The flu kills 60,000+ people a year in this country. Do we shut down the entire country? No.
No, the flu kills about 35-40K people a year in this country. The worst flu season of the last decade was 61K, but it seems everyone wants to make that the baseline.
And note that the flu has several advantages to keep people from contracting it:
- We have vaccines for flu strains.
- People harbor some natural immunity from past flu infections.
- It's believed that the R0 from the flu is lower than from Coronavirus.
As a result, with this being basically a greenfield of infection potential where nobody has immunity, and with R0 higher than the flu, it would be expected that infection rates would be SIGNIFICANTLY higher than the flu, with an infection that's significantly more lethal. That's a bad multiplier.
And who f***ing knows how accurate those numbers are at all. They are most definitely gamed.
Excess deaths analysis suggest the numbers, if anything, are low.
And this has all happened in 10 weeks, compared to a flu season that is 6+ months long.
When that happens- you get moronic things like shutting down a society and wrecking an economy and the livelihoods of tens of millions of people, for something that is basically a little bit worse than a flu. I'd say that's a HUGE over-reaction.
If it's only a little worse than the flu, how has it killed 100K people in 10 weeks DESPITE locking everything down?
Do you believe that if we all went on with our lives, taking basically ONLY flu-like precautions (i.e. none), that we'd still be at only 100K now?
Do you think if we were still holding sporting events, people going to work without precautions, people going to bars/restaurants/clubs, that we'd be okay?
Corollary: If you say that you think the infections would have tapered off naturally without a lockdown, then why are they tapering off in every European nation EXCEPT Sweden?
You know what is way more serious than coronavirus that almost nothing ever gets done about in this country? Heart disease. 650,000 Americans die every single year because of heart disease. Do we shut down fast food companies? Do we ban soda? Do we ban smoking cigarettes? Do we use government powers to force people to change the way they eat? Does the gov't crack down on big ag and fast food for dumping toxic bullshit into our food? Nope. How about we work on fixing obesity and the bullshit food supply of this country. That is killing more people in this country than coronavirus could ever dream of.
We live in a country where people are getting shot for asking store patrons to wear a mask, and you think we're gonna ban cheeseburgers to save people from heart disease?
Note the difference, though... You can't catch heart disease from your neighbor if they cough too close to you.