I'm feeling good today. So, let's start with a story.
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A long time ago in a land far, far away called The Sometimes Semi-United States of America (SSUSA), something happened. Someone took charge. An outcome was reached. And someone understood what had happened. Someone did not.
The Sometimes Semi-United States of America was something of a Democracy. Sometimes that meant that they elected idiots. But sometimes they got lucky and elected someone of some intelligence. This was one of those fortunate times. At this time, they were fortunate to have elected a fellow by the name of Rhackett as POTSSUS (President of the Sometimes Semi-United States). (Please note that any resemblance of persons, names or events in this story to actual persons, names or events is purely coindicental).
Now, one day, an expert from the medical fields came to Rhackett and let him know that there was someone very ill in his area, suffering from a novel disease. Rhackett demanded more information as quickly as possible. So, the medical expert went out to find as much information as possible in as short of a time as possible. He discovered quite a bit within a week. It turned out that this novel disease had already run through at least one foreign population center to devastating effect. It’s lethality was known “well enough”. It’s rate of spread was quite well understood.
It happened that within that one week, while the medical expert was investigating, that one case in The SSUSA had grown to a total of eight cases.
Rhackett listened very carefully to the information on the disease from the medical expert. He also acknowledged the increase in case count from one to eight in the span of one week. Rhackett considered the situation to be at least pretty serious and decided to do some careful mathematical analysis of what was then known. He would sleep on it and decide what to do in the morning.
The next morning Rhackett pulled together all of his top advisors and laid out what was known for all to comment on. After some discussion, Rhackett asked for a moment to gather his thoughts. He turned his back to everyone for a full minute. Two minutes. Three minutes. When he finally turned back to his team, his face was grim but determined. “Shut it down!” he said.
His team looked at each other and back at Rhackett. “What?”, their collective stares said.
“Shut everything down”, repeated Rhackett. “Everything in this country that is non-essential for maintaining civil order has to shut down now. People need to hunker down immediately. Contact between people has to be absolutely minimized. Close every school. Ban every meeting. Anyone not in an essential job needs to stay home. Make it happen.”
Now, Rhackett was a wise and well-respected leader. It happened, as he demanded.
The eight individuals became 13. The 13 became 17. But the 17 only became 19 before petering out at 20. With only 20 cases, there were only 3 deaths. And then it was over.
After a few months, Rhackett opened up the country for business again and things gradually returned to normal.
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Now, it so happened that, in addition to being wise and handsome, Rhackett liked to keep in touch with “the masses”. One way he had of doing this was to participate in message board discussions on an Internet site call LetsRant.Com (or LRC for short). Here, Rhackett was able to see how “typical” citizens of The SSUSA thought about things. And on LRC, the following exchange took place between Rhackett and Shally Vhix. Shally was the resident Idiot in Chief on LRC - here discussing things with Rhackett, the Commander in Chief of The SSUSA.
Shally: “I just can’t believe that we shut down the entire nation on account of 3 deaths! 3! And 20 cases. It’s the most idiotic thing I ever heard of!”
Rhackett: “We did not shut down the nation for the 20 cases and 3 deaths that happened. We shut down the nation for the 100 million cases and 3 million deaths that did not happen.”
Shally had no idea what Rhackett was talking about and concluded that he must be some sort of raving lunatic.