The COVID-19 Pandemic: Two Important Points

Two important facts about the COVID-19 pandemic that everyone should know and base their behavior on in the next few days and weeks:

1) As New York governor Andrew Cuomo has repeatedly stressed during his press briefings the last few days, all of this social distancing and shutdown is being done for one overriding purpose: to ensure that anyone who enters a hospital in need of a ventilator to keep them alive will have that ventilator available for them.  Period.  For this to happen and supplies of ventilators to meet the demand, the infection rate curve must flatten enough so that a spike of infections does not result in desperately ill patients finding themselves without the means for survival...

2) I've heard that as many as half of those infected with this coronavirus at any given time are asymptotic, that is they feel and display no symptoms of the disease, either because it will run its course through their bodies over the span of two or three weeks without causing any noticeable effects or because it is incubating within them, the symptoms of fever, dry cough and shortness of breath beginning to appear a few days later.  I don't know if "half" is an accurate estimate, but I'm confident that a large segment of the infected population feels fine.  The potentially tragic mistake is to equate having no symptoms of COVID-19 with not being infected with it...unfortunately, I see people who seem to buy into this notion and who not only won't practice safe social distancing but who also shoot off at the mouth against those who take the pandemic seriously.  Please don't be like these fools. By the way, wearing a mask is an effective way to prevent droplets containing the virus from being breathed in by others if you happen to be one of those without symptoms, but infected...breathing in these droplets is the most common means of coronavirus transmission.  When I'm at my "essential" workplace I presume, rightly or not, that none of my colleagues are feeling or displaying symptoms...if they are, they shouldn't be there in the first place.  Again, just because you feel fine and normal that doesn't mean that you aren't a dangerous carrier of this very contagious disease that has killed, and will continue to kill, those susceptible to its effects...