There has not been a real and honest cost assessment of this, IMO.
The people making decisions have done it based on emotion and fear.
Bankrupting this country and future generations is not a wise reaction to a virus shown to have about a 2% overall mortality rate that is heavily weighted towards the elderly, sick, and those with co-morbidities.
Those people at risk who cannot protect themselves should be protected. Those of sound mind who are at risk should be allowed to make their own decisions and take any action to protect themselves they deem fit, including wearing a biohazard suit in public, and everyone should respect that decision.
And if people want to open a business, attend a church or a rally or whatever, they should be free to do that as well.
This is not the Bubonic Plague.
💯
Well said
A good friend of mine of many decades is a retired anesthesiologist, but he began his medical career in family practice. He is 89 years old and he has stories to tell about public health of the past. Particularly polio. The statistics on polio were quite small. But because it was affecting children the impact was greatly amplified.
Decisions about polio were also made from emotion.
Tuberculosis, more than any sort of frontier spirit, sent people West. A study came out indicating that the disease would be less symptomatic, and less deadly, if patients breathed very clean air. So the phrase Go West Young Man arrived on the scene, and it came from brochures printed by Western towns hyping their very clean air in the mountains of Denver and elsewhere. Those towns needed population.
So the disease defined their policy, and when the patients arrived at the city limits they were often kept out.
My point I suppose is that this is not the first time disease has compelled government policy. TB has some similarities. Many infected people are asymptomatic. They’re walking around infecting people. 25% of the world’s population is infected with TB. About 1.5 million people die of it each year even with antibiotics, the most of those deaths do not received the entire treatment regimen which is multiple drugs over a long. Of time.