COVID-19 Crude Fatality Rates, Media Freakouts, and Capacity Analyses

The best way to understand this is to look at the rain.

The crude fatality rate for COVID-19 is almost assuredly being overstated by the media, but the mathematics for it go deeper than that, and a failure by our media to either understand or convey this properly is hindering the overall dialogue. The fact that the media’s business model in 2020 is to peddle anxiety for clicks, and that the general population has awoken to that fact, has made every article or media piece about basically everything into one great “crying wolf” exercise. But this COVID-19 outbreak may in fact be the wolf, and the best way to explain why, I think, is by looking at similar other processes in nature with which we’re more familiar. Like rain.

Stormwater Hydrology of Thneed Factories

Rain falls on your twenty-acre piece of forestland. Some of the raindrops hit the trees, some hit the ground. Some of the ones that hit the ground leak into the ground. The ones that don’t leak into the ground run off along it, into tiny creeks, which slowly join, and flow off of your twenty acres past your neighbor Big Joe, who has a little shack down by the creek. This is a routine event. You see it happen, you know what it looks like, and you have an intuition about it because this is something you experience your entire life. If you were to stand, boots on, heels planted in the creek at your property line in a storm, you know what would happen around you…