In a typical year, about 60,000 people in our State will get the flu. In a typical year, about 400 will die, most of them elderly, and most of them suffering numerous health complaints, as with COVID-19.
Not only would 1,000 new cases not be scary, I ask: why is this even a headline? Is it a headline for any reason other than that our Governor is DESTROYING OUR ECONOMY over this thing?
About 40,000 people in our State die a month from some cause or other. Are we going to burn our house down because for a time we might be adding 100 more to that? Even a thousand more to that? Hell, even 10,000 to that
?Every one of those deaths is a tragedy to those affected. But so too is not being able to put food on the table, and tossing and turning all night every night because you can’t pay the bills, and you have NO IDEA when this nightmare will end.
As things stand, most of our medical centers and hospitals are largely empty. We are 2-3 weeks “behind Italy”, which was the basis for all this craziness. And what? NOTHING. NOTHING. Or almost nothing. 1,000 cases in a State of over 4 million is not much.
I continue to have a basic question: until a cure is found, the only way out of this epidemic–or ANY epidemic–is for enough people to get the disease and acquire immunity that transmission stops spontaneously.
Since this is the only way most epidemics end, why are we not working towards that end? A certain number of people need to die. This is brutal math, but I didn’t invent it. I’m just the messenger. Until those people die, we have just hit the Pause button.
And that Pause button has an ENORMOUS cost. Without risking much, I can tell you perhaps a third of the mortgage payments in our State were not made this month. Can you begin to count the long term cost of even ten percent of the mortgages in the State?
What about the long term costs of children being exposed to relentless daily arguing they can’t escape from because their parents can’t pay their bills or put enough food on the table?
Anyone who might die because we had a shortage of respirators was on their way out anyway. Those of you who wanted Socialized Medicine, if you have two brain cells to rub together, realize that ALL nations which have socialized medicine have committees who decide at what point to discontinue life saving treatments. It is inevitable, unless you decide adding one day to the life of one person is worth the collected resources of the nation.
So comparing the economic catastrophe being engineered out there right now–led by self important and for now self congratulatory Leftists–to the necessary triage, the hard triage, of who do we treat and who do we not, I think the question is fairly easy: error on the side of having a few too many patients, and a few excess deaths, and get both the economy and the disease moving again.
We are not Italy: most of our elderly are in quarantine, in effect, most of the time anyway. We are not China, which locked everyone up together and let them die together, then lied about their death numbers.
The emerging evidence seems to me clear that because not even a fraction of the needed testing has been done, that our data on this thing is terrible. We are both underestimating its infectiousness and overestimating its lethality.
This column from a Stanford Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology remains relevent: https://www.statnews.com/…/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as…/