Tucker: For millions of healthy people, coronavirus lockdowns are a life-changing disaster (must watch)

May. 22, 2020 - 14:33 - There is precisely no evidence as of right now that the lockdowns saved lives anywhere in this country.

Note to those (millions) Healthy People,

You don’t belong to any victim group.

Hence you are not the focus of our gubmint officials/experts, nor any politicians. Because they can’t make hay (iow, profit/benefit for themselves) out of you.

Thank you.

My own calculations show that the death rate would be much, much higher by now without the quarantine measures. We’ve successfully decreased disease spread by 95% over what it would have been without quarantine.

I hate to think of the consequences if people go back to their old behaviors, which they are likely to do if they continue to believe some of the ridiculous conspiracies instead of the actual data.

We aren’t over this yet.

From my reading of the article you linked, the 1968 pandemic was more comparable to the 2009 pandemic (which is still with us) in terms of its case fatality rates. A better comparison for Covid-19 would be the 1917-1919 H1N1 influenza pandemic that killed some 50 million people worldwide.

Covid-19 is not an influenza. For any influenza pandemic, we have the ability to develop a vaccine within months, since influenza vaccine technology is decades old. A vaccine makes a big difference. We don’t have the technical ability to generate a brand new Covid-19 vaccine and push it through the approval process within a few months, the way we do with influenza viruses.

The reason for the control measures with Covid-19 is that it is highly contagious, no one is immune, and it has a far higher fatality rate than any disease since the 1917-1919 influenza. It showed pandemic potential early on. The challenge for governments is to eradicate it, to keep it from ever becoming entrenched in the population.

"Yah,and once upon a time housewives did the dishes wearing a pearl necklace...like June Cleaver."

I saw that same response from many feminists during the 1990s in their disagreement with traditional family structure. The social and economic differences between the U.S.A. during the 1960s and now are obvious to all who were in decent families and neighborhoods back then (that is, in the real American communities as differentiated from places full of incoming foreigners).

[I hate to think of the consequences if people go back to their old behaviors, which they are likely to do if they continue to believe some of the ridiculous conspiracies instead of the actual data.

We aren’t over this yet.]

What US expat and former Hong Kong resident Fai Mao pointed out is that while NYC and HK have roughly similar population densities, HK’s death numbers are two orders of magnitude smaller. He attributes it to almost universal masking.

My impression, from a swing through Hong Kong decades ago, is that Hong Kong is far more crowded. Much of its craggy geography remains undeveloped. I’ve read that small parcels of (what used to be Crown) land is auctioned annually to developers, as part of the city’s long term revenue plan. Whereas NYC is pretty much built up from one end to the other with parks and cemeteries being the exceptions. Even NYC’s car registrations are triple Hong Kong’s.

So people are more spread out in NYC and yet they have literally 100x the dead in Hong Kong. I find it hard to believe that universal masking isn’t the reason Hong Kong’s numbers are so much lower despite the fact that it has continued operating on a business-as-usual basis throughout the epidemic, with limited restrictions on restaurants and bars, as well as border controls and quarantine measures for people coming into the territory.

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