane, authoritarian government that was responsible for the Tienanmen Square overreacted.
What a shocker.
Ebola has a mortality rate of 25%-90% depending on the outbreak. MERS has a mortality rate of 35%, and SARS had a mortality rate of 10%. COVID-19 is still squatting anywhere from between 1%-3% and those numbers are being skewn by places like Iran and China, because Iran's healthcare is so fucked that it's
more dangerous to go to the hospitals for treatment than it probably is to just stay home, and because COVID-19 is a respiratory infection and everyone in China has fucked-up lungs because of the pollution, they're much more susceptible to the infection.
Even with that factored in, we're still at 1%-3% in shit-heap, third-world conditions.
People just want to panic because the person next to them is panicking because the person on the internet told them to panic and it's just gotten ridiculous. Do you know what happens when everyone panics and they have no real grasp on the reality of the situation? You get the
Battle of Los Angeles. On February 24th, 1942, just a few months after the U.S. had entered World War II, the entirety of the U.S. Army and the Coastal defenses spent the entire night sounding off alarms and then an entire hour firing every single bullet and mortar and weapon they could find at:
Absolutely fucking nothing.
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Because there were no real targets and people were blind-firing out of sheer panic because the person beside them was blind-firing in sheer panic, all of the rounds fired fell on the city. Buildings were slammed with bullets and shell fire, cars were shot to hell, five people were killed as a result of the indirect fire, and we never measured the exact cost of all the damage caused. There was no incoming fire, there were no targets, there were no troops rushing up the beaches. It was just pure, senseless panic for an entire
hour.
All of that happened because one
dipshit thought that he saw something, and every dipshit standing beside him started doing the same damned thing. Does COVID-19 present a modicum of danger? Absolutely, but the sheer level of panic we're seeing over it is
completely disproportionate and it's
significantly more dangerous than COVID-19.