February 16, 2020, Apocalpyse pandemic now?
The novel corona virus originally centered in Wuhan, China now exceeds 71,000 cases world wide and over 1,700 deaths. Supposedly there are about 15 cases in the USA.
The ordinary seasonal flu has infected over 250,000 people, with an estimated 14,000 deaths for the 2019 to 2020 flu season.
I was wondering about some other things going on. In the most recent full year for which data is available (2018), world AIDS deaths were around 770,000.
Meanwhile, in the ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, since the outbreak began in August 2018, there have been 3432 total cases resulting in 2249 deaths.
Just for the hell of it, the most recent year for which complete data is available, for 2017, the USA recorded 39,773 total gun deaths.
While I do lay out a number of unusually American statistics in my chapter "Death And/Or Taxes" in Donald J. Putin on American Exceptionalism, among the top ten things Americans die of are fascinating, including medical errors, suicides and accidents, for example.
I don't mean to discount the seriousness of the "COVID19" virus or downplay the suffering it is causing. I merely mean to point out that it is operating in an environment where other things are, at least for the moment, more lethal both worldwide and even within the United States (which, after all, is the only thing Americans care about). My broader point is that there is an agenda out there in telling us what we are supposed to be concerned about; and maybe it makes sense, and maybe it doesn't make sense. I don't quite know about this one.
I just note that any country that goes ahead and elects Donald Trump as its president is a country that has already been fucked with in terms of the things it is told. And what we are told about diseases and threats and death tolls is no exception.