Jay wrote:
Larssen wrote:
We've been over this. Jay would readily sacrifice 2% of the population. what economic damage that would cause he has no idea but it can't possibly be worse than government action.
I would not sacrifice 2% of the population if I thought it could be helped. Why would anyone do so? I said that this disease was likely going to be a lot less lethal than the projections that were being thrown around, and it turns out I was correct. I said that the cure would likely be worse than the disease, and I've largely been correct.
What I'm not willing to do is sacrifice all of humanity to save a few. And this is the issue I have with left wing ideology in general. You focus on the hard cases. The minority. You're perfectly willing to tax everyone in order to potentially, and I mean potentially, save a few. You're willing to throw everyone out of work and force them onto the dole in order to potentially save a few thousand lives of people waiting to die in nursing homes. You focus on the stories that tug at the heart strings and turn them into causes, even though they might in fact be very minor things in the grand scheme of life. You let the media and politicians manipulate your high empathy levels at every turn and you get told that you would be an unsympathetic, uncaring, unfeeling bastard if you opposed the taxes and the new authoritarian impositions on daily life, so you embrace it instead.
Jay,
Your claims about this disease being not so deadly or that the cure would be worse were from the very start completely totally baseless. A hunch. Fantasy. Fiction. An imagination. Are you telling me national policy where lives are potentially at stake should be based on people's uninformed guesstimates?
The problem is that almost noone alive today has ever experienced a real crisis of any magnitude. You know, the type you read about pretty much every chapter if you open a history book. That safe, risk free experience has caused an enormous amount of people to be wholly convinced that every problem will solve itself, that every situation can be nuanced, that there's never a reason to really worry. Why would there be, none of us have experienced it. Well, this pandemic has presented itself as that once-in-a-century moment. If you had paid attention to the information coming from China in january or february, you would've been clinically insane to argue that it's all just a big ruse - you can pick out the world leaders who at this moment have proven themselves to be mentally not all there.
The death rate statistic has been quite well established now. It's around 2%. That is still lowballing it as global average is 3.5%. The extreme optimist could argue closer to 1%, but that number wouldn't be fairly accurate as we can't account for the death rate if all hospitals are filled and there's no breathing equipment available to treat ICU admissions. The ICU admission rate - I'm not sure and working from memory now but based on hospital admissions, it's somewhere between 5-10%. That means between 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 end up in a situation so bad they need medical assistance to survive. Imagine if that medical assistance is no longer available due to overflow in the hospitals.
I don't focus on the minority. The numbers are bad enough that they affect the majority. Had it been let loose, everyone, you included, would personally know people who would die from corona. I'm thinking about the human impact of millions not being able to say goodbye to their loved ones, about the logistics involved in disposing of hundreds of thousands of bodies in a matter of months, about the impact it would have on hospitals, doctors and nurses who would have to work under such extreme pressure, space and time constraints it's a certain bet many would come out with PTSD. I'm also thinking about the economic impact of losing a substantial number of your population in record time and what this would mean for capital movement and insurance. I'm also thinking about the morality of letting so many people die.
You have not thought this through and keep proving that time, and time, and time again. Use that engineer brain and at the very least make an inventory of all factors that ought to be considered.
Last edited by Larssen (4 years, 8 months ago)