Just like regular flu. It kills lots of people every year. So do car accidents - lets just ban driving?
The worst flu killed 80k people in a year, and normally kills about 20k a year. It hasn't even been a year and three times as many people have died compared to the worst flu season, and 1,600+ Americans die every day from COVID. This epidemic so far has been more than twelve times worse than the average flu season.
> So do car accidents - lets just ban driving
About 38k people die in car accidents in the US, and the average person drives 1 million miles before getting in an accident. And that's with practically every person in the country driving that can. In contrast, only 3% of Americans have had COVID, yet 237k of them have died in less than a year. If the majority of Americans get COVID, millions of people will die.
I think you're about 3 orders of magnitude off. COVID is pretty bad, but the 1918 flu was horrifyingly awful. Flus can get pretty bad.
Or maybe let's infringe on your freedoms by: requiring a license to drive, requiring use of a seatbelt, setting safety standards for car manufacturers...
Let’s say we use the governments force to close business down, in order to hinder the virus from spreading there.
When the government later stops applying this force and business can reopen with persecution, will the virus not just continue from where it left off?
In March they said “flatten the curve to not temporarily overload hospitals”, which I get, but the reasoning for keeping the forced lockdown only seems logical if you never reopen.
For this reason I’m glad my country is one of very few that never locked down. More have died here than in the neighbour countries, but I fail to see why they won’t catch up when they reopen.
If it turns out there were a few infections left, or one slipped through quarantine for arriving travellers, the health system has enough capacity to perform testing for anyone with even mild symptoms, and comprehensively contact trace.
This has worked for several countries.
If every member of our species is convinced to quarantine for a month, the disease could maybe be eradicated, but this is clearly not realistic. Herding cats is easier.
This is the strategy New Zealand followed, and now their lives are back to normal. Here's a pic of one of their sports stadiums[1]. Notice how nobody needs to distance or wear masks because they got control over COVID spread.
[1] https://images.indianexpress.com/2020/06/New-Zealand-rugby-1...
Treatments get better. As we learn how the disease works, we know how to treat it better. This means that if you get sick now rather than at the beginning, you are much less likely to die.
Secondly: people are working on vaccines. If you can hold it until one is available, you might not have to get sick at all.
I work in vaccines and I don't believe any vaccine is even close to coming out. The products our company is working take about 10 years from start to final sale.
Its quite likely that the FDA will have to lower their standards to fast-track coronavirus vaccines. I am going to be very skeptical of their safety given that we don't have long-term data, especially with the newer unproven vaccine tech.
The vaccine is also still vapourware
Yes.
Or, to be less hyperbolic about it: do a lot more things that change us towards being a society where travel via single-occupant vehicle is not the default, or the highest-prioritized use of a space when many other options are cleaner, safer, more efficient space uses, encourage better health, and are not as environmentally and socially damaging.
So, to link it back to coronavirus: taking steps to mitigate a harm that we know exists, that we can predict coming, and that absolutely involves making changes to how we conduct our daily lives but if a lot of us make a little change, we make a dramatic effect.
Let's not forget it Trump suggested to slaughter Muslims using bullets dipped in pigs blood, so he is definetly not a antiwar as some here suggest.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-have-bombed-yemen-more...
It shouldn't be hard for a sharp upstanding human being not to throw out 'flippant' comment.
That actually surprised me the most. That exactly what you said, stopped to matter.
It shouldn't and we shouldn't allow it.
Getting upset about what he actually said and in what context seems like faux-outrage or someone with motivated reasoning to try and find something to get upset about.
You do like it doesn't matter.
Does it?
Knowing that there is a virus, not doing anything about it and then spreading it onto me, should also have consequences.
As it is not possible to do so, might be a good idea to mandate mask wearing and cautions someone might think.
COVID-19 has killed more Americans this year than all accidents. It's the third leading cause of death. That's much more significant than influenza.
To still try to downplay COVID and act like it's no worse than a regular flu is, quite frankly, willful ignorance.
I've found that it isn't ignorance, it's that they just don't care.
I know highly educated people who are more than capable of understanding the statistics underlying COVID infections, and they still say "it's just the flu".
These were people who knew about COVID in January, and were talking about what a threat it could be. Yet months later they're repeating the President's talking points.
They simply don't care.