I'm sitting in an undisclosed country in the EU, under what was at first self-imposed lock-down (and now government mandated sheltering in place), telling you straight up that this virus is bad news. It overloads hospital capacities in ways that force doctors to make wartime triage assessments. The psychological toll that COVID19 is taking on medical professionals here in Europe will result in massive amounts of PTSD as there are not enough ventilators to keep everyone alive who is getting sick. I've got first-hand information from Germany, France and Belgium that their emergency medical capacities are filled with just the FIRST WAVE of patients. They expect a tripling of cases in the coming weeks. If you don't have a ventilator in your chest in the next few days, and if you need one next week, you will probably be dead.

Medical staff in the UK are telling me that they've got no money for tests, no money for protective gear... the NHS is so bankrupt that most of the health professionals are just expecting to lose about 5% of the elderly population this year.

If you want to realize how bad this virus is, think about a country with the absolute worst human rights record in the last generation (China) being so concerned about losing their slave labor population that they shut their economy down in the middle of a trade war. A government without any moral qualms creating Uyghur concentration camps was so fearful of the loss of social control that they decided to protect human life for the first time at that scale.

So, for the folks crying about the impact on the economy and that they're being inconvenienced, I'll tell you from the front lines in Europe that you better be ready for some bad, bad weeks to come. We're seeing it here and having strong conversations with our church leadership about getting an exemption in the way that the sacrament is administered because we don't want to be that crazy religion whose dogma drives members to infect each other because we won't let people break their own bread and let a priesthood holder bless it via phone or video conference.

This is just an internet message board, so I understand that folks make flippant and uneducated posts, but all of the 'We're over-reacting' posts on here are pretty short-sighted. Stay at home, do what your public health folks tell you to, and you'll save some lives.