[CornFed]

Saudi Arabia has 11 reported Covid-19 cases.  That didn't stop it from today closing all schools and universities across the kingdom until further notice.

Israel is now considering a 14-day quarantine of ANYONE traveling from ANYWHERE in the world to Israel. I saw another country (can't remember the one) requiring a 30-day quarantine.

Italy now has the second most reported cases to China, passing South Korea. Speaking of this...

China has 23x the population of Italy. Yet, China seems to have only 10x more cases after three months of spread, than Italy has had in just 3 weeks since the virus took off there. China has 18x the population of Iran and a similar story. South Korea is even smaller than Italy, yet they have even more cases than Italy does on a percentage of population basis. These three countries have about .0001 of population infected now, with at least a month less of time than China had before it took action.  China's official numbers equate to .00005 of population.  Either China has been misrepresenting its actual infection numbers or it didn't test and count enough people who have the virus. 

When you figure Italy was planning its response on China's numbers, it's just an unmitigated disaster. Based on the spread in Italy, Iran, and South Korea, it seems for every 2-3 cases China only reported one. To put this in perspective, I saw a great monologue by Chris Hayes this week, where he talked about disasters as measurement problems. He used Chernobyl as his analog to this Coronavirus pandemic. After the accident, the onsite workers measured 3.6 units of radiation per hour and didn't think things were that bad. They didn't realize their devices could only measure up to 3.6. When military grade detection was used, they found it was 15,000 units per hour.

I highly recommend the series Chernobyl.  Extremely powerful.

[CornFed]

Saudi Arabia has 11 reported Covid-19 cases.  That didn't stop it from today closing all schools and universities across the kingdom until further notice.

Israel is now considering a 14-day quarantine of ANYONE traveling from ANYWHERE in the world to Israel. I saw another country (can't remember the one) requiring a 30-day quarantine.

Italy now has the second most reported cases to China, passing South Korea. Speaking of this...

China has 23x the population of Italy. Yet, China seems to have only 10x more cases after three months of spread, than Italy has had in just 3 weeks since the virus took off there. China has 18x the population of Iran and a similar story. South Korea is even smaller than Italy, yet they have even more cases than Italy does on a percentage of population basis. These three countries have about .0001 of population infected now, with at least a month less of time than China had before it took action.  China's official numbers equate to .00005 of population.  Either China has been misrepresenting its actual infection numbers or it didn't test and count enough people who have the virus. 

When you figure Italy was planning its response on China's numbers, it's just an unmitigated disaster. Based on the spread in Italy, Iran, and South Korea, it seems for every 2-3 cases China only reported one. To put this in perspective, I saw a great monologue by Chris Hayes this week, where he talked about disasters as measurement problems. He used Chernobyl as his analog to this Coronavirus pandemic. After the accident, the onsite workers measured 3.6 units of radiation per hour and didn't think things were that bad. They didn't realize their devices could only measure up to 3.6. When military grade detection was used, they found it was 15,000 units per hour.

I highly recommend the series Chernobyl.  Extremely powerful.