It’s now looking like the lockdowns may have been a huge mistake

Autoprax

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Vagina Point
September 9, 2020
The pandemic is history
By Ron Ross

A curious but fortunate characteristic of virus epidemics is their limited lifespans. No one knows why, but guesses include herd immunity and mutations of the virus.
The following graph from the Centers for Disease Control and the National Center for Health Statistics shows the time profile of the COVID-19 weekly death counts from February onward.



In the U.S., the virus got underway in March. For the week ending March 14 the total number of deaths nationwide was 52. During the following month the number of deaths increased rapidly, peaking in the week ending April 18 at a count of 17,026.

From that time onward, the death count declined rapidly to a weekly number of 3,684 in late June. A second “wave” began in July. The peak of that second wave was 6,794 deaths during the week ending July 25. After that a steeper decline commenced and accelerated.

The peak death count for Americans under age 25 was 28 (for the week ending April 11) and has been under that number since. Only a single death occurred in that age group during the latest reported week, and there were no deaths recorded in the 25-34 age group.

Virus epidemics behave differently than virtually all other diseases. If you graphed timelines of the number of cancer deaths, fatal heart attacks, and fatal strokes, those timelines would be virtually flat.

Virus epidemics, however, have relatively short time profiles, like what we’re seeing with COVID-19. There’s nothing unusual about the fact that the coronavirus death count is dying a natural death. That should have been anticipated, and it should now be widely publicized. Why are we pretending not to know this good news? These facts are easy to find. We ought to be celebrating like we did when WWII ended.

This COVID-19 death profile is extremely significant yet is almost totally ignored by the media. Their focus is on cases, not deaths. The number of cases has not decreased as rapidly as the number of deaths. Only a small percentage of cases now ends in death, and the death count is vastly more important than the case count. The case count may linger, but that problem is becoming increasingly manageable.

The latest reported weekly death count (August 29) was 370. That’s out of a population of 330 million people. In a single week, between August 8 and August 15, the number of deaths dropped 85 percent (from 3,169 to 455). The COVID-19 death rate in the U.S. is now barely more than one per million and dropping like a rock. Coronavirus deaths are currently half the number of weekly vehicle fatalities. We’re now seeing the pandemic in our rearview mirror.



Winter is coming
 

surfadelphia

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Nov 15, 2010
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Exactly. Trump didn't drain any swamp, he made a new swamp and only invited playdates who would let him play the king.
That's just wetlands restoration, he is the "greatest environmentalist since teddy roosevelt" or whatever sh!t he claimed by not drilling off florida
 
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Phi1

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Incidents like Sandy Hook, Pulse Nightclub, Las Vegas didn’t really move the needle on gun control. Thinking a virus will sway the aggressively stupid is nearly equal in stupidity. :foreheadslap:

Edit: ”The price of freedom” types are applying the same logic.

The solution to mass shootings is MOAR GUNZ!

The solution to the pandemic is MOAR VIRUZZ!
 

hal9000

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Did the 15 cases go down to zero yet?

Grossfat logic: the pandemic is a hoax but also Phil Murphy killed lots of old people, and he also wanted his island closed to outsiders.
 

mundus

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Stop your multi-posting. It could get you banished if Oz finds out.

If you don't think Biden is a weirdo you haven't been paying attention.
And you have proven to be the bitch to cry to the mods
 

Mike_Jones

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It’s now looking like the lockdowns may have been a huge mistake

Were lockdowns a mistake? To that nagging question, the answer increasingly seems to be yes.

Certainly, they were a novelty. As novelist Lionel Shriver writes, “We’ve never before responded to a contagion by closing down whole countries.” As I’ve noted, the 1957-58 Asian flu killed between 70,000 and 116,000 Americans, between 0.04 percent and 0.07 percent of the nation’s population. The 1968-70 Hong Kong flu killed about 100,000, 0.05 percent of the population.

The US coronavirus death toll of 186,000 is 0.055 percent of the current population. It will go higher, but it’s about the same magnitude as those two flus, and it has been less deadly to those under 65 than the flus were. Yet there were no statewide lockdowns; no massive school closings; no closings of office buildings and factories, restaurants and museums. No one considered shutting down Woodstock.

Why are attitudes so different today? Perhaps we have greater confidence in government’s effectiveness. If public policy can affect climate change, it can stamp out a virus.

Plus, we’re much more risk-averse. Children aren’t allowed to walk to school; jungle gyms have vanished from playgrounds; college students are shielded from microaggressions. We have a “safetyism mindset,” as Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff write in “The Coddling of the American Mind,” under which “many aspects of students’ lives needed to be carefully regulated by adults.”

So the news of the COVID-19 virus killing dozens and overloading hospitals in Bergamo, Italy, triggered a flight to safety and restriction. Many Americans stopped going to restaurants and shops even before the lockdowns were ordered in March and April. The exaggerated projections of some epidemiologists, with a professional interest in forecasting pandemics, triggered demands that governments act.

The legitimate fears that hospitals would be overwhelmed apparently explain the (in retrospect, deadly) orders of the governors of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Michigan requiring elderly care facilities to admit COVID-infected patients. And the original purpose to “flatten the curve” segued into “stamp out the virus.”

But the apparent success of South Korea and island nations — Taiwan, Singapore, New Zealand — in doing so could never be replicated in the continental, globalized United States.

Governors imposing continued lockdowns claimed to be “following the science.” But only in one dimension: reducing the immediate number of COVID-19 cases. The lockdowns also prevented cancer screenings, heart-attack treatment and substance-abuse counseling, the absence of which resulted in a large but hard-to-estimate number of deaths. What Haidt and Lukianoff call “vindictive protectiveness” turned out to be not very protective.

Examples include shaming beachgoers though outdoor virus spread is minimal; extending school shutdowns though few children get or transmit the infection; closing down gardening aisles in superstores; and barring church services while blessing inevitably noisy and crowded demonstrations for politically favored causes.

The new thinking on lockdowns, as Greg Ip reported in the Wall Street Journal last week, is that “they’re overly blunt and costly.” That supports President Trump’s mid-April statement that “A prolonged lockdown combined with a forced economic depression would inflict an immense and wide-ranging toll on public health.”

For many, that economic damage has been of Great Depression proportions. Restaurants and small businesses have been closed forever, even before the last three months of “mostly peaceful” urban rioting. Losses have been concentrated on those with low income and little wealth, while lockdowns have added tens of billions to the net worth of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.

The anti-lockdown blogger (and former New York Times reporter) Alex Berenson makes a powerful case that lockdowns delayed, rather than prevented, infections.

There are old lessons here. Governments can sometimes channel but never entirely control nature. There is no way to entirely eliminate risk. Attempts to reduce one risk may increase others. Amid uncertainty, people make mistakes. Like, maybe, the lockdowns.


RIGHT OR WRONG The idea that lockdowns are necessary was sold to the public. The course has been run, and we have tested, proven vaccines which can eliminate COVID-19.

Leftists like Dr. Fauci, Kamala Harris, and the lying leftist Astra Zenica official who has halted testing are joining forces and attempting to deny public access to effective COVID-19 treatment. Without intervention this will result in treatment being delayed until weeks after the November election. Thousands more Americans will die so that leftist assholes can have a cheating hedge against losing an election which they are currently losing miserably.

But you and your writer are busy second guessing a decision which was settled months ago using information which wasn’t attainable when it was needed.

So what? As a conservative you face much bigger real current threats. Pull your head out of your ass, and focus.
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