IN MEMORIAM: After a long illness, Shadow finally departed for greener pastures on Monday.

That's him on the left with his sister Daisy shortly after we brought them home from the shelter in January of 2006.

Perhaps our other cats don't yet realize he's left -- his spot for catnaps on the bed remains empty.

Farewell, my friend. May the cat gods treat you well.

THE DIPLOMAD is coming around to my point of view. Or I, his? No matter.

WUHAN FLU [CORONAVIRUS] UPDATE: Here's today's chart.

Pretty much as I expected; the number of cases is rising as testing increases, death rate remaining relatively flat. I did expect (hope) the insanity would begin to taper off, but no, even deep northwest rural Georgia ran out of toilet paper today. (I blame the Floridians fleeing here to 'safety'.)

Yesterday's chart is here.

NO SURPRISE HERE: Bureaucracy kills.

STOP THE INSANE OVERREACTION! Here is a prediction:

[T]he deaths of Americans caused by the Wuhan flu bug will be dwarfed by the suicides committed by people whose life’s savings have been wiped out, whose businesses have been bankrupted, whose jobs have been lost, and whose prospects have been blighted by the insane overreaction we now see from our governments. That overreaction must stop. Right now. Before it is too late, if it is not too late already.

Sanity is finally catching up.

SIMPLE MATH GUY (identified in this Instapundit post) may have passed exponientials in math with flying colors, but he obviously failed common sense in kindergarten.

In 'simple math' terms, an infection rate doubling every three days, as Simple Math Guy claims, would spread to 7 billion people (roughly Earth's entire population) in a mere 98.1 days. Since the first identification of the COVID-19 virus in Wuhan, China, was apparently on Nov. 17, 2019, by a little after midday on February 4, 2020, the entire world was infected.

Since we're all now infected, let's quit the hair-on-fire stuff and just get on with life. Have a good day.

P.S. For a commonsense approach to Wuhan Flu analysis, I recommend my two posts: here and here.

AMMO GRRRLL writes on panic-stricken Arizona.

I ventured into my local Bashas grocery store which resembled either Venezuela or a 7-11 Store in Florida when a hurricane is already at Cat 5. The shoppers looked like they were on a festive field trip from an insane asylum – many wearing colorful long-sleeved rubber gloves, dousing themselves in sanitizer after putting each item in their baskets. Mind you, in the entire state of Arizona – not one of your smaller states geographically — as of this writing, there were 20 people with COVID-19, 5 in one family, and no deaths. That’s no, none, nada, bupkis. We were probably all in much graver danger from the plague of wrong-way drivers in AZ than from the COVID-19 plague.

Gives new meaning to the word 'festive'....