Additionally....as I listened to a podcast, a recent "bad" flu season was .5%. We didnt damage our economy then over a *higher* death rate.

To do so now is neither logically nor morally consistent. Sorry I would have to dig to cite that .5% someone feel free to jump in on that. Lots of kid watching. For me today.

 

filler....

 

bad flu seasons involve a lot of deaths. But most - like coronavirus - are old people in nursing homes and a similar demographic. There are almost 2 million people in the US over age 90 but less than 75,000 over age 100. That’s according to the US Census. So during a ten year period we lose about 190,000 people between the ages of 90 and 100. A lot of those are to flu, despite having flu immunizations and antiflu antiviral medications. This year a lot of those deaths will be to coronavirus.



https://www.statnews.com/2018/09/26/...deaths-winter/

 

Dr. Katz is saying pretty much what Dr. Erickson said in his interview. After 5 million views, you tube pulled it, citing violations of content policy (later explained as contradicting WHO advice).

Big pharma would like us to hunker in the bunker and not build immunity until they find a vaccine.

 

https://apnews.com/b894f3b39f6915dcc3cc402438deaf0b

Here's some progress. It'll be a while until the vaccine gets released I'm sure, but drugs used to fight the virus are also crucial to getting us to reopen.

News like this will get people back out again.

 

Welp, it's about to be as bad as the flu.

 

I think you're continually missing the point about any comparisons to the flu. Even now, the flu and covid are in roughly a dead heat (but it remains to be seen what covid does over the course of one year, including estimating what it did before we knew about it fully).

To me, the point is not to dismiss covid as a non-issue. Even with how deadly the flu is, we basically do nothing as a society to deal with it. Yes, we tell people to get flu shots, but that's largely driven by people's economic motivations (less absenteeism, etc.). Other than that, no one does any kind of "social distancing" or other strategies to prevent flu deaths. We utterly tolerate 50-80k deaths each season (in the US alone).

The purpose of the flu comparison is to calibrate a discussion on what sorts of actions are justified in order to prevent a certain number of deaths. This is where the real debate should be. It's subjective, and people will disagree.

To me, it's sheer lunacy to say that 50k deaths require basically no action at all, but 72k deaths (current IMHE projection) requires shutting down the economy and trampling on the rights of every single person. Beyond that, it's a give-and-take. If the deaths were 150k, maybe we require some forms of social distancing. Personally, I feel like the deaths would have to be 500k or more to justify what's currently being done, AND the measures taken would need waaaaaay more proof that they are actually going to accomplish something before just blindly implementing them.

Lastly, call me crazy, but I also think the bill of rights and due process should be respected in any scenario. We require a supermajority two-thirds vote for the Senate to ratify a flippin' TREATY, yet somehow all this can happen without a single vote being cast. To me that's the biggest casualty of this virus.

 

You realize you just answered your own question, right? 72k from IMHE is the projection with all the measures that you're complaining about. Also IMHE's model stops Aug 4. No idea what happens after that, probably more of the same. So your 500k to warrant action requirement would have been met easily if we had treated this like the flu.

Also, the only definitive proof that exists for a global pandemic mitigation strategies would be a prior global pandemic. We haven't had one of those in over 100 years. I'll let you know how this one turns out.

 

And we haven't even had the Chinese fast ball yet.

 

Hey, come back with those goalposts....

People refuse to admit what they don't know. You have zero knowledge of what effect social distancing measures have on total deaths (not to be confused with "flattening the curve"). I'll reference the IMHE numbers numbers for the sake of discussion, but let's not forget at all where those numbers started. It's very convenient to say that the social distancing measures are the reason the models were so wrong to begin with. To use another cliche: heads you win, tails I lose.