Republican Senator asking if reaction to Corona goes to far

He is 100% right.

Basically he is saying if thousands upon thousands die from car wrecks, flu, accidents etc...why don't we shut the economy down for them?

A question worth considering.

Think how many deaths can be prevented if we all stayed home and never went outside.

35k people are killed by car accidents per year in America. If we are mandated to stay home they would all live.

He's clueless about the impacts of the pandemic.

Johnson is a moron. Always has been. On top of that he’s a pussy. “I’m not saying we’re overreacting.” Oh really, then what are you saying? He won’t stand up to Trump and tell him disagrees. He just wants to be on tv. What a dick.

Personally, I’m ok with balancing the measures taken with preservation of the economy. So, broadly I agree that it’s a balancing act and that there will be significant costs no matter which side of the pendulum we land on, or even if the policy is a compromise somewhere in the middle.

The auto death and flu analogies are idiotic however. We don’t shut down the economy for flu or autos because we have other treatments. There are vaccines for flu. There are treatments for flu that don’t involve using a limited resource, ventilator. There are monstrous federal and state regulatory schemes that regulate the manufacture, sale, ownership, insurance and operation of autos. We already do something about both of those things. Right now, the best treatment for covid is prevention. After that, hope it’s not a bad case. If you are one of the 20% and it’s a bad case, hope you aren’t patient 60,001 and left without a ventilator when the music stops.

To me, that’s a huge difference.

"Right now, the best treatment for covid is prevention. "

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...and a massive increase in testing would help determine where the "hot spots" are so we don't need to shut down the entire economy in a panic.

I disagree with Jimmy. Auto crashes kill thousands annually so the "monstrous regulations " have clearly failed. Why hasnt3the government required employers to provide safe transportation for their workers, or required state transit and commute systems? Heart disease is still the #1 killer in the US, but salt, red meat, butter, fats, and sugars haven't been outlawed or regulated. Why hasn't government forced employers to provide heart-healthy meals for their employees and restaurants to completely rework their menus to address this? They tried it with public schools and it failed spectacularly.

This whole thing is a gross overreaction. I watched two guys in a restaurant on Monday lunch nearly get into a fistfight. It was a spicy Tex-Mex restaurant, and one guy covered his mouth with his arm and coughed once, lightly (the food was clearing my sinuses, too). There was noone within 15 feet. Another guy, over 30' away, stared daggers at him until the first guy was forced to say something. They were about to cone to blows until two plainclothes stepped in and stopped it. Because some coughed, covered, 30' away.

S Korea has done 30x more testing per-capita than we have which explains their success

Randumbmember has stated an intellectually correct statement! Where are those tests?

Thanks asshole

Gamma, I think we’re closer than you think. My larger point is that society has determined that a certain number of injuries or deaths is acceptable in exchange for allowing us to engage in certain activities. Driving and moving around in society has far more benefits than deaths from car accidents or exposure to flu. We’ve taken acceptable measures to limit those injuries and illness.

Where we disagree is merely the appropriateness of the ‘treatment’ for covid. You disagree that shutting everything down for 2-4 weeks is appropriate. I think it’s worth it to prevent a bigger danger.

I don’t know if the alarmists are right. I do know that the death rate in Italy is 5% and it’s not all because their population is older. They’ve run out of hospital beds and ventilators and are forced to decide who gets treatment and who doesn’t. The flip side is S Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong. They don’t have the same freedoms we have here. They used cell phone tracking to isolate the infected and the exposed and quarantined them. Their infection rate and death rate vs population size is much much lower. Do we give up some freedoms and economics in order to be closer to those countries rather than Italy? I say yes.

And just to add something political into the mix, the overreaction you are seeing is coming from Trump. He’s overreacting because he was accused of underreacting early on. He’s compensating because he couldn’t take the criticism. I’m not a Trump fan obviously. I don’t think the virus is his fault. I do think his actions are purely based on how he’s treated by the media. That to me, is what got us here.

If COVID19 kills 50,000 people in the US this spring, the government - and the media - will proclaim PROOF that the disease was the worst pandemic in history. At the same time those kind and "non-political" folks over at CDC and NIH (who were hired by Obama appointees and hate the current president) will crow about how their recommendations saved millions of lives, while downplaying the economic, civic, and social destruction. (YES, that is sarcasm)

The government bureaucrats will loudly end the "emergency" within the next 45 days, but they will quietly fail to undo any of their emergency powers (in case another crisis occurs).

If COVID19 kills 50,000 people in the US this spring, it will still NOT be as deadly as this year's seasonal flu.

If COVID19 kills 50,000 people in the US this spring, it will not even be in the top five deadliest diseases: for real comparison, the complete 2018 totals (from the CDC) show 655,381 killed by heart disease, 599,274 killed by cancer, 159,486 killed by chronic lower respiratory disease, 147,810 killed by cerebro vascular disease, and 122,019 killed by Altzheimer's disease. Even ordinary accidents killed 167,127 people that year. The flu killed 59,120 people in 2018, and it wasn't a "bad" year!

At least our government is clearly taking action and all the politicians can clearly be seen "doing something." (more sarcasm!) Even Trump is in the game. This election year, he too, is trying to be seen, "doing something."

The UN, EU and the Fed bureaucrats are getting exactly what they want, autocratic powers across international borders and a chokehold on the global economy. I am not claiming that this is something they planned. I am saying they will use it!

It will be interesting to see how long Americans are willing to adhere to all this economy shutdown chaos.

Taking people's income is a sobering reality check.

Polititions are in a no win position. If the shut down works everyone will say it was an overreaction. If it doesn't, everyone will say enough wasn't done.

Regardless how it goes. I doubt Americans will ever allow a shutdown like this again no matter how dubious things look.

We'll start to hear tangible grumbling very soon.

Dallas, get your facts straight. The reality is that 1, 500,000 Americans could die if we don't do anything.

I think we need to keep in mind this is being done in the name of public safety. What if you had a legitimate emergency at the ER which was non COVID related and they couldn’t help you because all of the facilities are packed and overcrowded servicing the COVID patients?

I'm Team Thanos. I think the casualties are acceptable and will help address the current problems with overpopulation, deforestation, and global climate change. Especially since the already sick and infirm are most at risk. Laissez faire

This current state of things is a major-inconvenience and financially-painful - but I don't think there's a choice but to follow the advice of the experts in terms of the social-distancing - anyone can have an opinion but I rather err on the side of the experts vs some guy talking out of his ass w/ no expertise in the area of infectious-diseases/pandemics.

At a death rate of 1%, that's around 3.3m US lives at stake. Part of the problem the governments have is China and South Korea are currently showing many of these potential deaths are preventable (via more extreme but similar measures to those now rolling out). That makes it a very hard political decision to take to not invoke similar measures as other countries.
The real bet is around how quickly the science will kick-in and allow for less stringent measures against the pandemic whilst starting to allow control and the regular economy to kick back in.
The actions now being taken are also partly due to the lack of strong data and knowledge on the disease and hence the higher than usual risk of a mis-step and under-estimating severity.

"At a death rate of 1%, that's around 3.3m US lives at stake. "

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The 1% mortality rate is probably close enough, but even the most pessimistic estimates are more like 50% of the population getting infected. So more like 1.7M

Dang it Random. Stop stating good facts. I'm really wanting to disagree with you.

Well, 1.7 million deaths is almost the amount of all "natural" deaths a year combined in the US, so if that figure comes true, then yeah, it's a pretty big freaking deal. The reality is that for the majority of people, the death rate isn't 1%. It's not even .1% which is the rate of the flu. According to Italy's and South Korea's stats (i can't find the ones for China), not a single person under 30 has died. Yes, not a single freaking person. No way all of those people are otherwise healthy either. Not a single person under 10 has been in the ICU besides newborns. For those two countries alone, yes, but that's a sample size so far of 4,144 people and 0 fatalities. Italy's data is about 4 days old and S. Korea's about 2 days, so Italy's number is much higher now (I got the data from wikipedia which is otherwise updated quite quickly).

S. Korea's case is a bit unusual as almost 28% of their cases are 20 somethings which makes up easily their largest group (their next largest group is 50 somethings at just over 19% of cases; 1615 cases and 6 deaths), while Italy only has just under 4% of cases between 20-29 which is their smallest group besides those under 20 (1.2 percent) and those over 90 (3.0 percent). The next smallest group is 30-39 at 6.7% and their largest group is 70-79 at 20.4%.

All this shows is that S. Korea is testing a lot more relatively healthy people, while basically only sick people are getting tested in Italy. If Italy was testing like S. Korea, that 4,144 number of people under 30 (Italy's share is about 1,300) with COVID-19 would be closer to if not greater than 20k. I don't know if they would maintain 0 deaths at those numbers though, but the reality is that the overwhelming majority of under 30s with the disease are not having severe symptoms. So there's a good chance that there would still be slim to none deaths in that group. Also there have been over 800 90 somethings tested and confirmed in Italy (and over 165 deaths) but no such cases in S. Korea. I guess Koreans just don't live as long, although the Japanese do and beyond (although they're not as transparent with their data). But how many comorbidities do you think a 90+ year old has? Like even if they recover, they're probably not long for the world.

This is what makes the disease so perplexing and confounding. In a vacuum it causes almost no fear for young people, but for the elderly it's almost like catching a very quick killing cancer. So millennials and younger are probably just irritated and more concerned about economic fall out while boomers and older are much more concerned about health consequences as they are less likely to recover from those than the economic ones. Of course we don't live in a vacuum and the young folks can very well kill the older ones while the older ones can still hold the country hostage, or maybe they are the hostages depending on how you look at it. I have never seen anything like this. It's almost like class warfare, but between ages/generations and well, people that care more about money/materialism/net worth/standard of living than the human "cost".

Here’s an article from a Stanford University Medical Doctor and epidemiologist arguing that
1. We simply don’t have enough data on how far the virus has spread
2. Based on what we do know, it’s death rate is likely very low and is similar to the common flu
3. Imposing Social Distancing for as long as CoVid lasts is not practical
4. By focusing the health system on CoVid, many thousands may die from other, untreated, illnesses


https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fi…

You know, as you look at the spread of the virus, in cruise ships and urban areas with people packed near each other, I wonder if there will be a longer term trend of people putting more space between themselves and masses of the unwashed. Moving out of global cities. Flee to the suburbs and ex-urns. Avoid mass transit. Work and study from home. More reliance on Amazon for shopping.

^ If so, that bodes badly for future strippers and that industry...

If that’s true Mark94, then I’m ahead of the curve.