why i have a hard time sleeping at night...or...we're probably pwned

We're heading into the forty-day plus period of the stay at home orders established as a response to the coronavirus. And as the deaths in New York City begin to decrease and the national curve stops its essentially vertical ascent, there are moves pretty much everywhere to begin to take the reigns off of the country and let people get back to living their normal lives.

It's like these motherfuckers have **literally no idea** of the kind of dilemma we're in.  I sit around and listen to the media, the medical professionals, and when I'm in the need for some straight humor or to be openly deceived, the President. And if you listen to them all, you'd have no idea what to do, or who to believe, or when to believe them.

To be clear, there will be some meandering as this comes along- it's not an article,  but more a stream of thought that may have value to **someone** and even if the only someone it has value to is me, that shit matters too...

This stay at home order has gotten me to do be more in my own head than I like. I think the official term our state uses is Shelter-In-Place, but as an old high school teacher, that term has a very specific, and pretty terrifying meaning- it's how one is trained to respond to a school shooter- both shitty but by no means analogous...but I digress. When I've been sitting at home, I've been fortunate enough to be able to keep working- the only difference is now I can consume copious amounts of information while I work on writing grants or doing reports. And the more news I consume, the more concerned I get that we may be getting an illegitimate bag. I understand everyone wants to be optimistic, but it seems there are a few things that make that projection of confidence particularly complicated...I'll talk about just a few of them here...

1) As of April 26, 2020, we have no immunity, treatment, or vaccine. We don't **really** know how efficiently it spreads.

2) Every conversation about vaccines I've seen is 12-18 months. I find that peculiar, as there has literally **never** been a vaccine produced that fast and the fastest, from samples to a licensed drug, took four years with the Mumps in 1967.

3) Even if we could produce the vaccine in 12-18 months, we'd need to produce **way** more vaccine than we're used to. In an average year, for average vaccines, we need to vaccinate kids under 5 and adults over 65 which ends up being about 5 million a year. This is a different motherfucker- almost everyone will want to get vaccinated- even some of those old-school anti-vaxxers from both parties (kale eating progressives and slack-jawed yokels who both believe the Lancet article (that's been discredited for like over a decade now). We have 350 million people...we don't have the kinds of labs to do the kinds of scale necessary to create that much vaccine. You know who does?

China.

Probably makes you wish we hadn't called it the Wuhan virus now...

4) All of this presupposes something-  that we could make a working vaccine for this. We've tried to make vaccines for **other** coronaviruses, and we're zero for every time we've ever tried. The vaccines we've made that have sometimes had some success in animals have also been known to make the disease more likely which makes it a really really shitty vaccine.

5) Treatments require study and trials, too. We've FDA fast-tracked some drugs and tested them on humans (overwhelming African-American you say?? I call shenanigans!!!) and turns out the studies indicate the drug was more likely to kill you **if you took it than if you didn't** which makes it a particularly ineffective treatment.

6) Immunity- we have no fuckin idea. People who have had the disease are being tracked with really low to no antibodies- this would mean that **even catching the disease would not make you immune- which with no treatment or vaccine means...

The disease, if all this is true, would have no check. The only natural resolution would be international herd immunity- which a) isn't particularly fast and b) has the kinds of death totals that sound like they destroyed Houston or Los Angeles or Chicago. This is grim as fuck- I get it. And maybe I've up too late and have just missed some simple shit. But as of now, I don't see this shit getting any better.

I haven't even cracked the door on the economy or mental health, both of which are essentially nuclear explosions as well...which is probably why I don't sleep well anymore...