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COVID-19 milestone

Journal by khallow
Sometime today, there will be more active, reported coronavirus cases outside of China than inside. The cat is out of the bag for sure. I think at this point, it's only a matter of time till a good portion of us catch the disease, barring a vaccine in the next few months. Good luck to you and your loved ones.

Moving on, this appears to me to be a real world test of various countries' public health systems, with such things as how accurate the above reports are, or how many people are infected or die due to this coronavirus.
 

Reply to: Re:This is our karma

    (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 09 2020, @01:07PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday March 09 2020, @01:07PM (#968479)

    This virus is going to massively re-arrange the geopolitical landscape. I really think it's going to cause exponentially more suffering by its economic impacts than the direct effects of the virus itself.

    No, the real problem here is this is likely another black swan event on the scale of 9/11 or the 2008 crash, and will likely linger around a lot longer. I predict this thing is going to become a permanent member of the world's constantly-circulating virus pool, and will likely become no worse than the average cold or flu in 1-5 years.

    Which doesn't really say much since these sorts of black swan events happen quite often.

    But until then, this is going to topple a lot of established power structures, because many of them are rotten and corrupt to the core. The US is a prime example. I hope and pray that the major lessons that we learn from this are 1) healthcare *is* national security and 2) we need to clean our corruption problem up if we don't want something even worse to wipe us out utterly.

    We'll see. I think for the US, it'll take something bigger like a major defeat in a war or said "something even worse" pandemic. Big things take longer to die.

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