Most of my Longtime and Loyal Readers will know that I have been a strong advocate of staying calm during this time of crisis. I have used my lovely speaking voice to tell people to chill out from my soapbox, such as it is, and I have used maths, science, data, and charts to show everyone that we are almost certainly dramatically overstating the impact of this virus and are massively overreacting by shutting down the global economy.

I am here to tell you that I was completely, totally, and utterly WRONG.

I mean, yeah, sure, the last pandemic – swine flu – in 2009 infected something like 25 MILLION people around the world, and that was after about 6 months, while we’ve got a confirmed 873,000 or so infected people at this precise moment of writing. And yes, swine flu killed an estimated 570,000 people worldwide in 2009, while this pandemic has killed only about 43,000 or so people, and those numbers are highly suspect.

But I must confess that my original highly positive and optimistic projections were simply wrong.

And here’s why.

Look at this chart from the Bing COVID portal. Just LOOK at it:

Just look at that red curve. It’s going up, up, and away! There’s no flattening of any kind!

To quote Private Hudson in Aliens (1986): “Game over, man, game over!!!”

We’re ALL gonna get infected! We’re ALL gonna be victims of Corona-chan!! We MUST give up ALL of our freedoms and liberties to our governments, and let our wise and benevolent leaders do whatever they feel is necessary to save us!!!

It just doesn’t matter if they want to track us using drones and our mobile phone pings off of cell towers. If it saves even ONE life, it’s TOTALLY worth keeping the entire population under lockdown.

Don’t lecture me about silly things like “freedoms” and “costs versus benefits” – and don’t tell me that I told you about such things in prior posts, either. Everyone is panicking about this damned virus, and it’s well past time that I panicked too!!!

And don’t tell me about the serious questions being raised about whether this virus is anywhere near as deadly as everyone claims it is, or about how the Chinese are bullshitting through their teeth about their actual casualty rates, or about the fact that the Taiwanese managed to contain the spread of COVID-19 without crippling their entire economy. All I care about right now is the fact that this thing is a crazy train, and we’re all in its path!

Everyone reading this should be equally terrified. This thing is going to kill between 0.1% and 1% of the total population (of infected persons), which could mean tens of thousands of casualties (even if most of those might have died later in the year anyway). And it’s absolutely going to CRUSH the global economy for generations to come!

It’s Fallout 76 in real life! We’re all going to be living like this in the future!:

Never mind the hopeful signs in front of us. Never mind that the rate of new infections in the epicentre of the outbreak, New York F***ing Shitty itself, is going down. Never mind that His Most Illustrious, Noble, August, Benevolent, and Legendary Celestial Majesty, the God-Emperor of Mankind, Donaldus Triumphus Magnus Astra, the First of His Name Bad Orange Man has been a highly effective crisis manager thus far, and highly reassuring to the American people.

NONE of that matters. What truly matters is that Chris “Fredo” Cuomo now has COVID-19!!!

I mean, seriously, is no one safe?!? Don’t bother me with facts, figures, and calming statistics – the Wise People In Charge are plainly going crazy about this, and it’s high time that we all went crazy too!

So heed my words, my friends: YOU’RE ALL DOOMED! GET OUT WHILE YOU CAN!! RUN TO THE HILLS!!! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!!!

In the unlikely event that you took any of the above seriously:

CHECK THE DATE.

Idiot.