Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "America Trip Update - 15th March 2020" video.

It's unfortunate, but I doubt this will calm down in the next 30 days. Your airline will cancel the trip within the next several days so just sit on the tickets. Most airlines here are allowing people to reschedule with no penalty for up to a year, so maybe that will be an option. This will pass. It will take several months before new cases start going down enough to end some of the travel restrictions. And better a cheery announcement until you had more information than adding any more doom and gloom to an already tough situation for us all. We will all make it through this. Hell, I'm 74 with other health problems, so I'm theoretically one of the most at risk, and I'm just staying home except for weekly food shopping I can't avoid with things from Amazon. I wash my hands whenever I can and keep my hands away from my face. I'm confident that's enough to keep me from getting the virus. I lived through the Hong Kong Flu of 1968, back when I was a respiratory therapist actively treating patients hacking and coughing in my face. That flu killed one million people worldwide and about 600,000 in the US. We had patients lining the hallways on cots and had to rent a refrigerated truck to hold all the dead bodies because the county morgue was full and we had run out of coffins to bury people. I never even got a sniffle. Until I see something that starts rivaling the 1968 outbreak, I'm pretty sure that vast majority of us, now that we are taking the same precautions we should take every flu season, will not only not die, we won't even get it.
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@WALTERBROADDUS Yes, good opportunity to catch up on postponed household chores like finally getting all the wash done and some painting on the front porch where the sun beats down on it all summer. I can't move very fast now, but I just go slow and steady until it gets done. I'm really confident this will be a manageable outbreak this time. I would have been a lot happier to see these steps being taken ten days ago, but it looks like we're on the right path now. Thank goodness this isn't a repeat of the 1918 "Spanish" influenza. Then we'd at least have a reason to running around with our hair on fire. :-)
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@WALTERBROADDUS Yeah, that is a pretty scary prospect. Thing is, it's still out there, and we've still never been able to develop an effective vaccine because it's such a fast mutator, so we will get another pandemic at some point. We have better medical care than in 1918, so the mortality rate won't be as high, but it will still be in the hundreds of thousands. I really have to wonder if many people today can even handle something liked that without melting into a pool of butter. We seem to be living in a fragile society.
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