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?

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...

————-

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.

I agree with everything you just said. But I'd gladly take New Zealand's 100 mystery cases over our own 50,000 daily right now.

Regarding what Americans will "tolerate": We've become lazy, entitled, and self-interested. Here's the perfect opportunity to come together for the common good -- and we failed spectacularly. It makes me wonder how previous generations, especially the Greatest Generation, would have dealt with this crisis.

OMG! 310,000 out of 2.8 million annual deaths, half of which were people waiting to die in nursing homes! Shut down the economy until there isn't a single case for three months!

You know what's funny? The comparisons to other death counts have been going on since this started in March. H1N1. Flu. Car accidents. Heart Disease. The COVID death count has exceeded every comparable metric that you now have to use EVERY DEATH IN AMERICA to make COVID look less scary.

​​​​​​It's sad that you're still fighting that fight.

​​​​

​​​

Tell me again how it's trending to 0 again. I love a good fiction.

Actually, they died WITH Covid. Even fewer died OF Covid.

Holy EXTRA scary, Batman!

I think it's sad that you feel 0.1% of the US population dying from this, the vast majority of which are not working age, will have some devastating effect on our way of life. Get out of your mom's basement, turn off the 24/7 news cycle, and see that Americans are generally masking up and trying to do the best they can in the face of idiotic government mandates (make sure you order substantive food with that beer!).

It's equally sad that you think that this won't have a devastating effect.

I'm thankful that people are coming around regarding masks. We've all got loved ones at risk. I want this over as quickly and with as few lives lost as possible.



​​​
​​​​​​

Trump has ‘major’ announcement tonight at 6pm on veeroos therapeutics.

https://nypost.com/2020/08/23/white-...-breakthrough/