Nobody is saying the virus doesn't exist in the southern hemisphere, of course it does. It's just the warmer summer climate tends to suppress it somewhat or at least that's a supposition right now. It is true there are few stories about this from South America for example.

And at age 74 I'm right there with you Tony. I live in a retirement community too but not any kind of assisted living, just a 55 and older community. Everybody loves to say hey, I'm a healthy 74, age is just a number and all that rot. I'm not naive, healthy or not there's no way people our age are anywhere near as strong as someone in their 50's much less 30's. We're basically healthy for our age. Whatever that's worth.

Test kits have been a problem for sure but yesterday they're saying there are over a million available now and 5 million basically in transit and available in the next few days and ramping up from there. We will have a handle on this fairly soon I think and my guess is the overall death rate will start coming way down. Still a heckuva risk for us older folks and the more compromised your health is the worse it could be.

My friend and neighbor is 78, been a smoker all his life, still smokes a bit even now but he's one of those where he's been cutting down for years but seems to not make progress, his lungs are compromised, he has high BP, a heart murmur and other issues but not been in a hospital for about 20 years.

He has to go into town to the Walmart for food shopping and he's worried and I'm a bit worried for him too. But, just checking the website now there is not one case reported within 20 miles of me, there are a 6 in surrounding communities, mostly from the cruise ship and they were already isolated several days ago. So, what's the risk then? High? Low? Medium? I have to say pretty low. Already in the last two weeks there have been several fatal car accidents around here and many other deaths and accidents from all kinds of causes.

Keep this in perspective. It's foolish to simply ignore this but equally foolish to suddenly feel we're all under a death sentence. There are risks all around us and have been all around us our whole lives. We're merely the lucky survivors, how many friends and relatives have we all lost over the last 10 years?

Bob

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