The passing of my Father-in-law

My father-in-law passed today.  March 24, 2020.  He was kind enough in the end, to delay his passing until after his daughters birthday.

Birthdays and Death both suck during a pandemic.

Its the Economy, Stupid!

The economy slowed down as soon as we realized the threat of COVID-19, and began self-isolation. Schools, post secondary closed, followed swiftly by entertainment business (Theatre, orchestra, cinema, bars & pubs).  Soon it became that only essential services should stay open, that is, food, medicine, liquor.

I ran today.  Just a short run to try to get back to normal.  It was quiet, almost no cars during a wednesday rush hour.  Erie. Weird.  Saw another runner, and chatted, his run was a stress reliever as well. 

The economy grinds to a halt, and we realize that this is an opportunity to talk about how our economy should work.  It's always easier to examine an engine when its not running with a foot pressed on the gas.  Don't think that will happen.  People will demand their rights.  Rights to healthcare.  Rights to food, and shopping.  And Partying.  Eventually when they are told that no, you don't have a right to healthcare, that's when the violence will start. America has never seen a problem that they couldn't solve by apply a little bit more violence.  So it has to be a goto strategy here.

Defenders of the 2A

I want to start a betting pool.

How long after the medical system is completely overwhelmed, until the first Defender of the 2nd Amendment demands, backed by force, that the doctors treat his loved ones. How long until the next Defender of the 2nd Amendment sees a rich person, or a politician, jump the queue, and take exception to it.

Winner gets to be more uniquely horrified that they were right.

The oft-predicted Pandemic is now real, and has a foothold on the North American continent

Covid-19 has its foothold.  If pandemic doubling holds at 6 days, the United States as a whole, is out of hospital beds at the beginning of May 2020.  Some counties will be run out in the next week.

Panic buying has already started.  Costco is sold out of toilet paper, some people buying pallets of it, and trying to sell it at inflated prices on Kijiji or Craigslist.  No one wants to buy vegan products, they are never sold out.  Why toilet paper. No one knows.  This is a respiratory disease, doesn't affect your digestion.

What should have been frightening people this week is that President Trump is clearly in poor physical and mental health, and under increasing stress.  There is better than even odds that he bursts a vessel, and we have President Pence.  No one really gave much thought to the Rapture, other than the evangelicals, of who the new president was one. 

And the stress skyrocketed as the stock market and oil prices all tank.  Russia and Saudi Arabia conspired to depress the price of Oil, by getting into an argument about quotas, then flooding the market with cheap crude. The additional shock of the oil price war, on top of Covid-19, will hit the USA hard.  We kept forgetting that Putin didn't have his money yet, and was still out for revenge.  There was no normal estimate to when prices would stabilize, they would stabilize once the USA was beyond stabilizing.

Comes a Crisis

The timing of COVID-19 was almost perfect.  The impeachment acquittal was now finished, the Trump purge was underway, and we were settling into a very normal fascist dictatorship.  Then came COVID-19.

So many world governments didn't learn the lessons on the Spanish Flu.  Iran lied about how hard they were being hit. It exploded there in early March.   The first deaths started happening in early March in the US as well. There was no credible plan for quarantine or containment.

When it exploded in North America, it was with a bright flash across the continent, with very little slow burn leading up to it. With the glaring incompetence of the administration in full display, panic was really the only logical course of action.