Where do you get this stuff?! The death count is not small! Covid-19 is currently the
leading cause of death in the US.
The US is at 350,000 deaths and climbing. Over the course of the year, it is the third highest cause of death in the United States only because the containment measures you keep denigrating kept the death rates lower after the initial surge. Since October when things had been reopened and the case count has soared, the death count has followed.
Everyday there are approximately 1800 deaths due to heart disease and 1650 due to cancer. The trailing 7 day average for Covid is
2400, which is probably artificially low due to the reporting delays through the holidays.
I hope and expect that the recent efforts at containment bring it down in the short term and the vaccine in the long term so that we don't find it becomes a bigger killer than heart disease or cancer for the year as a whole.
But that's the point-- wrongly saying we don't need to take precautions because the death count is "small" is exactly what guarantees it to be big.
This is straight up
misinformation. You are attempting to leverage what is not known about covid to undermine what is known.
You have been
wrongly comparing this to the flu since the beginning, and using that as justification to downplay a response. This is not the flu. It is far worse than just about any flu in living memory-- the arguable exception being the 1918 flu where we did count cases carefully, we did put in place lockdowns and mask orders and medical science was so far behind today that they were still trying to
bleed patients as a treatment and vaccines were still 20 years away. When we've been concerned about potential flu pandemics since we have also worried about and tracked cases. Fortunately those have been contained in a way that covid has not been, largely due to preexisting partial immunity, familiarity with influenza vaccines, and a much more rapid response than could be applied to this coronavirus.
You are making a false and dangerous comparison that too many people have been using it as justification to disregard actual scientific evidence and recommendations.
If you mean “dead”, don’t say “impacted”. A great majority has been impacted. You may be comfortable
wrongly dismissing these deaths as people who already lived a full life, but the overwhelming majority don’t see it that way. They are impacted by the loss of friends, family and coworkers. They are impacted by the loss of friend’s, family’s and coworker’s friends, family and coworkers.
If there's any truth to your professional and academic claims, then presumably you know enough about behavioral economics to know that peoples' states of mind affect economic outcomes. You're simply wrong about both the health and economic implications of your world view.
How? You talk about this like infection is something people do to themselves. What’s more protected and limited than a prison? Yet those have been some of the
worst outbreaks. In California prisons the death rate from covid is twice that in the general population of the state.
Or nursing homes. They've been locked down tightly for months, but
outbreaks there continue.
The virus isn't spontaneously generating inside these facilities, it's getting brought in from the virus pool in the broader community. You protect those in danger by reducing the prevalence of the virus in the general population. Protecting and limiting only "those in danger", even if you could identify them all, is a ludicrously naive strategy. Saying "protect and limit them
more" completely disregards how this virus spreads. There is no viable means to bubble boy every individual at risk.
Private gatherings
are in violation of lockdown orders. So if spread were occurring mostly at private gatherings that in itself would be proof that lockdowns would help.
Furthermore, the
actual data shows that most risk comes from restaurants, bars, gyms and churches.
The greatest good for the greatest number is to keep the prevalence of the virus in the community low. This leads to the best health outcomes and the best economic outcomes. When there was doubt about the potential for a vaccine, I argued that meant keeping the rate of infection to something that the health care system could handle and that would allow the economy to operate to the extent possible. Now that we have an effective vaccine in distribution, any additional death due to covid should be seen as a preventable death and the window over which we're looking to manage this has been condensed to months. There is no excuse for arguing in favor of letting it rage out of control the way it has in the US over the past few months-- that is the least good for the greatest number of people.
