I wanted to take your comment into a separate thread because I feel that you raised excellent questions likely shared by many who are silently reading my posts.
As you know, I am half-Armenian and was brought up in what I call a “debate culture” that is shared by many ethnicites of the Mediterranean and the Middle East. A cornerstone of this culture is for individuals who have formed a thesis on some idea, topic, crisis, or invention, to state that idea publicly for review. This culture of open conversation, critique and debate is the reason why humanity’s greatest thinkers, many revolutionary inventions, concepts of law and society were all born in the Middle East. To date, the internet as we know it and every protocol that makes networked computers work together, is ran according to rules outlined in various “RFC’s”. RFC is an acronym for, “Request for Comments”. Debate culture is a time-tested method of distilling the truth and it does not require one to have letters or titles in front of one’s name.
Going as far back as February, I started to make posts about the development of this Corona thing. Jokes at first (drinking Corona), but then I dove into the numbers. I consider myself good at situational analysis and data calculus – I feel my professional achievements speak to this. What got me, were the numbers of people who’d gone farther in school than I and presumably had taken higher levels of mathematics and analysis, who were making broad (and very erroneous) statements on incomplete and plainly misinterpreted data. There were many facets – death rates, economic impacts, inflationary tendencies, effects on the stock market and the undercurrent of a major oil price war which contributed heavily to instability of typical financial shelters utilized by investors in times of stock crash. To me, this was facinating!
My brain attacked the problem and the more that I analyzed the available information, the deeper I became convinced that as you accurately put it, “covid 19 is not as big a deal as the media has made it out to be.” But, as I pointed out in an article I published in my blog on August 16th of last year, “The power of a true and honest 2nd person perspective in our decision-making process, is invaluable!” What I was seeking here is not an echo chamber of supporters (which is what unfortunately so much of FB has become), nor the re-broadcastment of the mass media narrative, nor the anecdotal accounts of someone 4 times removed that died for within the past few months. I was inviting my FB circle of acquaintances to provide some well-thought-out perspective. Dozens of people have contacted me privately as a result of these posts. But it is apparently not within our Western culture to ‘stick our necks out’ publicly, which is probably at least a part of the reason why we find ourselves in our present predicament. You have no way of knowing how many times, I’ve myself raised a question – “could I be wrong?” gone back, wiped my spreadsheets, went back to the most updated creditable data and restarted the calculus. The result keeps coming out largely the same! So the only conclusion that I am left to draw is that I am not wrong.
I am not a medical doctor. But neither is Bill Gates, who’s been making a lot of sweeping comments about the present situation. For that matter, neither is Tedros Adhanom who is presently the head of the World Health Organization! However, I’ve seen a lot of doctors running their mouths about 3.5-4% death rates (which are improperly derived and refuted by even the doomsday Imperial College study, by a huge factor!) and applying those figures to the total global population as if this virus had a potential of infecting literally every human on the planet. (which it obviously does not). Having accreditation letters next to one’s name clearly does not impart their brains to recall the basics of statistical calculus, which they ought to have learned in school many years ago, and clearly not utilized. If there is anything clear about this whole situation is that “the professionals” (doctors, politicians, policy-makers) have utterly failed us! I however, utilize data calculus in my work on a regular basis. And if that is not enough, I must point out that most of my posts link sources and cite MD/PhD researchers from the world’s top universities. As further proof, I invite you to look at my TLTR post from March 15th where under the Predictions section I wrote, “In the end the statistics will likely show a less than 1% (quite likely less than 0.5%) overall death rates.” To date, the only two population-wide studies conducted on Coronavirus concluded with overall death rate of 0.6% and the more recent study, a 0.34% death rate. The beautiful thing about this brave new world of information that we live in, is that practically all of us, from the doctors to the janitors, have the access to the same information and are free to analyze it for ourselves. One of the biggest problems as I see it now is that people are either unable or unwilling to look at information and objectively come to their own conclusions. Most are looking to what those around them are doing as a guide to what they should do and how they should think. And this method is how buffalo go stampeding off a cliff – I thought we were better than that.
However, if you feel that I am disregarding some data, or have climbed too far out on a limb of my own making, PLEASE present your argument! I welcome debate on this point. Just please ensure that the sources of your information are valid and that we do not divert into discussing feelings and anecdotes. My aim through this provocation is to figure out what’s going on.
Finally – what if I am wrong? Well Derek, I will first admit that I was wrong. Following that, I will promptly process a refund-in-full for anything I’ve sold you as a result of these posts 
Sound fair?
Derek, playing the “what if” game can eventually bring us to “what if a doomsday asteroid hits earth?”
Doomsdayers have been saying for decades that we simply do not dedicate enough resources into detecting near-earth-orbit objects and that there is a calculable chance that an asteroid that could end all human life may not be detected soon enough for us to do anything about it. Years ago I researched this a bit and it is actually a valid concern.
The issue there is that we as a society (rightly or wrongly) decided that the expense of launching more satellites and telescopes, hosting warehouses full of computers and armies of people for the aim of finding these objects, is not worth the expense vs the probability of this becoming “a thing”.
Same, but opposite with this corona virus. The question is not whether people will die, but rather how much of our civilization, quality of life, happiness and comfort are we willing to unravel in order to delay (not stop) some deaths?
Taking it to another extreme: we could save about 50,000 lives per year in the US (and these aren’t just mostly elderly) if we just stop using motorized transport. This has been statistically clear for decades. But we’ve decided that slowly progressing towards safer roads and safer cars is worth 0.016% of our population coming to an untimely death in a car wreck every year.
Why did we throw a nuclear bomb at our way of life, destroy people’s livelihoods and ability to provide for themselves over a virus that is reasonably projected to kill about 3 times as many people in the US as the common flu in the year before we build herd immunity to it? Yes, that is a lot. Yes, they are all someone’s father, mother, whatnot. Washington State alone now has 170,000 more people who were living self-sufficiently and now require others to give them money so that they do not become homeless. I feel that response is crazy vs common-sense distancing and isolation of the less than 15% of our population who are at any considerable risk from this virus.
See my other post made today about what Sweden is doing. And their death and hospitalization rates are not higher than anywhere else despite the fact that they have open borders and are a major airport hub.