Visiting audio stores?

If the spread of the disease isn't slowed down there will be more sick people than there are ventilators and providers.

This is baked in. Do the math.

Infections increase ten fold every 2 weeks. 1k becomes 100k in one month, 10M in two. Symptoms run about two weeks behind infections, intubation/death another two weeks behind that. The death count, in other words, lags infections by a month. A month in which infections increase by 100 times.

Let's say the case fatality rate is the low 1% that some claim. Its not but let's assume for the moment it is only 1%.

So what this means, by the time you get to 1k dead, it means you had 100k infected. Not now, but a month ago. In the month it took for the 1% to get sick and die the 100k infected grew to 10M.

Then in just two more weeks its 100M. Essentially everyone in the country susceptible to infection will have been infected. This is the nature of exponential growth.

Changing the numbers around, all it really does is shift the date we run out of hospitals and beds by a few days or weeks. It does not change the outcome. Nothing now can change the outcome.

The time for that was two full months ago. Back when I posted my PSA.

Perhaps our most significant conclusion is that mitigation is unlikely to be feasible without emergency surge capacity limits of the UK and US healthcare systems being exceeded many times over. In the most effective mitigation strategy examined, which leads to a single, relatively short epidemic (case isolation, household quarantine and social distancing of the elderly), the surge limits for both general ward and ICU beds would be exceeded by at least 8-fold under the more optimistic scenario for critical care requirements that we examined.In addition, even if all patients were able to be treated, we predict there would still be in the order of 250,000 deaths in GB, and 1.1-1.2 million in the US.

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College...

One day back in the late 70’s one of my astronomy club pals said hey did you hear? Carl Sagan giving a talk at the UW! When? Tonight! So we all piled in the car and drove from Puyallup to Seattle, making it in just before the monster hall completely filled up.

Sagan gave his then standard talk about the number of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy. Nobody really knows of course. The probability, I mean. Turns out its a gag: How many? One. Maybe. Hung jury. The talk was mostly a run-down on things like how many stars, how many of those with planets, how long the stars last based on mass and the rate fusion turns hydrogen to helium, just the kind of thing your way above average geeky teen has studied to death and yet still goes ga ga over.

Little did we know however the best part was the QA. Mostly the questions were pretty standard stuff. But a few grad students had some impressive if hard to follow ones, even a few that seemed almost impossible to answer. Incredibly, one after another he not only answered them all but in a way that enlightened everyone including the questioner. By enlightened I mean even if you didn’t understand the question to begin with you did by the end, and you understood why the answer was correct as well.

Well, with one exception. There was, not a group exactly but a cohort, a number of otherwise unrelated people who had but one thing in common, an utter and complete inability to comprehend. Anything. Quite a few different people but yet they all sounded exactly the same. No matter how eloquent the answer, or how pointed the barb, it was like water on a duck.

The danger is very real, and serious. The reason we just saw a comprehensive multi-trillion dollar stimulus package is this paper by epidemiologist Dr Neil Ferguson and published today by the Imperial College of London showing that merely acting to slow rather than completely stop the spread would "still likely result in hundreds of thousands of deaths and health systems (most notably intensive care units) being overwhelmed many times over." https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College...

In other words exactly what I been saying for two solid months, only now its a prestigious epidemiologist reporting to the White House.

Their projection is for 2.2M (yes, million) deaths in the US.

That said, the Wuhan virus is spread not by speakers but by, uh, speakers. When you talk, or even breathe, it comes out in your breath. If you are infected. Which you must at this point assume that you are, and everyone else as well. Also assume every surface in the area of breathing people is contaminated, since moist breath and particles tend to drift and eventually settle on surfaces.

Wearing a mask interferes with this process. Virus that gets caught in the mask is virus not being deposited on surfaces. So avoid people, especially people so clueless or inconsiderate as to not be masked. Avoid touching surfaces anywhere anyone has been, because they could be contaminated. Above all wash and sanitize your hands like crazy and especially before eating or touching your face.

Do those things, maintain a distance of a good 6 feet, and there’s no reason not to go audition some gear. If that still somehow manages to be so important.