By quoting things I've heard for months. The idiocy of the reaction to this virus is astounding.
Here are some real, actual quotes from this very board:
From April:
Imperial College and the University of Washington predicted over 200,000 deaths with strong mitigation and warned Sweden that if they didn't lock down (which they have not) they could face a significant portion of their populace in the hospital, with many dead. Well there is no hospital bed shortage in Stockholm, and the beers and shots continue to be poured in their bars as well. They are on track for their usual number of deaths in a typical flu season. Now these self professed experts have dropped their death count to well below 50,000 for the US, the usual flu deaths for this country.
420,000 deaths to date. Sweden has had 43,471 cases and 11,500 deaths. Their next door neighbors Norway and Finland have had 4,300 and 4,900 cases respectively. Norway's had 561 deaths; Finland has had 671.
From May:
The Chief Epidemiologist of Stockholm says herd immunity will be achieved in days, if not a few weeks.
Still not there, 8 months later.
it's called COVID-19 because it's the 19th strain/mutation of the Coronavirus - a virus that has been known and around for a LONG time. Shoot, read a Lysol label. It literally states "Disinfects:" and lists "Human Coronavirus".
Spoiler: none of that's true.
COVID-19 isn't going to do jack squat
Weird...fear mongering and panic because of a small threat disease during an election year.
There are dozens of examples just like these. It's really easy to look back in retrospect and be critical of components of the response, and even to rightfully point out where the response went overboard.
But it's important to remember that a large portion of the population -- including the ruling party at the time -- spent a huge part of the beginning of this pandemic insisting this was literally nothing but a political hoax. And that insistence backed them into a corner. Since the prevailing message on the Right was that the virus wasn't a major health concern, it meant that there wasn't any political will for the economic response that was necessary. As a result, we ended up with a health risk that far exceeded their expectations and an economic response that was insufficient.
And pretty much all of the folks who were insisting this was a political hoax are now standing alongside of you in the "common sense" crowd being critical when they see overreach, and completely ignoring how wrong they were a year ago.
So forgive me if the "financial cost of this crisis will outweigh the health cost" argument makes me skeptical. The people who made it early on -- at least here -- all grossly underestimated the health risk.
Last Edited: 2/1/2021 7:52:59 PM by Bobcat Love's Sense of Shame