An outbreak of 80,000 diagnosed in a country with a population of 1.4 billion? That's .000057 of the population (.0057%.) Is that 5.7/1,000ths of 1 percent?  (Someone with math skills, please help me.  I get punch drunk thinking about basis points of basis points of basis points.)  To put this in perspective, 1% of the population of China is 14,000,000.  Does that shed any light?

Bringing it back to this country, and with the CDC's own statistics, 5-20% of the American population get influenza each year.  Granted the coronavirus is purportedly much more dangerous than the flu but people die of the flu every year.  And I'm not getting into those statistics.

How about these?  Approximately 40,000 people die of gun violence each year in America.  According to a study by NOAA, 240,000 are struck by lightning globally with 24,000 deaths; those numbers are 400 and 40, respectively, for America.  (I'm not suggesting you start obsessing about the flu or lightning striking but you may wish to put the NRA on your radar.)

Let's bring it back to a real travesty.  According to the WHO, as of 2018, 32 million people have died of HIV and 74.9 million have contracted the virus.  (Reduction does not mean eradication.)  Too bad this kind of attention didn’t ensue in 1981.  Oh, that’s right.  Why would it for something called the “gay plague”?  And, after almost forty years, why is it still a pandemic?  Well, the top five countries experiencing AIDS-related mortality are:  South Africa; Mozambique; Nigeria; Indonesia and Kenya.  Need I elaborate?

Now to the financial markets.  First of all, we were extremely overbought, riding on blind momentum, so we were late for the door on a correction.  But seriously?  It's getting stupid now.  By comparison, the market dropped 7.1% the day it reopened after 9/11.  Total for the week was an approximate 14% drop. That's 9/11…9/11 - An unprecedented global act of terrorism!

Are people imagining the demise of the homo sapien - no one left on the planet but one man and one woman - both gay - refusing to procreate for the propagation of the species?  Crazy Hollywood shit!  Do we actually need a catastrophe to wake people up?  There’s so much divisiveness - politically and personally.  Nothing like a global disaster to foster unity.

And for the CDC to announce it's not a question of if but when?  How is this pandemic supposed to sweep America, if you've been quarantining people coming into the country for almost a month?  I have neither the time nor the bandwidth to speculate on their agenda.

I suggest everyone settle down, binge on whatever it is you stream and order some Chinese.  (Yes, I have heard that people are afraid to order Chinese take-out.) SMH