“You’re hurting old people like me. Well, not me... I’ll never see you.”

Larry David wants everyone to stay home to protect older Californians from #COVID19!
He does not do these things.
Listen to Larry.#StayHomeSaveLiveshttps://t.co/snYe5v55Rw pic.twitter.com/C5cKOaAufE

— Office of the Governor of California (@CAgovernor) March 31, 2020

Rob's comment:

David's humor falls flat from the start here, since he implies that making a public service announcement is an imposition undermining his professional persona as a curmudgeon. Is there a real Larry David underneath that performance? Maybe not.

Later: David seems curiously self-satisfied and pleased with himself, as if his audience should see him as amusing even when he tries---and fails---to be funny about the pandemic.

Please do not take medical advice from a man who looked directly at a solar eclipse.

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) March 24, 2020

We just don't know

Kevin Drum:

It’s worth a quick note to point out that we no longer have any real idea of how deadly the coronavirus pandemic is going to be in the US. We’ve long since passed the point where the key to understanding the likely spread of the pandemic was a better understanding of the virus itself. What matters are the countermeasures we put in place to stop its transmission routes.

Somebody should stop me if I’m wrong here, but we’re in terra incognita. We’ve never had a widespread pandemic where we’ve put in place strict and widespread countermeasures, and that means we’re just guessing at how effective they are. 

The guess of an epidemiologist might be better than the guess of a blogger, but it’s still just a guess. We simply have no experience to draw on...

This is why you see estimates ranging wildly from 80,000 deaths to half a million. These estimates all depend on which countermeasures you think we’ll adopt; how well they’ll work; how long we’ll keep them in place; and how seriously people will take them. 

Unfortunately, even the smartest epidemiologist in the world has a limited insight into things like that. So we just don’t know.

Trump openly admitting if we made voting easier in America, Republicans wouldn't win elections

Trump: "The things they had in there were crazy. They had levels of voting, that if you ever agreed to it you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again." pic.twitter.com/x5HmX6uogo

— Lis Power (@LisPower1) March 30, 2020

See also The Republican Party: A malignant force in American life.