Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr. V
Please keep in mind that it's not just "us" that are in lockdown mode: most of the world is / was as well.
Had we not adopted the measures we did the death rate would have been much higher: when we saw it explode in Italy, for example, it ramped up the fear level.
The problem with how we handled it is that there was never a coordinated dialogue among the politicians as to the bottom line issue, namely: how many American lives are we willing to lose in order to save the economy: nobody ever took a vote.
Earlier projections of the death rate, had we done nothing, exceeded one million IIRC: clearly unacceptable.
But 80K deaths: arguably tolerable, given the historic death rate by flu.
There should be a consensus on acceptable death rate, and their isn't.
One other factor that led to draconian steps was the totally helpless feeling caused by lack of a vaccine.
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That's all reasonable.
It's as though nobody is willing to talk about the acceptable death rate. As it stands now it's as though 1 is too many and anyone saying otherwise doesn't care about human life. And they talk as though there's very little cost to keeping things locked down, and very little benefit to reversing course and getting back to life.
The status quo is a very immature way to handle a complex social situation such as this. It used to be Americans would rise in the face of adversity, but holy crap this is not the America I grew up in.