Bookworm Beat 3/31/20 — the endless supply of coronavirus memes illustrated edition

One of the things that’s necessary to fight a war, even against a coronavirus, is a sense of humor. We’ve got plenty of ammunition to win that fight.

To those of you kind enough to tune in for my words, not just my meme collections, I’ll have something to say tomorrow, I promise. Today, I’ve got nothing original to say. I have to process things. Oh, I do have one thing:

As you may have noticed, drug manufacturers in other nations are promising to send medicine to America, even as their own nations are experiencing coronavirus. (I’m thinking of Bayer and Teva, but I believe there are other examples.) My theory is that this reflects the fact that the world knows — it may not like, but it knows — that America is to the world what ballast is to a ship. Without America, the whole damn world might as well tip over. For now, their flirtations with China and the EU are over. Like it or not, America is what holds modern civilization together.

That’s my theory, and I’m sticking to it. Without further ado, the memes:



Yes, I know that the following is not the be-it-and-end-all of information about mortality statistics. It’s a reminder, though, that how one classifies deaths affects how we understand mortality. For more on that point, I highly recommend this article.






I haven’t checked if this is accurate. It’s just so consistent with what the media has been doing that I’m throwing it into the mix.



I get it, especially after Trump’s Tuesday press conference, that Covid-19 has the potential to be much worse than H1N1 was. I’m just pointing out that the media was instantly hysterical about Covid-19, when it wasn’t at all clear how it would affect America, while it never got hysterical about H1N1, despite its effect on America.