Visiting audio stores?

Yes, Millercarbon, that is a model/projection number that uses the base input of “no effort to stop the spread”. The model is a worst case scenario that we are long past with our social distancing and other efforts already being implemented.  Please do not project information that is hysterical and outdated as current fact.  Out goal is to make the rate of the ongoing spread of this corona virus manageable by our health providers and facilities.  To this end we should conscientiously place ourselves in our system’s sweet spot and play music.  Possibly add some medicinal wine or spirits for good measure.

One day back in the late 70’s one of my astronomy club pals said hey did you hear? Carl Sagan giving a talk at the UW! When? Tonight! So we all piled in the car and drove from Puyallup to Seattle, making it in just before the monster hall completely filled up.

Sagan gave his then standard talk about the number of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy. Nobody really knows of course. The probability, I mean. Turns out its a gag: How many? One. Maybe. Hung jury. The talk was mostly a run-down on things like how many stars, how many of those with planets, how long the stars last based on mass and the rate fusion turns hydrogen to helium, just the kind of thing your way above average geeky teen has studied to death and yet still goes ga ga over.

Little did we know however the best part was the QA. Mostly the questions were pretty standard stuff. But a few grad students had some impressive if hard to follow ones, even a few that seemed almost impossible to answer. Incredibly, one after another he not only answered them all but in a way that enlightened everyone including the questioner. By enlightened I mean even if you didn’t understand the question to begin with you did by the end, and you understood why the answer was correct as well.

Well, with one exception. There was, not a group exactly but a cohort, a number of otherwise unrelated people who had but one thing in common, an utter and complete inability to comprehend. Anything. Quite a few different people but yet they all sounded exactly the same. No matter how eloquent the answer, or how pointed the barb, it was like water on a duck.

And yet Carl Sagan in his novel Contact was going to have Dr. Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster in the movie) reach Vega via a black hole until Kip Thorne later of LIGO fame disabused him of that idea and suggested a worm hole instead. Hel-loo!

Perhaps our most significant conclusion is that mitigation is unlikely to be feasible without emergency surge capacity limits of the UK and US healthcare systems being exceeded many times over. In the most effective mitigation strategy examined, which leads to a single, relatively short epidemic (case isolation, household quarantine and social distancing of the elderly), the surge limits for both general ward and ICU beds would be exceeded by at least 8-fold under the more optimistic scenario for critical care requirements that we examined.In addition, even if all patients were able to be treated, we predict there would still be in the order of 250,000 deaths in GB, and 1.1-1.2 million in the US.

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College...