Yeah, and how many of those 1200+ were college students? Old people get sick and die, it's a fact of life. Cancer, heart issues, organ failure, Alzheimer's, the flu, strokes, pneumonia, and many other age contributing factors. Covid 19 is a garden party compared to what happened in 1918. I'd be interested in knowing how many of those 1200+ in Stamford and Greenwich Hospitals were smokers or former smokers.
Actor Corey Glover said it best in the film "Platoon".
sorry to go long here. And, Not picking on you Huskyrob here. But that view you have, and it is common, is the exact problem with the American response to this. It essentially is this: I am healthy so I shouldn’t have to change my ways or alter my life because my risk is low.
That is a very personal view of the current situation, but one that misses the big picture. Rationally, individually, your view may be right. But collectively, it is disastrous.
That thinking explained is pervasive among a lot of people too. Your chance of death is low, true, but your chance of infection is the issue we are trying to SLOW. Why? Because the math sucks when you start extrapolating out to large swaths of the population. A 1% death rate on a 100 million infections is disastrous. We have 160k on 5 million confirmed. Multiply that by 20.
the numbers, at scale, are unbearable. Your risk of dying is extremely low, but make no mistake, if 100 million infections happen we will see ~1 million deaths as a result.
Even drop death rate of entire population at to .5%. Apply that multiplier to any kind of volume and you get a big number.
Consider how quickly North Carolina Chapel Hill went from a handful of Covid cases to 13% positive test rate. If they stayed on campus without major mitigation, it would have tore through campus and infected, eventually, the entire region.
The virus is like whack a mole. One day, there are no infections. Great job. Then you go out and encounter someone outside your bubble. Eventually an infection happens. The test you took is now worthless because you intermingled.
The right path is to slow burn the infection and keep infection rates low and traceable to prevent clusters like what happened at unc.
We do this in parallell continue to develop therapy and test vaccines. We can’t do this forever, but you can’t rush the science.
Do we hide in our homes forever? No. But how about 4 more months until a vaccine hits the market? Or, is that too long and 1 million dead an acceptable cost to keep economy somewhat open?
that is the question we are facing.
