jusplay4fun wrote:With a few exceptions, most who have died in the USA are those:
1) live in the New York City metro area (with high population density and use of mass transit, that is likely one major source of the outbreak);
2) live in what I will call nursing home with residents who have 2 significant factors (old age and underlying health issues);
3) elderly (over 65);
4) with underlying health issues.
So we shut down most of the country for these relatively few situation and few people? Yes, every human life is important and there are tragic deaths everywhere. But to me, this is a bad case of the flu (influenza). And it SEEMS that many who have and carry Covid-19 are asymptomatic, meaning that they are carrying the disease and suffer no major symptoms. So many are not suffering and not likely to die from it, much less suffer serious symptoms. And we shut down the nation for THIS?
And now many tested carry the antibodies for the disease and have NO SYMPTOMS? So the disease is more widespread than we think? And we have these RELATIVELY small number of deaths and those ill from it?
It is time to discuss when the nation "opens up" and begins to return to a "more normal" situation.
The disease is BAD, but is it THAT BAD? Questions to ponder.......
The Prophet's Paradox. If you say, "repent or you shall all die" and they ignore you, you're a failure. But if they listen to you and repent, then nothing bad happens and they say you were full of shit.
Remember Y2K? People heeded the warnings. Everybody rushed to upgrade their computers. Nothing bad happened, and everyone is like "that was a bunch of hype about nothing." Today, Y2K has become a joke punchline. But what we don't know, what we can never know, is what would have happened if we ignored the warnings. If nobody upgraded their computers or their software, maybe indeed some of the disasters that were being discussed would have happened. Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn't. The point is we can never know for sure. We can study it, we can make hypothetical scenarios, but we'll never know for sure.
What we do know is that most people have been very, very faithful about following the social distancing guidelines, and the death toll has not been as high as some projections. Is that because the projections were wrong, or is that because we have been so good about following the guidelines? We can never know with certainty.
Sorry, I have no answers for you. The questions you are asking are being asked by millions of people. None of them know with any certainty, either. At one extreme are those who will tolerate no risk and want to stay in the bunker until we're absolutely sure the bugs have gone. At the other extreme are those who don't give a shit and think they're ubermensh and are preaching that it will be good to cull the herd a bit. In between those extremes are the vast majority of people, cautiously optimistic but still optimistically cautious. Different countries are going to experiment with different ways to get back to normal, and in a while there will be better data to work with. No matter what, however, there will be a lot of "might have beens" that we will never know for sure.
