1 INTRODUCTION
       2 RISKS
           2.1 CORONA RISKS
           2.2 ECONOMIC RISKS
           2.3 HEALTH CARE RISKS
           2.4 POLITICAL RISKS
       3 GUIDELINES
       4 MY ADVICE
           4.1 PAST
           4.2 PRESENT
           4.3 FUTURE
       5 THE SPEECH I THINK DONALD TRUMP SHOULD GIVE

       1 INTRODUCTION

   We got this bug, maybe as bad as the flu, possibly worse. We have a small-but-growing fatality rate with enthusiastic, extreme, exponential extrapolations of serious death counts.

   From a mathematically educated viewpoint and some historical perspective, what's the right thing to have done and what's the right thing to do?

   There are consequences of doing things. One of my liberal friends “unfriended” me on Facebook because I couldn't care more about Corona deaths than the losses from flu or the loss of life from the things we're doing.

       2 RISKS

   Let's look at the various risks brought upon us by Corona virus.

           2.1 CORONA RISKS

   The total losses from Corona virus, also known as (aka) COVID-19, are still short of annual flu casualties. From mathematical scrutiny the most severe countries are starting the saturation phase. There are a few scary places including New York City with almost-as-scary numbers in Philadelphia. New York has, according to my web browser, reached flu numbers and is not “curling” downward yet.

   A friend sent me an article about Jews being especially susceptible to Corona virus. New York City and Philadelphia have a high proportion of Jews.

   The virus seems to spread by touching each other, touching surfaces within a few hours or a few days, depending on the surface material, and breathing air in close proximity. It seems to response well to washing hands and disinfecting wipes (Lysol and Clorox brands come to mind). (I haven't seen it in any of the warning media, but I imagine brushing teeth more often would wash virus-laden particles out of the mouth before they have time to infect the host, or that could be totally bullshit. Still, there are good reasons to brush our teeth anyway.) It presents with a bad cough and high fever, often without a runny nose. So I conclude self-quarantine isn't much more dangerous with other non-quarantined people living their lives. Food and packages can be delivered and handled while wearing disinfected gloves.

   While the models are still based on eager, energetic, enthusiastic extrapolation of factors of over one hundred, the disease shows indications of near-flu casualties worldwide. The original scare numbers were about ten times that, figure 300 thousand deaths stateside and seven million worldwide, 0.1%, one in a thousand. Actual deaths so far are one in 150 thousand worldwide and one in 75 thousand in the United States. Flu claims about one in nine thousand per year.

    COVID-19 is not the Ebola-like horror of “Outbreak” or the rapid-spreading, high-mortality disease in “Contagion.” Whatever horrors COVID-19 may hold, the bad predictions haven't happened yet and the scientific community predicting horrors hasn't done well with other environmental predictions It might be worse than swine flu or SARS or bird flu, it might even be worse than the ordinary annual flu virus, but that hasn't happened yet. It's not the zombie-apocalypse terror of “28 Days Later.” It's not contaminating the outdoors like “Bird Box,” so we can go outside without being at serious risk. This isn't “Capricorn One” in that Corona virus might be real (even if I don't know anybody who has it or directly knows anybody who has it). There is no age group whose mortality is morbidly affected by even the bad projection of this disease. For most of us, washing hands and keeping “social distance” is plenty safe. For those at highest risk, staying home, washing hands, using antiseptic wipes, and using gloves to touch delivered packages should be safe even if other people aren't concerned.

   A friend wrote me this was a good lesson about exponential growth. I think it's a great lesson about exponential growth models. I took a box of checkers and did the exponential-growth thing, one on the first square, two on the second square, four on the third square, eight on the fourth square, and I finished up the whole checkerboard. That put nine on the fifth square and the box was empty. So much for 18446744073709551615 checkers when the box only had twenty-four to begin with. It's the same with predicting 200 thousand deaths from 4000. Sure it could happen, anything could happen, the sun might not rise tomorrow, but a factor of fifty increase isn't the way to bet.

    In case you were wondering if the folks who tell of Corona virus as just misinformed or mistaken, I'm seeing videos of emergency rooms (ERs) taken by ordinary people, not official news reporters, and there's nobody there. I don't know anybody with Corona virus and none of my friends know anybody with Corona virus. They tell me people they know claim to know somebody. It seems all the left-wing people I know are comfortable with eager, energetic, enthusiastic extrapolation while those more-conservative types have a more-realistic view of these “wild-hockey-stick” projections of COVID-19.

           2.2 ECONOMIC RISKS

   Closing restaurants to sit-down traffic and prohibiting gatherings of more than fifty people have cost a few tens of millions of people their livelihoods. Waiters, retail servers, actors, dancers, ushers, clerks, et cetera are finding themselves without work. These people are generally young people living paycheque to paycheque, so 2020 April 1 is going to be interesting as quite a few of them are not going to make their next rent payments on their living quarters. Whatever health coverage they had, whatever resources they had to pay for health care, are now gone.

   Shopkeepers and restaurants are going out of business and their rent payments also won't be forthcoming. Many of their landlords have mortgages and bills to pay. These risks aren't projections of large population impact from current small numbers. These people are already suffering from our COVID-19 precautions and too many of them are going to die as a some result or other of their now-impoverished status.

   The loss is real. It isn't just that one group has replaced another. Sure, there's a surge of retail sales from toilet-paper hoarders who seem confused about the difference between Cholera and Corona. It would be funny if it weren't funny.

           2.3 HEALTH CARE RISKS

   Over the past century some politicians, perhaps in cahoots with the medical industry, decided not to allow poor people to get for their families the inexpensive, high-quality medical care rich people get for their dogs and cats. Maybe we can fix that, but we've had a health-care crisis here in the United States for decades while we haven't done anything about it, so I doubt a speedy fix is going to happen soon.

   A disease that would be a week of miserable coughing and a fever for me in my nice, comfortable home with my three cats will likely be fatal for people who can't afford doctors and hospitals. They tell us New York City and Philadelphia are running out of health-care resources even with the sub-flu penetration of COVID-19. What the fuck are they going to do if a disease comes along, maybe Corona, maybe Cholera, maybe Denghe, maybe Ebola, maybe something new, with far-higher penetration and mortality?

   (A few days later I've heard that people have visited these allegedly-overloaded hospitals in New York City and Philadelphia to find emergency rooms (ERs) that are mostly empty, no lines, no delays. Maybe the whole overloaded-medical-systems story is a political story without fact. Here in Phoenix there is no medical shortage that my health-care-professional friends can see and I really don't know what's happening back east.)

           2.4 POLITICAL RISKS

   The freedoms at risk from a lockdown sound academic. We're no longer free to assemble, we're no longer free to travel, and they're watching our cell phones to see where we are. They say it's an emergency. But there's always some kind of emergency, so let's look more closely at the losses of increasing government power to deal with Corona virus.

   About half of Americans want government to get bigger. They look at the results from Russia in 1925, German in 1935, Cuba in 1950, China in 1960, Cambodia in 1970, South Africa in 1990, and Venezuela in 2000 through very different eyes than mine. Non-revisionist history shows they actually supported most of those regimes. (I'll point out that these were “socialist” in their own description of themselves as well as others.) So I don't expect sympathy from them when I resist the expansion of government to deal with COVID-19. In fact, I suspect COVID-19 was a convenient event for our Democratic Party to try to topple the Trump presidency. I recall several liberal public figures saying they actually hoped the economy would fail, go back down to Obama levels, if it would cost Trump the 2020 election.

   So what is the cost of this sort of socialist regime? Is losing the right of assembly so terrible? I'll point out that in the past century, 1921-2020, about 100 million people have died at the hands of their own governments. If we figure about 5000 million people have died for any reason at all in that same period, that means 2% of all deaths have been due to big government.

   The cost in life, liberty, and livelihood from our Corona-virus prevention is huge, never mind that the threat of the virus is still in the state of large projections from early small data.

   Before somebody whines about “Lives Over Liberty,” or something like that, we have a precedent for that exchange. We accept having a military force to guard our country and it's special freedoms at the cost of human lives. We don't have to be happy about it, but we accept that tradeoff.

       3 GUIDELINES

   A new disease is a downer, no doubt about it. Sick sucks, dying is worse, and we want to avoid that. I was “unfriended” because I couldn't grasp that the object was to reduce Corona deaths at all cost, even lives lost other ways.

   There are doubts all over the place. We have guiding principles in the United States of America that other countries don't have. I think we should use them.

   Remember the scene in “Outbreak” where the chief of staff or whatever are deciding to do Operation Clean Sweep to wipe out a California coastal town where an Ebola-like disease is spreading rapidly. The guy in charge puts a bunch of pictures of the faces of folks in the town, pulls out a copy of our Constitution, and says something like there's nothing in here about killing 2600 people, even to stop a disease. We should stop and think about that.

   If Ebola were spreading in my area, then I would want some kind of force to keep people from spreading the disease through association or travel. I would want restaurants and concert halls closed. The guidelines of our Constitution might take a back seat. I suppose we could argue it is a war with over 100 million casualties at risk.

   Everybody is pitching in to help. For those stuck at home without access to the romantic-dating scene, Pornhub is giving away their product for free.

   COVID-19 isn't Ebola. Grotesque, gratuitous growth projections of large death counts based on small numbers suggest something five times worse than flu. As I write this on 2020 March 29 the American-death numbers are still in the few-thousand range, several times smaller than ordinary flu. China is over the hump, so are Italy, Norway, and Spain. Our east coast is at flu levels of death, a threat level where we have chosen freedom over force for a hundred years. We fought a terribly-difficult war over the right to assemble and I'm not happy about giving that up because of a prediction. Those opposite me in the political arena wave the banner of “science” just as they did for eugenics and global warming.

   I'm scared of this disease, but I'm more scared of the diseases we already know, I'm more scared of putting 10% of our country out of work, I'm more scared of big government that will linger long after COVID-19 is gone. We still have the Patriot Act almost nineteen years after 2001 September 11 when the World Trade Center came down. It's a kind of terrible ecology, political tyranny never goes away.

       4 MY ADVICE

   Here's what I think we should have done, what we should do now, and what we should do for the future. Think of it as the Al Stewart record “Past, Present, and Future.”

           4.1 PAST

   Right about the time President Trump started talking about Corona virus, “the Chinese virus” (just like “the Spanish flu”), I think our Federal government should have begun a campaign of caution, kind of like Bert the Turtle told us not to watch the mushroom cloud but, “Duck and Cover.” Wash your hands, don't shake hands, stay home, and especially don't take the kids to visit their grandparents. Restaurants should have been energetically encouraged to double their table spacing, a factor of four reduction in capacity to reduce contagion. Maybe a bright blue medical caduceus sticker on the door would promise extra spacing and extra cleanliness inside, something like “We Protect, We Don't Infect,” that sort of thing. Older people would be encouraged to stay home.

   A campaign against hoarding was a good idea, maybe making even more fun of people buying toilet paper because they couldn't tell Corona from Cholera.

   Maybe the government could go beyond that and make available laptop computers with somethink like Skype pre-installed so folks could talk to each other digital-face-to-digital-face. Until death rates climbed to substantially more than flu, that's where I believe government should have stopped.

   People staying at home still need stuff. Rather than shrink our work force, maybe we could augment it with more home delivery of stuff, especially groceries, to those at maximum risk. If a seventy-five year old with a history of heart trouble and some wheezing asthma can stay home with a laptop to watch shows and movies on Netflix and to Skype with the grandkids and efficient home delivery of food and stuff, then he can be about as safe as he would be under lockdown.

   Concerts could still be held. Concert venues could offer full refunds for no-show at-risk patrons. I wrote two dance companies that they shouldn't give any refunds, the disease wasn't their fault, but they should put on the performances (perhaps in empty halls) and send high-definition video to all their subscribers. I know two orchestras doing that for their subscribers. Still, if the pandemic panic hadn't reached such heights, maybe those of us willing to take the risk could still go.

           4.2 PRESENT

   Where are we now? We have countries and areas under lockdown and the most-severe region of COVID-19 has reached flu mortality without a downturn. I think government should back away gently, keep encouraging people to stay careful, and keep encouraging the elderly at risk to stay home. Companies should be able to feel good about a work-at-home workforce. A legal precedent should be formed that a concert provider isn't legally at risk if folks get sick. Maybe they can keep social-distance seating.

   Before you jump all over me about what might happen, nowhere has seen worse than flu and the Corona threat is no greater than swine flu was. We need to get people back to work so they can pay their bills, including their medical bills when they get flu or Corona.

    As an older person myself, what I want is both obvious and clear. So long as this disease stays less than two or three times flu, as it is doing, then I want to lead my life. I don't have that many years left and I prefer not to sacrifice a good part of that time to the alter of fear. I also want my friends in the service area to be able to maintain their businesses. Besides compassion, I'm also motivated by need. I want those people to be able to provide the services I have come to rely on.

   If this pandemic reaches more-dire levels, then I want to be able to hide out at home where I can be safe. I can wash my hands and take showers more often than usual and I can spray and wipe disinfectant all over my place. I'll forgo my social activities, especially my busy concert season with hundreds of people in a single room for a couple of hours several times per week. What I cannot do by myself is ensure safe, clean delivery of the things I used to get for myself. I'll need food and I'll want delivery of other stuff. That means I need a vigorous service sector to make my self-confinement healthy and pleasant.

           4.3 FUTURE

   We should be scared shitless that we ran out of medical resources from such a small death toll. New York City's 0.01% may be a lot of people, but the big, bad diseases that may come our way are going to be a lot worse. We should get ready.

   I don't feel good about government funding readiness. Just as banks are required to keep reserves as the lend deposit money, maybe hospitals should have plans for larger sick populations. We're not going to have enough doctors, so we need to find ways for non-doctors to do doctor stuff in a pinch. My diabetic friends give themselves insulin shots and I know other people getting shots from non-doctor family members. If the death toll goes from 0.01% to one percent, then maybe people can learn to administer intravenous (IV) drips of medications at home or even put a sick co-inhabitant on some kind of simple breathing machine while more-official medical help is not available.

   I also feel we need clear numerical guides for government action. Trump is bad because he closed the border, then because he didn't close the border enough. Some threshold like 0.1% deaths (flu level) should close the borders and some higher threshold like 1.0% should call out the National Guard to keep people from going out. Make it official and not political. It sound cold to talk about deaths like that, but it's a tradeoff between death by disease and death by economic deprivation, or even death by big-government tyranny. We can be afraid rationally, without panic. Let's try that for a change.

   This was our wakeup call.

       5 THE SPEECH I THINK DONALD TRUMP SHOULD GIVE

    My fellow Americans and people all over the world. We have seen a threat to our way of life in America and worldwide, and to our lives themselves in the Corona virus, also known as COVID-19. We responded in an almost-military manner to the perceived threat. In doing so, we have violated the Constitutional rights of our citizens to go about their business and to assemble peacefully. I believe this needs to change.

   We have responded in what we thought was a responsible manner to what we thought was scientific understanding of that danger. This is not the first time that our political system has been victimized by so-called scientific urgency. Global warming stopped twenty-two years ago, the climate has not changed, the icecaps are fine, and polar bear numbers are growing, yet we hear the call to curtail our way of life for the cause. The causes before that were the ozone layer and acid rain and an impending global ice age, none of which came to pass. We can't count on academic scientists and our free press to give us scientifically-responsible recommendations to act.

   Our politicians also have an agenda served by pseudo-science. Their objective is to make our already-too-large government even bigger and to trample the Constitutional rights our forefathers fought and died for. Fear is a good motivator to get Americans to give up their rights temporarily and then those rights stay gone. Look at how our government has invaded private matters such as education and health care and the arts. Is this something we want more of?

   So let's look at Corona virus. We have been given death reports that are, in fact, modest, thousands here in the United States, tens of thousands worldwide. Compared to other causes of death, this is barely significant. Even the ordinary flu we face every year kills about forty-thousand Americans and a million people per year. We face these diseases and deal with them without forcing businesses to close and without turning people's homes into quarantine prisons. It may sound callous to talk about death as something we deal with, but we are all going to die someday. I think it's often more important how we live than how we die.

   Are there diseases that merit the state-of-war response we have done for Corona virus? Absolutely. There are horrible, rampent, virulant diseases like Ebola or Marburg whose spread would warrent lockdowns and quarantines. The Spanish flu of 1918 warrented such a response. I'm Commander in Chief of the world's most powerful military and I'll use it to defend us against enemies in the forms of large armies and small viruses. Corona isn't that enemy.

   The economic devastation of our actions against Corona are profound. Tens of millions of Americans in our service sectors are out of work, people who are mostly young and just starting their climb of America's ladder of opportunity. Poverty has its own mortality rate, people out of work don't have safe places to live and can't afford healthy food. Buying that for them with wealth taking from other people only shifts that burden at huge cost to all involved. For example, the two-trillion-dollar Corona bill gave thirty-five million to the Kennedy Center to help their employees whom they laid off to give money to the Democratic Party. People need to get back to work so they can live better and longer and so the rest of us can live better and longer.

   Our news media have failed us. They reported long lines in emergency rooms and backed up demand for medical attention while people who visited those same hospitals found near-empty ERs and no shortages of care. This is more likely sloppy journalism than any conspiracy, but the journalists profiting from the First Amendment aren't living up to their responsibility.

   There were many clamoring for economic failure in my administration so I would lose the coming election, the same people clamoring for voting by mail so there would be less scrutiny and more illegal voters. This is naked, evil politics masquerading as response to a disease threat and it needs to be exposed. It has nothing to do with China. We live in a global community, people travel, and viruses can come from anywhere. Still, we can use this panic-crisis event as an opportunity to bring manufacturing back home to America. Making our own things is prosperity and power and pride.

   So here it is. We were afraid, we panicked, and we were wrong. Even if this disease claims some lives, even if it claims as many lives as the annual flu, our reactions to it are far more frightening to me. I'm afraid of the consequences in lifestyle and lives of the economic consequences of our response to Corona and I'm even more afraid of the consequences of bigger government that hasn't worked well in every country that has tried it and has cost a hundred million lives in other countries.

   Those afraid of a new disease aren't wrong. I suggest we all respect those fears with a symbol, a red star, that asks others to keep a social distance of six feet. Restaurants maintaining six-foot spacing between tables can display a red star to show their compliance with social distancing and outdoor takeout service. People medically certified to have had Corona virus can wear green stars to show they're no longer a threat. This is a way we can protect people and respect people's legitimate concerns without disrupting America's way of life.

   We were wrong and it's time to fix it. The Federal Government of the United States of America is withdrawing its specific recommendations of quarantine or other protections. We can recommend that people who are afraid and who have homes where they can stay and work feel free to do so. We can recommend that medical research laboratories work hard for tests and a vaccine for whatever Corona virus exists. We will support our Fifth Amendment's rights to life, liberty, and property. We will also support our Tenth Amendment's restraint on telling the individual states how to handle Corona virus. If they wish to continue quarantine and lockdown, then we don't have to like it here in Washington, but it's a decision they have to make for themselves.

   I'm sorry we didn't act sooner to remove governmental restraint. The ozone layer and global warming happened on somebody else's watch, but this one is on my watch and I'm going to make it right. Let's get America back on track and make America great again.

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