Hi McKenna, thanks for taking the time to comment on my article. The cascading event analogy (one incident causes a cascade) isn’t far off with auto accidents; they rarely happen solo and indeed most do cause cascades to some degree. But the real issue is the lack of context. Yes, c-19 is very contagious. So is regular flu, especially when we consider how many people get vaccinated ahead of time. Regular flu infects anywhere between 800 million and three billion people each year, of whom between 250,000 and 650,000 die depending on the year in question. Lots of diseases are very infectious. But we don’t shut down the world every year in the hope of saving half a million lives. Furthermore, instead of the mass media panicking everyone with context-free reportage it would be more helpful not to bandy around things like generic mortality rate but rather to show the percentage of at-risk in the population. This is because c-19 doesn’t appear to kill healthy people at all, unlike regular flu. It kills the old and the sick. So if we knew how many people in a given location fell into this category we could arrive at an upper bound of mortality. As it is, most people are running around like headless chickens, convinced that passing strangers will kill them through infection, and this is deeply unhelpful. Suspicion and castigation are no way to deal with the challenge c-19 presents, especially in a nation like the USA where there are literally more guns (around 400 million registered, who knows how many unregistered) than people (330 million). The fact is that the vast majority of people who contract c-19 will be asymptomatic or have very mild symptoms; a few will feel rotten for a few days. Sadly the old and the sick are much more at risk, but they are much more at risk of absolutely everything because they are old and sick. At some point, moreover, we need to look at ourselves and ask if it is moral or ethical to throw hundreds of millions of vulnerable people in developing nations into penury and starvation in order to attempt to protect our aged and sick. Today we’re just panicking and flailing wildly; we ought to be thinking carefully and acting coherently instead.