We shut down the entire world and it killed over 100,000 in the US alone in 3 months. There's no suspicious conspiracy surrounding Covid19, it really is a very infectious and capable of killing a lot more than it already has.
The Northeastern states actually shut down. They're now under 50 new cases per day per 1 million people. Their deaths are mostly flat (just slightly increasing) at this point. And I suspect a lot of that is now being imported.
The Southeastern states didn't do crap. They're mostly all above 200 new cases per day per million.
Then you have states like California that kinda/sorta shutdown. They're scattered about 100 new cases per day per million.
We could have stopped this. We could have been flat in number of deaths as of June 1 like most of the European countries.
But we didn't.
Instead, we're on the same trajectory as "shithole" (to borrow the MAGA terminology) countries like Brazil, India, and Mexico.
And, now states like Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arizona are on a trajectory to cross over states like Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts in terms of number of deaths per million.
And the economy is in a shambles anyway. So, lots of people died, and we got nothing for it.
Although New England seems to be doing well since earlier in the summer, we did NOT do well overall. For example, MA at #3 has had 8831 deaths for 6.9M people. The average age of the dead is 82, 65% of all deaths from long term care homes [2] -- this was a failure to protect the vulnerable.
As for NE cases being imported, we saw a small uptick on Cape Cod with vacationers (resulting in Baker's recent travel order) but the back-to-school has only found a few dozen positive cases over the last few weeks despite massive and ongoing testing [3].
I'm not sure your comment about "most of the European countries" is correct. France is seeing near-record cases [4] Spain has seen a very significant surge [5] resulting in a lockdown of the Barcelona area and Germany is also seeing a worrying uptick in cases [6].
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...
[2] https://www.mass.gov/doc/covid-19-dashboard-september-1-2020...
[3] https://old.reddit.com/r/CoronavirusMa/comments/ig1n1x/curre...
[4] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/france/
[5] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/spain/
[6] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/germany/
Back-modeling what happened in those states showed that the biggest problem those areas had is that (in New York, for example) when they thought they had Case Number 1 on March 1 they already had Case Number 10,000.
Even as late as March 15th, people in the New York mayor and governor's offices were screaming at each other because the data wasn't matching up and cases were appearing with no traceable cause--ie. general populace circulation was occurring.
The problem was that those areas needed to be locking down as of March 1 but because of poor data didn't get locked down until about 3 weeks later. This wasn't unusual: things like SXSW were still playing chicken with everybody until Austin pulled the plug on them--that was only like March 6th or so. And that's not a lockdown, that's just stopping an international travel event.
The sad part is that several states are about to surpass those per capita death numbers for RI, MA, and CT. That's inexcusable at this point.
And I really hope that no other state gets close to NY or NJ numbers. Sadly, unless a couple of those states do something NOW, they're going to.
[1] https://fortune.com/2020/08/15/europe-covid-cases-second-wav...
There's around a 40-50% asymptomatic number so the total estimated infections so far are around 40 million.
Total deaths is around 800,000.
.02 death rate on average and it drops drastically the younger a person is.
Depending on your risk tolerance, to many people, that's not worth destroying life as we know it.
Especially because the death rate of heart disease and cancer is higher than this and has easily targeted reasons with mountains of scientific evidence that could reduce the death rates.
It just seems like propaganda and we're making a bigger deal out of it than necessary.
Also, some studies seem to suggest we’re actually undercounting the death rate [0]. Combine that with likely under reported data in Russia, China, and other countries, it’s clearly a significant threat.
I think it’s kind of crazy to say preventing potentially 10s of millions of people from dying is not a big deal and propaganda. Seems like searching for a grand narrative in something that’s rather pretty cut and dry.
2. “Destroying life as we know it” is a pretty dramatic way of saying “Stay home, wear a mask when you have to go out, and wait until things are better to get your nails done.” Plus, lots of people are not even doing that! They’re out horsing around anyway, putting more people at risk and further extending the crisis.
And no one has ever shut down a fast food restaurant to prevent the propagation of heart disease.
It's bad but it's being severely over exaggerated.
And there's mountains of scientific evidence supporting those directly lead to their respective ailments.
The numbers I've seen are 0.66% death rate, with an average remaining life expectancy of about 10 years among those who die, and estimates that between 15% and 70% of the population would be infected.
70% of 0.66% of 328M is 1.5M deaths, or 15M years of life lost. That is indeed a big number.
Smoking has been estimated to reduce life expectancy by 13 years for heavy smokers. There are about 34M smokers in the US. I don't have the exact stats on number of heavy smokers and how long people smoke for, but assume that the average smoker smokes for 20 years and loses 5 years of life expectancy over that time. That's about 850,000 years of life lost _every single year_ to smoking alone.
I think the question of "would it be worth 5% of the current COVID-19 measures to stop smoking entirely for 1 year" is a valid one.
Leaving quarantine causes a disease.
It's personal choice to do either activity and corona is the only disease where it's somehow the rest of the worlds responsibility for people making poor choices.
You may not like the comparison but to call it "malicious" is not OK. Play the ball, not the man.