Quote:
Nationally, something approaching half of all COVID deaths were elderly long-term care facility residents. Some got sick from staff or visitors, other facilities were seeded with sick patients on order of their government. How was any of that within the control of the LTC facility deceased?Originally Posted by WutFace
The hilarious thing about your quote is that the virus spread is person to person only. So it's 100% in our control. It seems like a total cop-out to think otherwise.
The measures required for spread elimination simply are not practical. They would decimate local, state, national and global economies. Second and third order impacts would ABOUND and reverberate for decades.
Example:
“We could get over this if everybody got paid to stay home for four weeks.”
Everybody??? What’s that gonna look like with nobody staffing hospitals, no first responders, no delivery people?
“Well, maybe not everybody...”
Congrats, you get to go to work and expose yourself and your family and possibly contribute to spread while many others get paid to sit at home, what a swell deal. I’m certain they’ll in no way gather or do things that will further spread, either...
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Even New Zealand, a small island with a population barely that of Kentucky, “went hard early” with a shutdown Americans would NEVER tolerate and saw 100+ days of no cases and a return toward normalcy...now they have over 100 cases of unknown origin and are back toward being locked down. “Nature finds a way” and all that...
Mitigation is all we have, but within that reality considerations HAVE to be given to economic and social costs of such policies, not just clinical outcomes.
People are going to get sick, and people are going to die. It happens every day, even before COVID. If we can use strategies to minimize spread to help our economy and society persevere while biding time for hopeful eventual therapies and vaccine, that’s great...but policymakers cannot begin and end their decision tree on total case numbers and total deaths.