No, like a magazine-magazine. People will be reading me during takeoff and landing and in dental offices for days , son. Prevalence rates, treatment options, prevention methods, names and addresses of support groups. Wait, that sounds triumphantly low for a country of 80 million people. I pull out my phone and check the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention CDC website, which tells me that, in the United States, , people have died since the epidemic began.
This makes no sense. Germany has big cities, it has gay men and sex workers and drug users, it has all the same temptations for them to be uncareful that the United States does. How could so many fewer people have died? If the rates were the same as the United States, it would be , The further down the Google-hole I go, the more mind-boggling the numbers get. The next day I start asking epidemiologists about this divergence. The first thing they tell me is that it is real, even accounting for differences in methodology.
Scan the columns on the stats sheetsβincidence, prevalence, deathsβand you find the United States with a two-digit lead going right back to the start of the epidemic. Germany and the United Kingdom lose fewer than I only know one way to write a sentence Refer to self, item list.
Refer to self, item list. The fact-checker was super nice, too. I got a lot of stuff wrong C. Everett Koop is with a K? Even though I sort of am.
So thanks guys! And most importantly, I need to thank all of the epidemiologists and researchers and authors I talked to for the story.
