i think for many of us it's that shutting down the economy

Posted on: March 26, 2020 at 11:33:18 CT

and destroying the livelihoods of 350 million people is not worth it to save the 20k or so that will die of Covid 19. that sounds harsh, but it's a reality. we simply can't just shut the economy down for months on end and if we do so, it ignores the massive health and mental health implications of doing so.

we could have encouraged isolating at-risk persons, encouraged telework, voluntary social distancing, hygiene, etc. worked on the production of more PPE, more ventilators, increasing ICU capacity, cutting regs to get antivirals and vaccines to the market more quickly, cutting red tape to ramp up testing. all things we could have done to help curb the virus while not destroying our economy.

yes, it's sad that there will be deaths but the vast majority of the deaths, statistically speaking, are from people who were going to die relatively soon anyway. the world is cruel that way. and when we are accused of being immoral it's quite right to point out that we don't take these extreme measures for anything else that kills in similar or even greater numbers.

remember when everything was shut down in 2009-2010 for the H1N1 that killed up to 575,000 people worldwide and about 13,000 Americans? smh

From April 12, 2009 to April 10, 2010, CDC estimated there were 60.8 million cases (range: 43.3-89.3 million), 274,304 hospitalizations (range: 195,086-402,719), and 12,469 deaths (range: 8868-18,306) in the United States due to the (H1N1)pdm09 virus.

Additionally, CDC estimated that 151,700-575,400 people worldwide died from (H1N1)pdm09 virus infection during the first year the virus circulated.** Globally, 80 percent of (H1N1)pdm09 virus-related deaths were estimated to have occurred in people younger than 65 years of age

I might add that that our efforts so far will likely affect herd immunity and make the next go-around worse than what it should be

Edited by blake1771 at 11:48:07 on 03/26/20