Of course AHA has to try to estimate worst-case scenarios with an epidemic threatening to become a pandemic.
Confession: I laughed uncontrollably for a few very guilty seconds yesterday in reading some speculation
in the NYT about whether Italians would obey the virus-related orders in northern Italy (where I know you said some of your kin live) while reading the Times' explanation of "furbizia" -- bolding is mine:
Many, including Mr. Conte [the Italian prime minister] have appealed to Italians to reject their tendency toward “furbizia,” the Italian word for the sort of cunning or cleverness typically channeled into getting around bureaucracy and inconvenient laws.
I of course was thinking " yah... waiting for the speculation about how many USA residents will be all in on just obeying governmental lockdowns of entire regions, and orders to stay certain distances away from each other in groups?"
But on that estimate leaked out of the AHA conference: of course the media will run with anything "leaked". Better it should get cited and commented on to put it in perspective than end up just circulating on Twitter with a mere link and some "Wow we're all going to die" one-liner.
The other "of course": Of course we're all going to die at some point since that's how we customarily depart this plane of our existence, hence from the planet. But most of us are going to croak from something more mundane like tripping over a tree root coming up through a couple pieces of slate in a sidewalk or finally having our cardiovascular system balk over a lifestyle careless of long term health.
It would be nearly farce to have checked out in some banal manner like that, after we had endured the drama and taken the trouble to try to corner the market in hand sanitizers or paper towels or tea biscuits in order to "fend off" whatever we imagined would be the very personal toll on us of the medical or commercial ravages of a virus.
Two things do always seem weird to me about any flu-like viral epidemics though:
1) we do seem to understand that a virus and/or the official and civilian responses to it can disrupt our lives --so we do often engage in stuff like panic-buying when we hear of a possible epidemic (or "just" a hurricane warning).
2) many of us also resist like crazy the idea that we personally need to observe any inconvenient measures meant to contain an epidemic or minimize exposure of the most vulnerable of others -- including those in our families-- to whatever is the impending threat.
Yet we want other people to follow rules and want other people not to run out and strip the store shelves or go to work /shopping while feeling sick and shrugging it off as just a cold... and so risk infecting others with a more serious virus... and we are willing to criticize them over variants of what we're doing... because
we know what we're about and
they don't... (?!)
When I think about this, I realize we should probably not be surprised that how each of us may vote (or not vote), in creating our personal response to the right to consent to our governance in the USA, may not seem all that logical to the rest of us. And so it probably follows that we may well doubt that the government --which we collectively elected or failed to help elect-- should in the end be something to which we consent in the detail of our governance, even if we still want the other guy to go by the rules.
