Danger Close....

Whence one is dealing with close air support or CAS in a war zone, danger close means just that the danger is mother fucking close. Or the bombs and/or projectiles they are going to be hurling at some target coordinate is too close to friendlies for comfort. Always remember, friendly fire isn't.

So someone at work got this COVID-19 bullshit. Luckily she's already bouncing back from that shit. Now that in my current life is the definition of danger close. I mean I walked right by her on a daily basis.

What do you do with this information? I suppose you could panic. I suppose you could hide in your house and not do anything for the rest of your life but if you're like me that's not really appealing. I'd rather get this shit and die than sit in the house not getting near another person for the rest of my life. I mean how long can this go on? I understand there's a new virus and its killing people. Of course if you pay attention to the news you'd probably think that a quarter of the world's population has already taken a dirt nap from this stuff. If I'm not mistaken the last numbers I heard was

• Total cases: 213,144
• Total deaths: 4,513

For the statisticians in the room, that's 0.001% of Americans have bucked the kicket from this thing. Currently, some of the most dire projections have the death toll from this thing at 240,000 Americans. Now do NOT get me wrong, I am not minimizing the suffering of the families hit by this thing. But if 240,000 Americans die from this that's exactly 0.07% of the population. That would put it at the third leading cause of death in the country. Behind heart disease and cancer. Now heart disease and cancer are not (to the best of my limited knowledge) not something that you can catch. Heart disease you're either born with or you develop over the course of a lifetime of poor decisions. Cancer, again from what my pea brain retains, is in all of us, it just depends on whether it metastasizes or not. If I'm wrong about that stuff let me know.

Anyway, back to this Coronavirus shit. I think the damage its doing in what its turning us into is going to be far greater than the death toll from the actual sickness. Jobless claims are through the roof, unprecedented levels. The fed went so far as to project 32% unemployment. The Great Depression unemployment rate was 24.9%. So, my logic says that we are going from a viral outbreak that could kill a small fraction of the population, to a economic calamity that will kill just as many if not more, just in different ways.

Obviously, I could be wrong, I've been wrong before. The question that I have is this, is slowing the spread of this virus worth the years of economic struggle and the economic damage that many Americans will NOT recover from?