Many years ago, pre-web, ‘meme’ was an arcane and useful tool for thinking about ideas.

"Analogous to a gene, the meme was conceived (by Richard Dawkins in 1976) as a "unit of culture" (an idea, belief, pattern of behaviour, etc.) which is "hosted" in the minds of one or more individuals, and which can reproduce itself in the sense of jumping from the mind of one person to the mind of another. Thus what would otherwise be regarded as one individual influencing another to adopt a belief is seen as an idea-replicator reproducing itself in a new host. "

Then came early web culture, where the word was subverted to mean something much more narrow and stupid, like "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" (a narrow stupid ‘meme’ I loved, personally). A site called KnowYourMeme came along to clue in the clueless masses and the occassional journalist.

Lately they’ve been more intently political. Often in an ugly way. Pepe the Frog, etc.–I stopped paying much attention for a long while. Til now.

Here She Is.

That’s two of the four I saved from my half-ass research run.

The latest numbers, from China where the crisis is most mature, turned into percents, say this:
Of those that caught the bug,

• 86% have recovered
• 4% have died
• 4% are critical (hospitalized, on respirators presumably)
• The rest, something like 6%, don’t fit into those three categories, so–again presumably–these are cases of people who aren’t dead, or critical , but not recovered yet either.

So far in the US, the percentage of dead and criticals is lower–like under 2%–but there is literally almost no one in the been there, done that, and Recovered category.

More from Kyle at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDnLCH4HjsI