by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Someone read one of my posts about possibility of The Gray Plague and was quite sure I had “Trump Derangement Disorder” the likes of which they had never seen. First, fuck that guy. Second, if you ain’t got haters you ain’t poppin. And, second, I think we definitely need to keep and eye on South Florida. If we started to get reports of an unusual number of deaths there then, well, we know my fears of a Gray Plague are being realized.
I only think this is even possible because we don’t have any metric for how many cases are in the United States right now. While South Korea has tested 20,000 people, the United States has tested about 500. So, the only metric we will have to measure if it’s here or not is any unusual levels of sickness in the general populace. While I have been talking about how I think Iceland will suffer for the sins of our healthcare system because of how many Americans visit there in a year — I also think there’s one thing we would notice: a lot of old powerful and well known people dying in a rather abrupt fashion.
If you had between 1.3% and 15% of the elderly population of South Florida — or the rest of the country for that matter — being to die at a rather rapid rate, someone, somewhere would notice. The one organization that would likely benefit briefly by a surreal number of elderly celebrities dying would be, of course, TMZ. They would be something of our trip wire because they would the the one organization that would break the news of 40 elderly celebrities dying in 24 hours. One thing I just don’t know is how many elderly people, in real terms, would die if the absolute worst happened. Are we talking 1 million? 10 Million? What? I can’t imagine it could possibly be 10 million, but who knows. I know I don’t.
Or, put another way, we are likely about to enter about a year of unprecedented instability on a global scale. Living through history of such a a scope will suck big time. When it’s all over, some basic assumptions about life that we have now may no longer be accurate, for better or worse. I would prefer a few hundred thousand old people not die in the next year directly from COVID19. It would be a tragedy just like the Civil War or the first two world wars. I hope everything works out and I can, at last, give my full attention to the novel I’m developing.
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