Posted on 09/09/2020 9:27:03 AM PDT by bitt
Were lockdowns a mistake? To that nagging question, the answer increasingly seems to be yes.
Certainly, they were a novelty. As novelist Lionel Shriver writes, Weve never before responded to a contagion by closing down whole countries. As Ive noted, the 1957-58 Asian flu killed between 70,000 and 116,000 Americans, between 0.04 percent and 0.07 percent of the nations population. The 1968-70 Hong Kong flu killed about 100,000, 0.05 percent of the population.
The US coronavirus death toll of 186,000 is 0.055 percent of the current population. It will go higher, but its about the same magnitude as those two flus, and it has been less deadly to those under 65 than the flus were. Yet there were no statewide lockdowns; no massive school closings; no closings of office buildings and factories, restaurants and museums. No one considered shutting down Woodstock.
Why are attitudes so different today? Perhaps we have greater confidence in governments effectiveness. If public policy can affect climate change, it can stamp out a virus.
Plus, were much more risk-averse. Children arent allowed to walk to school; jungle gyms have vanished from playgrounds; college students are shielded from microaggressions. We have a safetyism mindset, as Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff write in The Coddling of the American Mind, under which many aspects of students lives needed to be carefully regulated by adults.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
No kidding.
p
Thank Dr. Faustus.
As we in the FR Flubro Community tried so urgently to point out to all yinz.
Lockdowns are only for political purposes after 4/30 and nothing else. Really believe when this virus occurred no one knew what China released. By 4/15 they knew and the RATS started........... plain and simple.
Betting that the Federal Government got something wrong/screwed something up is more often than not a winning bet in my experience.
Not a mistake to Democrats. Shut down the economy? Hell yes. It’s what they’ve been pining for.
Depends on the goal. It the goal was to tank the economy so that pollsters could gas light a lot of people into believing that Biden had a 15 point lead over Trump ... then, I guess it was a temporary success. If the goal had anything to do with public health, then it was a failure. If the goal was to see how easily the people would accept tyranny, then it was a smashing success.
That is what I call Fauci too. He sold his soul.
Plus flus had vaccines ....
Come on, fearbros. Come to papa. Well kiss your f**** dalmatians.
They locked us down because they were scared and didn’t really know what the Chinese had created or it was planned.
Now looking? I have been a COVID skeptic since before day 1. I have never been afraid of COVID. All of the people who have been going on and on about how dangerous it is will not come back and apologize for feeding the frenzy. We have many in our very midst. Most of them will come back and claim that they too were skeptical just so they dont look like the idiots that they are.
I said in mid April that if the lockdown went into May, we’d see rioting by May. I was almost wrong. The first of it started the very last weekend in May.
But it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to come up with that conclusion. Urban people lose their jobs, get massive unemployment, and all their hangouts are shut down. What are they gonna do for fun? George Floyd, et al are just the excuse de jure.
“jungle gyms have vanished from playgrounds”
They and other playground equipment are mass produced expensive pieces of metal and plastic with soft material put under them.
Wherever you go it’s the same stuff.
In my elementary school the jungle gym was made of galvanized pipe and the slides were really tall and you could fall of of them onto ordinary dirt.
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