> Just like regular flu. It kills lots of people every year
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.
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...
Ok, looking at first reply to my post, they reference "commercial freedoms", which I support. Look at COVID 19, commerce (measured in restaurant reservations and retail purchases) dropped like 90% before the government lockdowns. The way to improve the economy and provide "commercial freedom" is to defeat the virus. The way to defeat the virus is though, amongst other tools like masks and vaccines, lockdowns. You could remove all the restrictions you want and things won't go back to normal for business or their patrons until the risk serious illness from a disease is small enough that you don't need to think about it when making evening plans. Additionally, when you reference "banning cars", cars used to be extremely dangerous. We have cumulatively spent millions of hours and hundreds of thousands of human lives developing engineering solutions to make cars safer. Things like masks are like seatbelts, and "suspending indoor dining" is like adding a crumple zone to the front of the car and we do ban cars that aren't sufficiently safe.
Since this pandemic began, I’ve never understood this line of reasoning. I invite you to enlighten me.
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.
The virus can't "continue from where it left off" if there's nobody left in the country infected by it.
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.
> The virus can't "continue from where it left off" if there's nobody left in the country infected by it.
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.
Even quarantining everyone for a whole month probably wouldn't do it. Did you see that article about the immunosupressed woman who was spraying out viable Covid-19 virus for like 70 days without any visible symptoms of Covid?
> 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?
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.
Would it be possible to totally close the border to for example Germany, France, or Czechia, like NZ can do? I highly doubt it but am open to ideas. It would certainly be immoral to use force to hinder native citizens from travelling out of the country.
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.
>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.
In my neighbour countries no one is asking them to “please hold” - the government is using its (violent) force to make them stop living and doing business. In my home Sweden we are spared. I say there is an important moral difference between enforcing such a thing and not.
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.
9/11 killed a minuscule amount of deaths in comparison and warranted huge cut of freedoms, multiple massive military interventions, the US starting to normalise torture and black prisons, but somehow requiring people to distance and wearing masks is a step too far?
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.
It would be a spectacular failure of logic to evaluate someones record on war based on a flippant comment (which you misrepresented) as opposed to, oh I don’t know, maybe if they started any wars. Considering that he is the first president in at least a century to not engage in any new wars, I think that might be a better signal.
The comment was made in response to the Barcelona terrorist attacks and was very specifically joking about what we should do to domestic terrorist groups that mass murder. It was also not his original thought. He cited a myth regarding what he thought someone else famously did to terrorists and said maybe we should do that.
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.
> 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.
