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Comment by ed25519FUUU | Hacker News Reader

It's been really incredible to watch the "shut it down!" crowd work comfortably from home while watching their 401k rise while the rest of America suffers. Meanwhile small businesses (which employ a disproportionate amount of minorities) basically get rolled into the trash. California effectively mandated they go out of business.

The icing on the cake is seeing politician after politician get caught breaking their own rules. Nancy Pelosi visits a nail salon while the state ordered every other nail salon out of business. It's sick and it's dumb and a large portion of the country couldn't care less.

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What is the alternative to shutting it down when a large majority of your population is idiots who don't believe the virus is real?

Seriously. What else do you do?

You should have given much larger stimulus checks and fund small businesses to help them stay open. Doesn't require leaving the restaurant open so Joe Six Pack can continue going to McDonalds every day like a moron.

The political wedging on this issue is gross and annoying.

I think the poster you’re responding to is upset about the hypocrisy, not the shutdown itself.

Ideally you would immediately shut down everything and prevent the virus from even entering. With rigorous border controls and contact tracing you can prevent it from ever taking root.

Having failed that, one option is keep everything open and let people die. Covid is not that deadly, so it's worthy of consideration.

Another possibility is to deliberately make sure the young and healthy are infected. Preferably in a staggered way so they can be given care.

You could also consider making camps for the frail where they can stay isolated from the rest of the world while everything blows over.

> Covid is not that deadly, so it's worthy of consideration.

Right. People seem to loose perspective. In the U.S. we have lost 1 out of 750 people to covid, mostly older and mostly with comorbidities. I assume this number will increase to 1 out of 500 when this is finished. Many countries are in this same range.

From a personal perspective it is a tragedy to lose someone close to you. From a population perspective this is not as big as deal as some people make it out to be.

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