It’s not all about personal choice. Everyone is impacted by the decisions we make.
How many healthcare personnel have to die so people can go to the bar?
I think more people understand the situation with COVID than some realize, that it's a trainwreck from top to bottom and a lot of the decisions being made are far more political than they should be, as evidenced by the sheer amount of hypocrisy surrounding the supposed safety of protesting for left wing causes vs anything else. Even if you're totally right, the optics of this hypocrisy have created a permanent and un-mendable fracture where a large chunk of the country is never going to believe anything Coumo or De Belasio say about COVID.
Do automobile accidents experience exponential growth? If so, I guarantee they'd get the exact same treatment.
Or guess what else with your auto example. Drinking and driving. You don't get free reign to do so because society shouldn't have to pay your costs for you.
Exponential growth of the spread isn't the same thing as exponential growth of mortality rates. By now we know that virtually no children are affected by it at all. The most vulnerable are 60+ with preexisting health conditions. The very same kind of people Governor Coumo and a few other governors in the country put at risk by forcing COVID19 positive patients into nursing homes.
They've pushed the disease on the most vulnerable while making the least vulnerable afraid of their own shadow, literally, so they stay home and afraid and unable to work in many cases.
If you're seeing exponential spread, and a fixed portion of people die from it (whatever portion you'd prefer to define), that means you also have exponential growth of mortality from it .
Maybe that's the issue here.
Even if these protests have been have been relatively safe, I worry about a publication bias with those findings (publishing that the protests spread covid would be politically risky) and, more importantly, the lack of criticism essentially gave people permission to go have their own gatherings.
The issue with that framing is that it's really not a personal choice issue because one's choices in this instance are not sufficiently isolated from the rest of the system. Many choices are, but this is not. If one exercises one's personal choice incorrectly, the entire system suffers.
One might say, everything in life is a risk and everything we do affects someone else. Well yes, but not everything in life is has huge downside risk and exponential spread. This is a different class of risk.
(that said, I think there are ways to lower the probability of spread at a bar (spaced outdoor seating) and at a gym (masks + distancing). Excessive alcohol consumption is a risk for noncompliant behavior though.)
They weren't passed their actual hospitalization peak, death peak, or (unless something caused a longer delay between infection and either of those outcomes than seen elsewhere) the infection peak when they started locking down.
Besides a 1.61% death rate being nothing to sneeze at (and it's probably actually higher than that), you have absolutely no idea how many of those 28.9 million Texans will ultimately contract COVID - nor will you always personally know if you're an asymptomatic carrier, responsible for infecting more of your fellow citizens.
To each their own, but I would not want to take my chances with the actual odds you face in TX today. And I wouldn't take those chances with other people's lives. It's not just about you.
No, it's way lower than that. Deaths are probably undercounted, but nowhere near as much as infections are.
In 1918 August most of the people who died in 1918 from the Spanish Flu were still alive.
The economic depression screwed us over way more.
Even with a conservative 1.6% death rate, if only a million people in your county contracted COVID, you could still expect 16,000 people to die.
That kind of death rate would tank the economy far worse than a temporary shutdown.
A better plan would be to do what was possible to protect at-risk populations, but not make the Faustian bargain we did to destroy the economy.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
That's completely false. Most of those deaths would be people who aren't working anyway (retirees). The 1918 flu killed way more people, but the economic impact was far less, because there were no lockdowns. Sweden had almost 6000 deaths, but its economy is still doing way better than most countries in Europe (France, Italy, England..).