Yesterday, the United States crossed the Rubicon and had the highest number of coronavirus cases in the world.

People are freaking out. They are panicking.

BUT

There is data you need to understand.

Is it bad? Sure.

Is it insurmountable? NO

Those Chinese numbers? That 80,000 cases? The overwhelming majority, about 68,000 of cases, were in Hubei, and the majority of those were in Wuhan. Wuhan has a population of about 11 million and Hubei has a population of about 59 million.

The US has a population of about 327 million.

Therefore, many fewer cases as a percentage of population.

Italy has a population of about 60 million, with about 80,000 cases.

Italy has many more cases as a percentage of population. What’s the difference between Hubei and Italy? The lock down.

China locked the entire country down, and held the epidemic to Hubei province. The state is just starting to lift the Hubei lockdown, in pieces, and with monitoring of people via their cell phones so they know who is sick, who is immune, and who has not yet been touched. They are now starting to see some cases come into the country from foreign travel, so yesterday they shut their borders. These actions will hold their second wave down.

Italy didn’t lock down until it was too late, and to this day, people are still out running around, spreading disease.

We can learn a lot from this. The eventual postmortem will show that the Trump administration was presented with a written pandemic plan, that people like Alex Azar wanted to implement a lot of that plan in January, but got no traction. So we’re late to containment…we can still work on mitigation and flattening the curve.

Our testing is terrible in most of the country so we don’t have an accurate assessment of infection. In some places, like New Jersey, they are only testing people who are seriously ill, and their positive rate is in the 75% range. In New York, they are testing more possible exposures, so their positive rate is much lower.

The numbers across the country will grow, and keep growing UNLESS AND UNTIL everyone who can, just stays home. This is how we flatten the curve until there are treatment protocols, a serum antibody test, and eventually a vaccine.

So read those numbers again… and do what they did in China. The people who went out, the health care workers, food workers – they had their temperature taken on a regular basis. The people from households were allowed out once every three days for food, and only one person from a household could leave. To leave their building/complex, there was a temperature check. Everyone maintained distance. And after 2 months, the disease was eradicated from that area: that means, not one new case in 14 days.

Will it get bad here? Yes. Will many people die? Yes. But WE can help to slow the rise and decrease the total number of deaths. And remember, as Andrew Cuomo says in his news briefing every day, of all those cases, about 20% will require hospitalization, and 80% will be able to be sick at home.

So when you hear people panicking, and saying “all is lost, we’re all going to die” – that’s just not true. And we need to find a way to calm down those panicked souls, and send them virtual hugs – panicking doesn’t help anyone. There’s something to be said about the attitude we all carry. Now, I’m an old hippie and back in the late 1970’s the big threat was nuclear proliferation. I was one of several million people (yup, several million) across the world that participated in a daily meditation to avoid nuclear war. There were people who said we were nuts, that meditation couldn’t do anything, that the vibration of millions was just a waste of time. Now, they might have been right – but hey – no nuclear war.

So, meditate. Keep kind thoughts. When YOU want to panic, BREATHE. And when you see all the scary numbers, remember that they are relative to population, NOT absolute. And if you read things that seem odd, ASK – yesterday someone told me that this whole situation was caused by gay people and asked if that was true. Talking her out of that was an hour of my life I’m never getting back – but please – fight the insanity of idiots.

It will be warm today – get some air, while maintaining social distance. Send an email or text to a front-line worker (health care, distribution/delivery, food service) and say THANK YOU.

We are all in this together, and we will come out the other side.