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.”
Cmon man, the solution here is to kill the patient so we no longer have to worry about it’s health.
Dems are trying to blow up the country the same way a divorcing couple ends up sawing a classic Corvette in half.
If I cannot have it, then you won’t have it either.
Blow up the economy and stock market right when the Baby Boomers were set to retire
If you’re going to do a modified herd immunity approach, that is allowing the virus to spread among the less vulnerable groups and sequestering the vulnerable, you might as well shut the hospitals down when they are overwhelmed.
When the hospitals are well over capacity, they will be ineffective and dangerous. The viral loads dumped on hospital workers make them vulnerable population. It does take some time for a normal immune system to effectively respond to virus, and it can be overwhelmed by a high initial load. There are also concerns with re-infections (antibody dependent enhancement).
You will still need health care workers when this is over.
“Herd” immunity is like this. Chicken pox doesn’t spread wildly through the community because so many people have had it it has no where to go. This virus has been reported to only induce a brief period of antibody production, if what we read is true. If it is there may never be significant “herd” immunity. We just don’t know. It’s “new”.
I notice that these “Put America back to work” pieces never come from the angle of businesses I know should be suffering from this.
How about a write-up of a guy whose going to lose his hotel? What about the family with the small restaurant, on the verge of bankruptcy?
Writers producing the Free Traitor agitprop, that this piece is, don’t know any of these kind of people, I guess. The panicked appeal to “civil liberties” is laughable. This is clearly just a “Get my stock portfolio back up” piece.
How about we get the dead into the ground and see a leveling-off of deaths and a control of this thing, first?
If that can’t happen, your going to need to take farming lessons from Mike Bloomberg.
And that my FRiends is it in a nutshell.
CDC released these figures about the 2017 regular flu season. In 2017, 900,000 people were hospitalized with flu complications and 80,000 died. Not a peep from the government, the media or the medical establishment. The hospitals were not overwhelmed. No cities or states were locked down. It was business as usual and the stock market went up.
Let us find out who is responsible for this ruinous over-reaction for the entire country when fewer than 500 have died in six weeks in America. They are worse than the virus.
Covid-19 is 10x deadlier than the flu. It’s not the flu. I agree we should get back to work but the flu get a whole season to kill people and we don’t take any restrictive measures to combat it. It is not the flu. There is no comparison and comparing it to the flu is ridiculous.
There is no such thing as “herd immunity” - only a lack of exposure.
The UK was going to take that approach but realized if they did their hospitals would be overwhelmed. They came to their senses and rejected doing that.
Simply put if there is no effective vaccine or definitive medication this virus will permeate the population. People who survive this, as in the days of bubonic plague, will have either the genetic capability of not getting infected or the genetic capability if becoming infected but not critically ill or dead. Those that have the genetic susceptibility to the virus and do not have the genetic capability to recover will die off. When this virus circulates enough times those with the genetic susceptibility for severe and infection or those with the genetic susceptibility for infection and associated co- morbid environmental factors will die off and the susceptibility gene will be weeded out of the population. That is true “herd immunity” The problem is there will be a lot of suffering and deadly culling before such “herd immunity” is achieved.
I think the point at which we should start lifting restrictions is when we think the medical system is ready with tests, supplies, and drugs. Also a consideration is that the number of cases at least has stop increasing. I would like to see a definite decrease as a jumping off point, a flattening of the curve.
That’s true of any virus. They mutate. It’s why sometimes the flu vaccine is effective and sometimes not.
But that doesn’t mean that we should abandon a tried and true technique (vaccinating or otherwise developing herd immunity) just because it doesn’t always work.
Yes, but if the consequences of getting it are generally mild, sometimes to the point of not even being noticeable to victim, then why get hysterical?
Protect people who are likely to have more serious consequences - such as elderly or bed-ridden or otherwise ill people - and let the rest of life go one.
...and if there is only transient antibody production there will never be and herd immunity at all.
Apparently, Scott is not very intelligent.
IMHO this will cause even more “gnashing and grinding of teeth” by the elites since this is clearly a bi-coastal/big city pandemic which has left “fly over country” virtually unscathed.
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