Got up at 4AM this morning. In normal times I’d be going to church, probably hosting dinner tonight… but these are NOT normal times.

Last time I kissed my Mom on the cheek was over a month ago.

I had a solo in the church cantata scheduled for today. Hopefully we’ll get to sing it for the congregation at some point in the future. There are lotsa retired folks at my little church, including my parents… and I’m happy to report that there have been NO Covid19 victims thus far.

My daughters have been home with me the last few weeks, Grace came back from England March 17th, coughing and sick. She got better, I got a very mild dry cough for a few days… and then tested for Covid19 and got back a negative.

My other daughter stayed at her Mother’s house for 2 weeks.

Did me and Grace have it? Did we recover?

No way to tell until the antibody test becomes available.

There seems to be a positive correlation with Covid19 resistance and having O type blood, so I’m glad I have that in my favor. I rarely get colds, flu, etc.

I think one of the reasons NYC and North Jersey have been hit so hard is the prevalence of shared transportation; bus lines, trains, even elevators. One person coughing in an elevator in a 20 story apartment building puts everyone at risk.

Many of the North Jersey infections probably came from the NYC area.

It looks like Philadelphia is going to get hit hard, especially the poverty stricken  neighborhoods like Germantown / North Philly. In the late 1990’s I ran door to door sales crews in some of these rough zip codes… these folks are already struggling with poverty, drug addiction and violent crime, now they have to worry about Covid19 as well.

I’m a numbers guy, and looking at the numbers in Italy, Spain and New York state I’ve concluded that most of the world outside of Europe and North America is engaging in a cover up when it comes to this pandemic.

Nigeria is reporting 30 deaths per day and they have 206 million people….

273 million people in Indonesia, and they only have 400 deaths so far?

Less than 100 deaths in Pakistan with 220 million people in that country?

Mexico did not even shutdown until last week and they only have 233 Covid19 deaths?

I don’t buy it.

All these numbers from authoritarian regimes are bullshit.

In countries like Mexico where they can’t even control their drug cartels how the hell are they going to holdback an invisible virus?

Don’t even get me started on China, their numbers are so wrong we need to go after them for war crimes.

In Spain and Italy they’ve seen about 250 deaths per million people of population. This means that we can predict death rates for other countries; 1.43 billion people in China times 250 = 400,000 deaths.

Even if China totally contained Covid19 they would see 100,000 deaths, at the minimum, not UNDER 4,000, as they’ve reported.

Because the Chinese government was NOT reporting factual data back in January the rest of the planet continued to go about business as usual, probably 3 weeks too long…. a global lockdown on February 1rst would have prevented thousands of needless deaths.

And them there was the Orange Idiot, telling Americans Covid19 was a “democratic hoax” as recently as February.

So what now? We have to work with what we got. Lotsa restaurants won’t weather this. Savings will be destroyed. Marriages will crumble under the stress, homeowners will face foreclosure.

Some folks will be unemployed for a few months or longer.

If you make it through this alive you’ll find a way to pay your bills again.

I just hope and pray that when things get back to normal we don’t see a huge resurgence of deaths.

That’s all I guess.

Ben Alexander

Easter Sunday…………… 2020