Posted on 03/23/2020 5:57:54 AM PDT by Kaslin
As (mostly) blue-state governors trip all over themselves trying to test the limits of what a real totalitarian police state would look like if their Bolshevik wet dreams ever came true, reasonable Americans wonder if the proscribed “cure” to stopping the Wuhan virus might, in the long run, be infinitely worse than the disease itself.
Leftists and even some big-government type conservatives have taken advantage of what they clearly see as a great opportunity to virtue signal on this issue, because nothing says “I’m a good person” better than a condescending tweet or pajama-clad quarantine video. ‘We’re saving lives,’ they say, so any action is justified. ‘SHUT IT DOWN,’ they implore all over Twitter. Yes, everybody should be taking precautions and no, nobody should be gathering in large crowds or partying it up on Spring Break at the beach, but New York, New Jersey, California, and others are taking things to the point of unworkable absurdity, and goading President Donald Trump and thus-far noncompliant red-state governors to join them on the tyrannical bandwagon - one that, in the name of saving a few, could end up sinking the entire ship.
But some are pushing back. Colorado Rep. Ken Buck, a member of the House Freedom Caucus, has been one of the few Republicans to criticize the president on this issue and call for a more “measured” response. “You don’t shut restaurants down for 30 days,” he said last week. “I have no problem with (stopping) sporting events or things that don’t impact our civil liberties and don’t impact everyday life. Those are things that I think we can suspend for a period of time. But it’s just craziness to shut down businesses or parts of the economy that are absolutely necessary.”
“We are in the midst of a panic that is creating irrational responses,” Buck said, calling the closures “an overreaction to a very serious situation” which is now causing “some serious civil liberties issues.”
In an article titled “Rethinking the Coronavirus Shutdown,” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board posited last week that “No society can safeguard public health for long at the cost of its economic health.”
“Even America’s resources to fight a viral plague aren’t limitless—and they will become more limited by the day as individuals lose jobs, businesses close, and American prosperity gives way to poverty,” they wrote before calling for a strategy that’s “more economically and socially sustainable than the current national lockdown.”
In a normal recession, the WSJ argued, the country would lose around 5% of output over a year, but this crisis may cost “that much, or twice as much, in a month.” Scary stuff, but to seemingly most of those in charge at this point, the Chinese coronavirus is way scarier. Yes, the death toll has been relatively small so far, but if left unchecked hundreds of thousands, if not millions, could die, they tell us. Should the curve be successfully flattened, they say, we’ll save upwards of a million American lives.
But even if all that is true, and it may very well be, at what cost is this curve truly flattened? As Tucker Carlson noted last week, an epidemiologist - like Dr. Fauci - would tend to believe “the answer is simple: shut it down, close every public space until the virus passes.” Yes, we could do that, conceivably. It’s certainly what the left wants, although arguably for entirely different reasons.
The WSJ’s many supporters on Twitter included names like RNC member Harmeet Dhillon, economist Brian Wesbury, conservative writer Ann Coulter, former NBC host Megyn Kelly, Fox News host Laura Ingraham, and even NYT White House correspondent Maggie Haberman, all of whom were among many tweeting out the article and, in some way, wondering what we are doing to ourselves. Plenty were opposed, including the Daily Beast’s Sam Stein, who called it “an editorial that could not be more catered to the angst of the paper’s wealthy readership.” Third Way’s Mieke Eoyang ominously promised to “remember” the WSJ’s take. FAIR Media Watch called it “horrific.”
ProPublica president Richard Tofel accused the piece of ducking the “key choice, the emerging question will be whether the public health gain is worth the economic loss.” Indeed, the WSJ contended that this shouldn’t “become a debate over how many lives to sacrifice against how many lost jobs we can tolerate.” Though they mean well, that misses the point entirely. It’s not about simply lost jobs. It’s about shattered lives, shuttered businesses, and a looming second Great Depression that would, over the long haul, kill millions more Americans than the Chinese coronavirus ever could even if left unchecked.
Dr. David Katz, founding director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, called for a more “surgical approach” in a New York Times op-ed published Friday. Instead of tanking our economy for everyone, Katz argues, why not focus on protecting those most vulnerable?
“This focus on a much smaller portion of the population would allow most of society to return to life as usual and perhaps prevent vast segments of the economy from collapsing,” he wrote. “Healthy children could return to school and healthy adults go back to their jobs. Theaters and restaurants could reopen, though we might be wise to avoid very large social gatherings like stadium sporting events and concerts. So long as we were protecting the truly vulnerable, a sense of calm could be restored to society.”
Evermore importantly, such an approach could very well end the threat for good as society develops a “natural herd immunity to the virus.”
“The vast majority of people would develop mild coronavirus infections, while medical resources could focus on those who fell critically ill,” writes Dr. Katz. “Once the wider population had been exposed and, if infected, had recovered and gained natural immunity, the risk to the most vulnerable would fall dramatically.”
It’s a solution recently advocated by Israeli Defense Minister Naftali Bennett, who called for a combination of herd immunity and isolating the most vulnerable as an effective way to fight the virus. Since most experts say the virus is going to pass through most of the population anyway, it may indeed be the ONLY way, that is unless we want to experience another Great Depression or turn into Zimbabwe through the hyperinflation that some proposed ‘solutions’ would cause.
Like it or not, our leaders must decide what defines an ‘acceptable’ level of exposure versus falling off an economic cliff, one that could result in far deadlier consequences over the long haul. Either way, there will be suffering. Either way, people will die. It’s not evil to point out the stark, brutal truth. Life is rarely fair, but it’s immensely more unfair to pretend there is no other sane choice than simply “shutting it all down.”
Do it post haste. Or stat for you MD types.
Pelosi is tearing down this country and tearing up our livelihoods and our life savings...
Agree but how would that support further Agenda 21 and the removal of our God given rights?
How dare anyone speak common sense?
Try to talk some common sense into the old retired MD wastoute. Thank you.
Oh yeah, there’s no plan on when to end it, or how to even gauge metrics that would signal it’s time to end.
My question is: What are they going to do when the looters start rolling through the major urban areas? I’m guessing we’re only a week from that at this point.
Once those blue state governors get a taste of having their own army to order around, I’m going to imagine it will take quite a bit to shake them of their newly discovered toy.
Scott is right on the money. What is happening in this country is pure madness. Isolate the vulnerable, put money in hospitals and medicine (not Planned Parenthood), put the country back to work, reopen schools.
Celebrating by staying in a local hotel and getting a meal from a local restaurant will go a long way from our hospitality industry friends. They are in excruciating pain.
‘Try to talk some common sense into the old retired MD wastoute. Thank you.’
I’ve noticed that poster on these threads...quite the agitator, isn’t he/she...?
... prescribed ...
Amen. A viable treatment (may not work for everyone) is out there. But just sitting back waiting to be infected is not going to work. There are some who will, unfortunately, die regardless when they are infected.
Trump said the cure cannot be worse than the disease. There’s no way anyone can guarantee your good health.
Absolutely correct. I saw an article in the WSJ worrying about the non-symptomatic “carriers” and also about how many people are now being revealed to have had it. Well, if it’s non-symptomatic, that means it’s pretty mild, and also that the “herd” is building up immunity. That is, the disease may be communicated to another person, but because most people already have the antibodies from prior infections or vaccination, the virus is limited in the number of people in can spread to in one jump.
So why lament it? That should have been the strategy all along. Isolate the vulnerable if appropriate (and most of the elderly or already ill would have been perfectly willing to self-isolate, as long as they were assured they could get food and care), quarantine people who have active cases, look for treatments and a vaccine, and practice good hygiene.
If people are worried about hospital facilitie ( although ultimately they would be probably less necessary), build field hospitals and quick-train medical technicians. But it probably would never come to that if handled sanely.
And keep going to work, engaging in social activities, going to church, etc., although let people who are nervous stay home for a while. But don’t destroy the economy and all private society to “save” them.
Me and him/her have been at it all morning. He is smart but lacks any kind of reason, common sense or proportion to this faux crisis.
The best vaccine against those causing COVID-19 panic?
Throw USA influenza statistics in their face - every hour, every day.
Make them prove that COVID-19 - in the USA - is more deadly than a bad influenza season.
Bottom Line...
(1) Protect the elderly and the infirm to the best of our ability.
(2) Do not destroy the American economy and our standard of living.
Herd immunity WITH THIS PARTICULAR EVENT does not work. You can be re-infected with any of the multiple strains that have already mutated into existing around the world. Just like what happened in 1918, there were 3 primary strains that swept the world all off the one original strain.
We have to find that fine line balance on how to deal with Covid19. Turning everybody loose isn’t the correct answer.
If this pandemic follows the patterns of previous ones, there will be peaks and troughs. Perhaps loosening restrictions during low circulation times and then “tightening the belt” during the peaks is the answer?
It would be wonderful if this just disappeared, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. It appears that this will be become endemic until a vaccine can be found.
Trump’s over night tweets and retweets indicate that he’s all in for the 15 days. He’s not one to pick an idea or solution and be wedded to it just “because”.
Perhaps someone will define “herd immunity” and just how in the absence of a vaccine it is achieved. However do have a pet peeve. Neither the CDC nor the WHO are releasing the race and detailed underlying medical conditions, medications being taken, vaccination status and habits of those who become infected, go on to become ill, then go into respiratory failure and die. Such detailed categorization while not politically correct, is essential in understanding the population genetics and environmental factors that will dictate how this and any other pandemic plays out. Political correctness is willful self delusion and a very bad trait for scientists.
The problem is at least half the people who are asymptomatic or mild will never seek the test or by the time they do they have spread it. This is much more contagious than a cold or the flu. It’s anecdotal but I have seen one case where a resident and the surgeon operated on one sick patient and they both got it. I have never seen that kind of thing. Two doctors infected at once., incredible.
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