Gary Childress wrote: ↑Thu May 14, 2020 2:11 am
Gloominary wrote: ↑Wed May 13, 2020 5:15 pm
You're minimizing the seriousness of domestic violence.
Just like you're minimizing the seriousness of a disease which is almost sure death (and a pretty horrible one at that) for the sick and very elderly if they get it.
Not the way you did.
I said most people that died, died
with Covid, not
of it, which's true, they were 70+ with multiple severe diseases, I didn't say
we can't reopen the economy because Mr. Burns won't make it to his 110th birthday?
It's all about cost-benefit as you say. Do we cater to the needs of controlling domestic violence (something that can also possibly be addressed with heightened police awareness and media campaigns during the crisis) or do we cater to the needs of those vulnerable to the disease? Our policy-makers chose the latter. It's also possible that domestic violence was left out of the equation and an unforeseen negative externality.
Sweden has a population of 10 million.
Roughly 90 thousand Swedes die every year (and bear in mind that figure tends to increase every year irrespective of whatever new viruses are introduced because Sweden's population is both aging and growing, like the rest of the 1st world's pop).
We're told 3000 people died with Covid.
Most of them would've died anyway.
Many of them were assumed to have Covid, they weren't actually tested for it, and there were financial incentives for diagnosing Covid.
So how many people actually died of Covid?
Let's be generous and say 1000.
And of those 1000, how many could've been saved had Sweden locked down?
While Sweden has more deaths with Covid than some of its neighbors, like Denmark and Norway, it has less deaths than others, like Belgium and the Netherlands, altho Denmark and Norway are more similar to Sweden than Belgium and the Netherlands.
Let's be generous and say 500 could've been saved.
So 500 lives, but how many old people die because they've been jailed in their rooms, unable to go out, unable to see their family and friends?
Depressed, frightened, lonely?
Are we able to save a single life without sacrificing another?
How many more will die in Denmark and Norway when their economies are partly or fully reopened than in Sweden for Sweden will've achieved herd immunity sooner?
150,000 Brits will die an 'avoidable death' during coronavirus pandemic through depression, domestic violence and suicides.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... cides.html
So
perhaps Sweden could've saved about 500 lives without sacrificing as many or more old people in the process, but how many more people in general would've died an 'avoidable death' had Sweden locked down?
The UK's population is about seven times larger than Sweden, so if 150 thousand Brits will die an avoidable death due to lockdown, perhaps about 20 thousand would've died an avoidable death in Sweden had they locked down.
20 000, compared to 500.
These are measures you take to prevent the spread of the bubonic plague, not a flu that's not much (if at all) more deadly than seasonal flus.
Plunging the economy into a recession/depression + declaring lockdown/martial law is just about the worst thing a government can do to its people short of directly mass murdering them, I mean do I really have to explain to people why that is?
A recession/depression + lockdown/martial law aren't arbitrary, a massive increase in bankruptcies/unemployment, a massive reduction in quality of life/standard of living leads to a massive reduction in life expectancy and consolidation of wealth and power by a tiny few.
You don't plunge the economy into a recession/depression and declare lockdown/martial law in Sweden to save 500 (or rather give 500 people a tiny extension of their lives, since most of them only had a few months or years left) or 5000 people for that matter, even 50 thousand is debatable, now if it was 500 thousand or 5 million, sure, then I'd probably concede.
Presumably, the WHO and CDC did the math, probably based on what little info they had at the time from the Chinese and they made the decision that a lockdown was the better course. Should everyone have waited to see how devastating the disease was or wasn't before locking down? then it would conceivably be too late. We all know that hindsight is 20/20.
Was the lockdown necessary? I don't know. I don't know what would have happened in the US had states not locked down. It seems like common sense that the number of cases as well as deaths would have risen. By how much, who knows. You mention Sweden. Maybe Sweden proves that a lockdown was unnecessary or maybe there are factors that make Sweden a bad example for comparison.
There was never any cause for alarm.
Thousands of people, the vast majority of them old with multiple severe illnesses, were dying in places like New York, Northern Italy and Wuhan this year like they do every year, the only difference was this year some of them had Covid, and some of them had the common cold, some of them had seasonal flu, some of them had urinary tract infection, etcetera, it's not like all of them had Covid.
They should've known the infection death rate wasn't 3.4%.
Vulnerable people (70+ with multiple severe illnesses) represent a tiny % of the pop, perhaps 1%, so if 1000 show up at the doctors office with a new illness on top of their old ones, and some of them quickly recover, some of them have to be hospitalized and 3.4% die, odds are 99 thousand nonvulnerable people (young, middle age and old people in decent shape) have also been infected, but never showed up to the doctor's office, which means the infection death rate is actually 0.034%.
I mean what's so special about new viruses?
This wasn't the first new virus to come along in the last century.
Thousands or millions of wet markets exist in the 3rd world, where bats and critters we'd never consume are consumed by the millions or billions.
Viruses mutate and occasionally pass from one species to another.
Government and the media massively exaggerate the deadliness of viruses every few years, so why should we take them seriously this time?
If they exaggerated the deadliness of viruses by dozens of times before, they're probably exaggerating the deadliness of this virus by dozens of times now.
We haven't had a severe flu that killed 1 or 5% of the population since the Spanish flu, which was caused by H1N1, swine flu, a seasonal flu, which's relatively harmless now, and times were different back then, there was much more malnutrition, poor sanitation, poverty, a world war going on.