I have to say I personally find it most odd that people are getting all worked up over covid-19 but remain totally unconcerned about the persistently atrocious lifestyle choices they make. How can an obese indolent smoker possibly imagine that a virus is what they should be fearful of? As is always the case, we humans have zero capacity for assessing risk. We are easily manipulated by a mass media entirely reliant on sensation to sustain ad revenues, and we fail utterly to establish any sort of context; thus we’re fearful of things that are in context relatively trivial and complacent about things that will absolutely kill us years before we’d otherwise have died — and meanwhile will ruin the quality of our lives as we waddle and wheeze through every day. Given the atrocious state of general health in the USA it’s obvious covid-19 will have a far more severe impact than elsewhere. But surely that’s not really much to do with the virus itself, is it?