Special Message From Joel & Antonia About Our Current Global Challenge

We are writing today to share a special message with you as we face the global challenge of our time.

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“Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now” — Please read this post which has information and action we can all take. It’s the best resource we’ve seen and we are sharing it with everyone we can.
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Since we started recording the Personality Hacker Podcast in 2014, we rarely talk about current events. A decision we made early on was to keep our content evergreen if possible and hopefully it would become timeless.

On show #322 we talk about “Keeping Calm When The World Is In Chaos.”

While we’ve faced global epidemics before, it’s been a while since humans have seen one this easily communicable. We are, of course, referring to the global pandemic of the Coronavirus or COVID-19.

We’d like to persuade you to intentionally quarantine yourself, and if you’re not in a position to do that, then take every precaution to physically distance yourself. Stay connected to people digitally – but help slow the spread of the virus by physically distancing for a time.

“Why?” you may say. “I’m young and healthy. I can get the virus and survive.”

But you getting the virus now may be killing someone else later.

I’ll use the United States, the country we live in, as an example of why this is so important. The majority of cases of COVID-19 or Coronavirus are relatively mild. They’re flu-like symptoms and most people can stay home.

But that means 20% of Coronavirus cases are severe and require hospitalization. Of that 20 %, around 5% are critical, and half of those critical cases require ventilators, or what’s called an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine or an ECMO.

As of a couple of years ago, there were only around 250 ECMO machines in the entire United States.

In fact, the machines and the programs they rely upon are so costly that there was a debate on whether or not they were worth the expense. So we can’t just make more of them quickly. So we only have about 250 of these machines in the United States.

So, let’s say 100,000 people simultaneously contract the virus. Of those 100,000 people, about 20,000 will need hospitalization and 5000 will be the critical cases that need to be in intensive care or ICU.

One thousand (1000) of them will need machines that we don’t have enough of.

Right now at the time of this writing, we don’t have 100,000 cases… yet.

However, we are experiencing the same exponential growth curve that other countries have seen. So 100,000 simultaneous cases isn’t an insane number.

Here’s the deal… if we spread infections out over time, then those same 1000 people that need the ECMO machine get to use that same machine, because critical case number 974 contracted the virus two months after critical case number 142, and now it’s available.

People who argue, “I’m young and healthy, so it doesn’t matter if I get sick,” doesn’t track.

EXAMPLE: If you happen to contract the virus now and end up as a critical case, and a person in their 70s also contracts it now as a critical case, you could potentially end up killing the 70-year-old because the doctor has to decide which of you they’re going to give access to the ECMO machine. You might be in your 20s or 30s, the other critical case is in their 70s.

As cavalier as your decision was to go and drink at a bar, or hang with friends, or act carelessly, doctors are likely to keep you alive because that’s how priorities work. Doctors don’t give out Darwin awards.

We also need to account for people who simply cannot stay home and distance themselves; working parents who have service industry jobs, people who are keeping our utilities and supply chains going, and those in the medical industry themselves. These people don’t have a choice to physically distance.

Please stay home if you have the choice to distance yourself. Please do not put a doctor in the position of having to choose to kill someone else to save you. Again – if you can, please stay home.

Let’s pace the timeline of this virus out and turn a potential 4% plus mortality rate into a 0.5% mortality rate.

Stay connected digitally with the people you love. Please be healthy, make smart choices, and take this truly serious global pandemic seriously.

With great love and good energy,

Joel Mark Witt & Antonia Dodge
Founders | Personality Hacker