[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: Ok. Let us start talking about Spanish. Were you even supposed to call it the Spanish flu of 1918 or 1919? However, that is what it has been called for a hundred years. It is not because it started in Spain; it started in Oklahoma. However, President Wilson had an embargo, World War One was going on, and he could stop stuff he did not want reported on. So, they only reported a little on the flu going wild in America. They could report on it going crazy elsewhere.
Moreover, the king of Spain got it. So it became the Spanish flu, even though it should be the Oklahoma flu. However, anyway, they did not have vaccines back then. So what made it stop being a pandemic?
Back then, there were about one point five billion people on Earth. Spanish flu killed at least 50 million of them, more than three percent. They estimate that at least a third of everybody on Earth caught it. However, a third of everybody catching it would not necessarily give Earth herd immunity. However, it could be because we did not have commercial airline flights back then. So, maybe herd immunity is, you can do it at lower levels if you do not have people travelling from the most infected parts of the world to others. It may have mutated. I should do more reading on it, but it may have mutated into a form that was not as killie or as contagious. However, anyway, it died out, or at least people quit reporting on it, as much after the summer of 1919, after it had gone for about a year.
It still popped up and fucked up many people in some places in 1920. However, I do not know if it was still a pandemic in 1920. However, in any case, I only mention all this because, to compare it to now, about three point six billion vaccine doses have been given to the world’s nearly eight billion people. Moreover, depending on where you look, roughly 20 percent of the world has been vaccinated, which again is nowhere near herd immunity. Moreover, now we have this Delta variant that’s three times or more, and it is much more contagious than the previous variants. Moreover, the former U.S. head of… says that in America, at least if, that most people who are unvaccinated will catch it. It is running wild in England.
England has been doing an excellent job of vaccinating its people, except for its young people. Eighty-eight Brits, eighteen and over, have had at least one dose of vaccine and sixty-nine had both doses, which is higher than just about any other country. However, the Delta has been going wild in Britain, mainly among young people. It could be awful for the next couple of months, mainly since they stupidly two days ago got rid of all COVID restrictions. However, the U.S. is less vaccinated than Britain, where Britain has sixty-nine adults in the U.S., it is fifty-nine adults.
Moreover, you have got big pockets where, like the Civil War states, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and maybe Tennessee are thirty-five percent vaccinated. Wyoming and Idaho are forty percent, though they matter less because you have more Buffalo and Wyoming than people if you include cases in Los Angeles County. New daily cases are up eight hundred percent since last month. So, there is a fair chance that you would think that we could get a wave with fewer new daily cases than we had during the terrible third wave when nobody was vaccinated. However, this stuff is so contagious that there is a chance that the number of daily cases will match the third wave. Though it is not as killie, well, it is hard to tell because it is still early on. They called the death a lagging indicator that the death wave follows the new case wave by about two weeks because it takes two weeks for it to kill you if it is going to kill you.
However, based on Britain, it might not be as kill because it is infecting younger people. In general, it is common for people. Forty percent of people who get COVID-19 might end up being long-haulers. People with symptoms more than a month after their original diagnosis. My buddy JD got covered six months ago, and his shit still has not returned to the colour it was for his whole life until he got poked, which, as symptoms go, is not the worst fucking symptom, but who knows what else it is doing to him. However, anyway, it was going wild until yesterday or so; conservative media in America was pushing hard for vaccine skepticism, supporting people not getting vaccinated. The stock market crashed nine hundred points. The day before yesterday, people were thinking.
Anyway, yesterday, Fox News started to push for people to get vaccines a little bit. People think it might be because Fox is afraid of getting sued or because the people running Fox do not want to lose all their money if the stock market crashes because there is another huge wave, or simply because the Republicans do not want all their voters to die or to get pissed at them. After all, every Republican family loses somebody to covid. So last week in Britain and Florida, America’s most COVID state right now, with 20 percent of America’s new cases. Covid numbers have not been going up every day, but Covid numbers have never gone up every day because reporting standards vary by what day of the week it is.
Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday are low COVID reporting days because they are around the weekend. So the number has stayed the same. Today, they exploded again. The Florida numbers just came out, roughly 10 percent higher than the previous record for this wave. For a while, it looked like they might not be as exploding as people feared, but now it looks like they might be. So that is where we stand, probably on the cusp of a wave that will be the second biggest of the five waves the U.S. has had. Right now, it is at about 60 percent of the second and third-place waves in terms of the number of new daily cases and will probably match that number of new daily cases by sometime next month. To add, this seems like it is pissing people off more than the previous waves did because this is a preventable way. So, there may be a slight silver lining—the end.
[Recording End]
Authors[1]
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
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