Bill Bauer said:
Wow, it looks like in most states the mortality in 2018 was similar or worse than than 2020.
Yes, the 2018 flu, which killed 35,000 people in 12 months, is somehow "similar or worse" to COVID which in 2020 has already killed 150,000 people in half that and current estimates are 180-200 by labor day. That's quite an idea.
I think "most states" is doing some
heavy lifting here, and I would also say "wait six months, because we're nowhere near herd immunity and are seeing exponential growth in multiple places including places that had dodged earlier outbreaks".
Why are some people are so bent on trying to make comparisons to influenza when it's been clear for months that we're talking about something for which there is no vaccine, which has a mortality rate which is 5x what the flu's is even in the most conservative analysis, and which appears to do long term damage to various organ systems in some percentage of cases including cases which are otherwise nearly asymptomatic?
There's all kinds of conversations we could have about how many people it's okay to kill with COVID vs how much stimulus spending is reasonable to keep the economy staggering along in the mean time, but anything with the word "flu" in it at this point is just... completely not science based, and always a result of arguments being made in bad faith. The goalposts keep moving. First the "just a flu" people said this would maybe kill 30,000. Then Trump said if he kept it under 60,000 he was doing an "amazing job". Then we crossed 100,000 and places started opening back up.
People who lack a college education in the US are more than four times as likely to oppose mask use as people who have a degree; republicans are 27 times as likely as democrats. I am not aware of any other second world countries which have politicized this issue to this dramatic extent.
In the time since the first "just a flu, bro" arguments were made, this thing has killed 5 normal flu years worth of people. It has left many more with cardiac and lung issues of unknown prognosis. It's also a uniquely social problem -- people can protect themselves to some extent with relatively expensive n95 setups (and this is what we do, given our specific risk profile). However, if everyone would just wear cheap cloth/paper masks indoors and in dense public, that would be sufficient to reach eradictation levels within ~10-12 viral propagation cycles, and also allow for a much greater degree of "life as normal" right now.