"Civic duty" to do what exactly? Not go outside lest the unseeable boogeyman might give you a case of cooties which might kill less than 2% of the population? Where most of the people in that 2% category are elderly or otherwise "medically unsound" (barring other genetic factors not fully understood) and "non-productive" members of society with little or no chance of ever becoming productive members in the future?
Jeezus. Really?
Sure, while "non-productive" they are valued by people in society as whole, but does "civic duty" really mean taking measures which kills off entire sectors of the economy wholesale?
What sectors of the economy? Which one died? Was there a funeral? I missed it.
I love how it's always a binary choice. We can kill the economy, sorry, WHOLE SECTORS OF THE ECONOMY, OR we can sacrifice the elderly non-productive members of society in a kind of russian roulette. 'Cause that's the natural outcome of an individual doing their "civic duty". Deciding to shutdown their business.
Or, you know, you could just wear masks like everybody was telling you to from day 1. And you can stay home as much as possible. Work from home if you're able. But yeah, that will end up destroying entire sectors of the economy. At least the funeral home sector and the hospital sector is doing great, though.
But for those people working in those business sectors that did get shutdown? Their answer is likely to be a bit different, as "civic duty" for them meant throwing away their livelihood, their hopes, their dreams, and years or even decades of blood, sweat, and tears in order to maybe save a comparative handful of people.
Saving a comparative handful of people? 265,000 people have died.
Two Hundred and Sixty Five THOUSAND. That's nearly as many Americans that were killed by enemy action in WWII. Almost enough non productive members of society to fill Tiger Stadium THREE TIMES. If you stacked all those people, head to toe, and assumed an average of 6 feet of height, the line would stretch 301 miles. If you were to walk along that line to see every body, at 3mph, walking 12 hours a day, it would take you slightly over two and half days of walking to see every body.
Every single one of those non-productive people who died was somebody's father, mother, brother, sister, son, or daughter. But the good news is that they were non-productive. Every single one of those deaths could have been prevented. Sometimes simply by wearing the proper PPE like a mask, or maintaining distance, or someone else staying home when they were sick. But the good news is that they were unproductive. I'd hate for people to throw away their dreams of drinking at the bar tonight, or seeing Wonder Woman 84 in a theatre, to save 100,000 people.
The post-mortem on Covid19 is going to be fascinating to see once we get some distance behind us on it. I'm inclined to suspect that places like California(especially San Fran and LA which basically never left lockdown), Michigan, and NYC are going to have paid a very high price in the name of prevention, and in the final analysis, it will not have been worth the cost.
It's true. There will be many more bartenders in Las Vegas than in San Francisco next year. Dear God. The cost...the cost.
Except at the start of this, there were plenty of experts who had doubts of a viable vaccine ever being developed, or at best, that it would be years before one could be made widely available.
Which expert was that? Some guy on the interwebs? Maybe somebody on the Hannity show? Show quack general practitioner? Maybe a neuroradiologist from a conservative think tank that doesn't know cac about epidemics?
It's amazing with all these plenty of experts that the vaccine makers started on vaccines almost immediately. I mean, who would have guessed? Obviously not all these experts you're quoting. I mean, I guessed that we'd have a vaccine by January to February of 2021, back in MARCH! But I'm far from being an expert. I'm just not a frickin idiot, and I don't listen to idiots. You must be the other guy. Because we're obviously not getting our news that forms our opinions from the same sources.
How Trump handled things was a mess, but how a lot of other nations and states handled it with their lockdowns also were a mess. Trump at least had a sense that a middleground needed to be walked, but the buffoon he is, he was incapable of communicating it effectively, and his narcissism also turned the into being all about him, which didn't help.
Trump had a sense of a middle ground, eh? Which sense was he using? The force? His powerful business sense? Maybe if the dude didn't just ignore it at first, then be a mask skeptic and listened to his professional expert advisors, then we'd have an extra 20-100K people still alive today. But hey, they were non-productive anyways.
The middle ground in this case was a complete failure. If we had gone either way hard at the start, it would have been better. If we had just never shutdown and just gone full bore, sure, we'd have 1,000,000 people dead, but hey man, they're non productive anyways, and we gotta protect those sectors of the economy, and nothing makes the economy better than 1,000,000 dead consumers. If we had gone hard the other way, and shut down hard, at the beginning in March, and instituted hard restrictions on international travel, then maybe we are more close to what happened in New Zealand. Of course, all those economic sectors would now be dead.
It was a failure of every part of the information distribution chain because they allowed agenda to take precedence over reasoning their way through "the rest of the problem" which wasn't medical in nature.
I blame CNN, I blame MSNBC, NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, the DNC, and even the GOP for that. That isn't Trump's fault alone, there is all kinds of blame to go around for everybody.
The information distribution chain? The information needed to make good choices were all there at the very start of this thing. Nothing was new. This wasn't some unique occurrence in the history of the universe. I got on here in March and said the same crap over and over. Wear a mask. Stay home. Use hand sanitizer. Be prepared. But let's blame CNN.
Personally, I don't blame CNN or Fox or the DNC or the GOP. I blame people who have become so political and get so much of their information from Facebook and Twitter, that they are incapable of making intelligent decisions anymore. I blame the people who didn't wear masks and stay home, despite being told to do so. I blame you.
If you're that guy, then take responsibility and learn from it. Don't blame CNN or Fox. Nobody is making you watch that *censored*.
Meanwhile, we have 6-7 months before we can get the vaccine rolled out to everybody. How do we prevent the next 300-600 thousand deaths of non-productive citizens before then? Without sacrificing the livelihoods and dreams of every bartender in America. Because if we have to make the choice, it's going to have to be bartenders, because they're productive members of society.