Wasn’t it fun when we were all arguing about old white guys running for President?

the obsessions of the public consciousness seem to move faster than the speed of thought these days, given that we’ve all got access to all the world’s information in our pockets, and there are multiple 24 hour “news” organizations scrambling to fill time with talking heads blabbering about the news of the day.

While there’s some definite advantages to this, it often creates many more problems than it solves, as it’s difficult to sift through the deluge to find the good information amongst all the bad (shared with both genuine concern and malice). Sturgeon’s Law, of course, is alive and well, so there’s a hell of a lot more bad information than good.

Enter COVID-19.

I am *not* an epidemiologist, or any other sort of scientist, really, so I am speaking from the position of a mostly-informed civilian (all mistakes in terminology are solely mine). This virus is serious, mostly because it’s new (well not a totally new virus, but a new strain of a very common one), and humanity as a whole hasn’t encountered it before, and thus lacks herd immunity, since few people have developed antibodies to it naturally, and there is, thus far, no vaccine. The average healthy person who gets infected is likely going to experience a week or two of illness and discomfort, not unlike the flu or other bug. That said, all the precautions being advised (although you should be washing your hands anyway) are more about protecting those of us who are especially vulerable to infection, or might have other conditions that prevent them from fighting the infection or might have something else aggrivated by it. The people who have died (and in the scheme of things, there aren’t many) largely fall into these categories.

Even if the US Government is doing terrible job of handling this business, the media, both professional and social, are likewise distributing plenty of terrible information. If you hear something that sound foolish, it probably is. It’s not a liberal hoax or false flag, it’s not a Chinese chemical attack, your dog can’t give it to you, and you won’t be cured drinking some televangelist’s silver solution.

Just wash your damned hands.

The precautions being taken, especially the shutting down of lots of big public gatherings, is probably a good thing overall, should slow the spread, but at this point, it’s here, we’re not going to stop it. Cases are popping up all over the place – the news announced the first one in my metropolitan area yesterday. I expect I’ll be doing some working-from-home before all is said and done. Most of us are going to be exposed sooner or later in the next few months. Part of me just wants to get it over with, build the herd immunity, and keep the vulnerable as safe as we can.

That said, the public response isn’t really tamping down panic; hand sanitizer and toilet paper are flying off shelves, kids at school are getting bad info from their cable news watching parents and it’s causing undue anxiety (I have first-hand knowledge of this).

We shall, however, see what happens. I fully expect it, as I indicate in this post title, that it’s gonna get weirder before it gets better.