America’s Nightmare Covid-19 Scenario is Coming True — All Over Again

10 min readDec 6, 2020

Source: Our World in Data

It was grimly, stupidly, frustratingly predictable. Millions of Americans travelled for Thanksgiving. In the middle of a lethal pandemic. That America had already failed to contain, and had the highest numbers in the world. Warning after warning was given. Please don’t travel. Stay at home this year. Help others be safe. The President-Elect spoke, the most respected doctor in the country spoke, all the epidemiologists agreed, and so did everyone left who was sane.

And yet none of that seemed to matter. Or at least not matter enough. To the millions of American Idiots, for whom sitting around a table eating turkey proved to be more than important than stopping the spread of a deadly disease.

I like Thanksgiving. I love spending time with the family. The holidays are important to me. But I’m also not a stubborn fool, like too many Americans. I can understand that this is not a normal year, and maybe sacrifices have to be made. You probably can understand that, too.

So those millions of American Idiots did what they were always going to. Not listen to a word. Do whatever they damned well pleased. Hey, that’s freedom, after all. Don’t tread on me!! I have the right to be as ignorant, stupid, and selfish as I want to be!!

Hence, today, about ten days after Thanksgiving, Covid is exploding. To entirely new heights. Hitting its highest peak ever. How high is that? 216,000 cases per day.

Meanwhile, 3,000 people are dying every day now. That’s a 9/11 per day. That’s the scale of carnage — and it is carnage — that the American Idiot has unleashed.

It shouldn’t have taken a genius to understand that traveling across the country in the middle of a lethal pandemic was a really bad idea.

Why? As I pointed out, it was probably going to create a hyper-spreader event — several super-spreader events, across the country. Not just one, but several, simultaneously. That is the only way, really, that Covid can keep climbing to new heights in America, by the way.

That meant, in the real world, something like this. That bus became a super-spreader. That airline route did. Maybe that airport or that bus station was. Maybe that shopping mall was. Maybe all of them put together in certain areas were. You can easily see how people trapped closely together for long hours in poorly ventilated, environments — buses, trains, planes, airports, malls — are Covid’s perfect storm.

It’s jaw-dropping, to the rest of the world. Why do Americans act like this? Life is returning to normal — or at least a kind of slow post-Covid normal — in much of the rest of the world. And it hasn’t been easy. Australia has beaten back Covid with a sense of determination and perseverance. It’s taken them many tries, not just one. It wasn’t easy in New Zealand, Vietnam, South Korea, or any of the other global leaders either, the places that fought Covid successfully.

But America really is different. If you needed proof of whether or not America’s an idiocracy, a country of bizarre, backward idiots, incapable of reasoning, thinking about anyone but themselves, understanding much of anything, much less caring…you don’t have to look much further than the example of millions of Americans traveling for the holidays during a pandemic, sending its numbers to shocking new heights. It’s really, really incredible.

It’s vivid proof that freedom has become free-dumb in America. It isn’t, say, the right to have healthcare, retirement, education, or childcare — but the right to act as harmfully and stupidly as you please, everyone and everything else be damned. It’s the right to, for example, spread a deadly disease, to not care if the vulnerable get infected, to act ignorant and selfish to the point where people die. That, my friends, I can call nothing else but malicious stupidity.

I mean that, I really do — because literally nobody else has done what Americans did over Thanksgiving. Nobody. Europe’s been a global laggard in Covid, but even Europeans didn’t behave as foolishly and thoughtlessly as Americans. Nobody did. Americans are in a class of their own now, when it comes to genuinely fatal idiocy.

That’s not just a jeremiad, by the way. It’s a warning — another one — of what’s to come now. Now that the chain reaction of yet another series of super-spreader events has clearly kicked in, Covid numbers are in all likelihood going to keep exploding all over again.

America hasn’t had “waves” — Covid never crested and fell — it’s had multiple tsunamis, which piled atop another, yielding plateaus. Think of a county being drowned by a flood, which never receded. Then another one, and another one. Each wall of water piles atop the previous one. That’s what’s happened with Covid in America.

Hence, so far, it’s hit three plateaus. The first, from April to June, was about 25,000 cases per day. The second, from July to October, was about 75,000 cases per day. The third, from October to November, was about 150,000 cases per day. At each step, the virus exploded all over again, thanks to a lack of leadership, a lack of cooperation, and too many Americans insisting that their right to spread the virus was free-dumb.

Now, the next phase of viral explosion is happening. How high will the numbers rise? A little bit of math — don’t worry, it’s simple math — can tell us a lot, right about now. From the first phase to the second phase, the numbers tripled — 25,000 to 75,000. From the second to the third, they doubled — 75,000 to 150,000. See the trend? Tripling, doubling — the rate of acceleration, the growth exponent, gets smaller. That’s to be expected, in a sense, because even exponential growth can’t keep growing at an accelerating rate forever.

That means that now, over the winter, in the fourth phase, something like this spectrum of scenarios will play out.

The good scenario is that they don’t double again — they grow by less than double. Let’s say that they grow by about 1.5 times. That means that daily cases will go from about 150,000 to 225,000 — which is almost where we already are. That’s “good,” in some abstract mathematical sense — but it’s not good at all in a human or social one. The bad case is that cases double again, which is what they did from the second to the third phase. That means daily cases rise to about 300,000 per day, and then flatten out.

In case it’s not clear enough why that’s nightmarish, at that rate, more than 2 million people per week are being infected with Covid. That reaches 10 million a month.

But we’re just talking about what’s already happened — over Thanksgiving. What if Americans travel all over again, for Christmas? Then those numbers explode — all over again. They double, yet once more, because just the same thing happens all over again. In the good case, 225,000 cases per day double to 450,000 per day. In the bad case, 300,000 cases per day double to 600,000 cases per day.

If that sounds both apocalyptic and unrealistic, go ahead and ask yourself if you expected 3,000 people a day to be dying right about now, because more than 200,000 per day were falling ill. Those are catastrophic numbers — and they tell us that the scenarios above aren’t just within the realm of possibility, they’re pretty likely.

After all, the next phase of viral explosion is already baked in — we’re seeing numbers begin to explode again now because people traveled over Thanksgiving. They’re not going to stop anytime soon. All that ill-advised travel set off a chain reaction, which is only beginning now. It’s going to keep rising for several weeks, right into Christmas.

And around then, Americans are probably going to travel all over again. They didn’t listen to the advice and warnings the first time around — so why would they this time? What’s changed? The Americans who are going to infect the nation with Covid genuinely don’t seem to care. They’re not thinking, reasoning, caring people. They don’t care. Nothing can reach them and change their minds because their minds are already made up. They’ve decided that their “rights” matter more than public health, and foremost among those rights is being able to act as foolishly and dangerously as you damn well please.

Lest you think I exaggerate, remember that North Dakota is the world’s hottest Covid hotspot — and there, people are so dumb that they’re literally going to their deathbeds and perishing of Covid while protesting that they don’t believe in it. There appear to be millions upon millions of Americans like that — more jaw-droppingly suicidally foolish than anyone else in the world can believe is humanly possible, dumber than a rock, a dog, a dunce…a virus.

America’s now entering the worst phase of Covid: a nightmare Covid winter. 3,000 people a day are dying. That number’s only going to rise, as America’s brittle, weak, underfunded healthcare system is stretched to the limit, and breaks. As and when that happens, deaths will rise sharply, and so will infections.

It’s going to be a brutal winter in America. A season of death, illness, suffering, and disease. A plague winter, where death’s glittering scythe slashes savagely across the land, cutting down life after life, too soon, too fast, without mercy. Take a moment to thank some of your fellow Americans — there are (really) no people more thoughtless, careless, and selfish in all the world than America’s idiots, people so foolish, cruel, deluded, ignorant, and oblivious they’ve made a pandemic explode over and over and over again now.

This is the third time Covid’s exploded in America, my friend. The third time. Once is a mistake, twice is folly — but three times? Playing games with death? There’s no other word for that than suicidal, lunatic, historic idiocy

America’s Nightmare Covid-19 Scenario is Coming True — All Over Again

Written by fossnuabvtb