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RE: Something Doesn't Add Up About This Coronavirus
Why thank you.
I'll have to admit, I do have my own conclusion and I didn't make any secret of what that conclusion was, but I do try to gather as many sources as possible. It's the ex-professor in me that tries to do everything at least quasi-academically.
It is a haunting conclusion (I can read, and interpet things!) and it will be interesting to see what happens in the weeks, and months to come.
I'm based in Australia, so our geographical proximity (and high levels of multi-culturialism, fairly active travelling commuinity, and reliance on imported goods) - will be ... interesting.
We have a high population of Asian University Students (as our Universities tend to be the most appealing of the region for some reason) - and they'll be starting their studies up again imminintely.
Just now there was an article I saw about a university student in Sydney contracting the virus:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-27/coronavirus-schools-urge-students-to-be-checked/11902702
Given the generally low-socio-economic status of University students in the country, and our... (good, albeit neo-liberalist inspired health care) - it will be interesting to see how things change and how Australia's health system handles this as people return to schools and universities, which are normally breeding grounds for any sort of viral or bacterial infections.
From what I've seen so far, the only nation that got caught flat-footed by this appears to have been China. Other countries were pretty quick to pounce on possible cases and isolate them. Though with the revelation of asymptomatic infections being capable of transmission, those containment efforts may not be sufficient after a while.
The other thing that I'd like to see disclosed in the numbers around fatalities / recoveries is the age of the infected individual.
Reports indicate the elderly (who are suspectiple to the general influenza virus and pneumonia) are the main fatalities of this. As an educated thirty something - I'm not the "target demographic" - but media reports tend to exclude this part of commentary from their sensationalism.
I don't think that's being deliberately excluded so much as just left out because it's cumbersome. Most of the reports of individual or small numbers of deaths make some mention of the age of the individual and I read somewhere (I need to look through my dozens of bookmarks for this article to find where) about a huge shock over the fact that ONE of the dead victims was young and healthy.
The rest have all been elderly.
And I didn't mention this in my article but it's highly convenient that at exactly the point where China's senior population becomes a burden on their economy, a virus breaks out in central China under suspicious circumstances that just happens to be killing off the infirm and sparing most of the working age population.
The pyramid that supports "retirees" & "seniors" makes it a financial burden in every somewhat developed economy. The only way to sustain this in a world driven by inflation and a stampede towards "ever increasing economic growth and prosperity", or whatever people want to call it is for people to constantly pump out more and more children and grow the world's population.
On paper, it seems like a decision made by a spreadsheet boffin or crazed economist, drooling slightly as they spew pragmatism over whoever will listen.
The reality is that I hope, one day, we can find a balance between all things and governments of the world can recognise that never-ending growth is not the way to prosperity, but cautious, realistic expectations factoring in all environmental factors (people, natural resource, economic, diplomatic) will lead to things flourishing, as it doesn't really feel as though the world is doing any of that at the moment.