Better than expected

Covid 19 continues to dominate world conversation.  It actually has been a major factor in why I haven't been posting over the past couple of months, largely because all of my media is saturated by it and I find I don't usually have much to add.  It sucks, people are responding to it badly, life is weird now.  I can say those things, and they are true, but since everybody is saying that it doesn't feel like there is much point in me spewing the same things onto my blog.

But I do have one point to make that may provide a different take on the whole affair:  I am surprised at how well the world is handling the covid crisis.

Don't get me wrong - we could do much better.  The response from some nations and leaders in particular has been heinously self serving and nonsensical, and average people refusing to wear masks as a political signal is also deplorable.

But we are doing a lot better than I figured we would.

At the beginning of all of this I assumed that all nations would refuse any serious measure to contain the virus in the name of economic progress.  I was stunned that so many nations actually came around to policies that closed stores and halted consumption.  I had thought that this simply wouldn't happen.  I figured that leaders would happily sacrifice 50% of the elderly and 1% of the rest of us on the altar of profit.

My expectation, made back in February, was that by this point about 2% of the world population would be dead, and we could easily be as high as 5% by year end.  I didn't expect any sort of serious attempt to stop the virus until every municipality worldwide was digging mass graves, desperately trying to find places to put all the corpses.

There was a reason I stocked up on food in those early days, and in part it was because I thought that we would have a far worse lockdown period following a monstrous dieoff due to covid.  Instead most countries had a moderate lockdown much earlier than I expected and it seems like the deaths from covid will be serious, but shouldn't even come close to 1% of world population, much less 5%.

(So far about .01% of world population has died to covid, and while it is still rising, it seems like we will have a vaccine long before we threaten to have 1% of us die from this.)

We could do much better, yes.  But we already did an awful lot better than I expected of us, so humanity surprised me in a positive way.  I normally like to whinge about how terrible people are, but I figurd I should at least note when it goes the other way and they surprise me in a good way.

In more normal covid news, I have grown a covid beard.  I already got called santa claus by a surprised family member, and nobody thinks it looks good, but this is apparently what I am doing with my time.