How I see dating, girls, COVID-19, and the quarantines, right now
Girls don't seem to be coming out on dates, although it seems that most people ages 18 - 40 are either asymptomatic or have relatively short or minor disease progressions. What's going on?
I think most chicks are wise to avoid going out with new guys, for the most part. 1. It's true that the fatality rate for people under age 50 or 60 seems to be very low. But. 2. Some larger number people under that age have a long and miserable course of disease, with lots of coughing, lung pain, and difficulty sleeping. We don't know the true percentage yet. It looks like it's low (we can see that from the USS Theodore Roosevelt, where there have been or are at least 940 confirmed cases so far), but we aren't sure yet. Furthermore, 3. lots of people interact with parents and elderly relatives... myself included... and I'd like not to be the vector for their demise, as would most girls. 4. Lots of girls in their 20s have moved back in with their parents, and those girls have left the big cities where they typically congregate in order to pursue sexual adventures with adventurous men. 5. Most girls who are at least a high 6 have a couple of background guys as insurance... any girl with a brain has picked one to be her "quarantine buddy." Yeah, her quarantine f**k buddy. Her sexual adventurism is at low ebb... for good reasons IMO. The risk of meeting random new guys is much higher than it was. How high? We don't know yet. She's already gotten one of her background guys to be her mainstay for the next few months, so she's not on dating apps if she can avoid it.
How long does this last? I don't know... there are still lots of ongoing screens of small molecule drugs, although I'm sure most chicks are not aware of it, at more than the vaguest of levels. If any of these drugs work, for real, they will change the game... for the average girl, and even average person, they might as well wait, unless they have very little contact with people over age 50 or 60.
So I get why chicks would be reluctant to come out. The younger ones are now living at home. Pew Research finds that 52% of people age 18 - 29 are living with parents, the highest number since the Great Depression. What are they going to tell their parents when they go out at night, "I'm off to meet a handsome stranger to get some dick?" And if the stranger gives them coronavirus they're likely to give it to their parents. How many normal people want to think, "I risked my parents' lives to f**k?" Plus, the girls in a typical player's target zone have picked out their quarantine boyfriends.
Average risks appear to be low, but we don't know how many people get long-term problems due to blood clots, lung problems, kidney problems, etc. There's a huge amount we humans don't know, as of this writing. Mysterious Heart Damage, Not Just Lung Troubles, Befalling COVID-19 Patients, for one example. Lots of chicks also have some connection to hospital workers (nurses, techs, PAs, docs they've f**ked), and hospital workers are seeing some % of young and apparently healthy people getting horribly ill. How many? We're still not sure. As more data emerges I am leaning towards opening up, since fatalities and hospitalizations seem to be concentrated among the elderly who are not doing well anyway, but I respect the desire to wait and see. Even if restaurants and flights opened up again tomorrow I wouldn't rush out to access them. Call me a herd-follower if you wish.
Some preliminary evidence suggests COVID-19 attacks testicles and could lead to infertility or other sexual-related dysfunction. This may turn out to be a very rare side effect, so I don't want to make too much of it right now, but given the risks, does it not make sense to attempt to avoid infection insofar as possible?
Most chicks also find sexual hibernation easier than men do (there are exceptions). And like I said, smart chicks have picked up their quarantine boyfriend for sexual needs. The impulse to test the sexual marketplace is very low right now. It's all about the cost-benefit. I'm not in the paid sex market but I wonder what's happening there... chicks got rent to pay... I'd bet that prices are falling due to lack of demand and increased supply, but prices should increase due to hazard... I don't know which effect is stronger. Nassim Taleb points out via Twitter that given uncertainty and risk of severe penalty if wrong, taking a conservative approach makes sense... agree on that point, although he's an a**hole on Twitter overall.... a**holes can be right. Taleb was also early on the point that wearing masks might do nothing, yes, but they might be helpful, and in an atmosphere of uncertainty with high risk and low cost, then wearing them makes sense on the net... a lesson that had New York learned it by 1 March, some of the virus's worst effects might have been avoided. Taleb's books are good choices for reading right now... he is wrong about some things but he makes you think different...
If we had spent February focused on developing testing capacity, we would also not be in the mess we are right now. A competent chief executive would have been focused on cutting FDA red tape... a competent political culture would focus on that failure... but here we are... many of us are part of “The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium.”
Girls are very rarely irrational, exactly, as men would define it... their incentive structure is a bit different... they might make mistakes, they might say they want one thing while pursuing another... but "rational" is hard to define.