Only 1.9% of the people who got the 1918 flu died of it, but so many got sick it ended up killing 675,000 people in the USA alone and 35 million worldwide. Because it's so new the death rate for the Corvid 19 virus is more uncertain but it's estimated to be between 2% and 6%, and it shows a disturbingly long incubation period during which a person is infectious but displays no obvious symptoms of being ill; it can be diagnosed with DNA detection kits but those are in extremely short supply. Administering large amounts of Corvid-19 antibodies would almost certainly cut the death rate considerably but you'd need massive amounts of it and, like DNA detection kits, we no longer have the infrastructure to rapidly mass produce it.
Obama created a pandemic czar to deal with just this sort of thing and to coordinate the activities of the various federal agencies, but in the spring of 2018 the pandemic czar position was eliminated and the entire chain of command was fired, and the disease fighting budgets of the Centers for Disease Control, the National Safety Council, the Department of Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services was cut by 15 billion dollars. The infrastructure can be rebuilt but that takes not just money but also time, and that is time we may not have. In 2017 Bill Gates told national security advisor H.R. McMaster that cutting the disease fighting budgets of federal agencies would "*significantly increase the probability of a large and lethal modern-day pandemic occurring in our lifetimes*". Maybe Corvid-19 will just peter out but I wouldn't count on it, it's looking increasingly likely that Mr. Gates was right. We're not ready. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv0_1hUVS6kc8h694Q0O%2Bs4XBBCFjnC4ZuSqnuQMTPSexw%40mail.gmail.com.
