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farewell, Canada

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Air travel between Japan and Canada is no more.

Meanwhile, my employer's apparently witless COVID-19 team just went on record stating the situation here in Japan is "under control". They are speaking in terms of "In the unlikely event that someone is infected."

This being a pandemic I expect that 70% of us will get sick (the herd immunity number). A model that an old friend passed around showed very few cases where the rate of infection was less than 50% and the usual seemed to be close to 100%.

If you look at the stats as they stand today, more than 50,000 are dead with 1 million infected (5% fatality rate) and a supposed base infection rate of 130/million population. If we extrapolate from those numbers to 70% infected we get 250 million dead. If instead the base fatality rate is 1% that means we have 5 million infected.

The government numbers show 77k new cases today, or 8% growth (in one day). Assuming that continues for a month and that thee are 1 million infected today, it means we'll have 10m infected in 30 days. At a 5% death rate that's 500,000 dead. If the real number is 5 million today and the death rate is 1% we'll have 50m cases in 30 days and again 500,000 dead.

It now looks like I'll be riding this out w/o my family and they without me. Ugh.