We're all temporarily free range chickens, 2 m apart (6 feet). They want to get us back into the factory farm laying eggs for them on the conveyor belt of progress and profit.
The problem is that this thing is stubbornly refusing to follow the news cycle.
That in the end is going to confound political ambition.
(Another bad day for the globe today. And in the USA 35 States have had 50 or more deaths and 46 have had over 1000 recorded cases. Also 30,000 total new cases and almost 2,500 total deaths on 15 April, Good luck with selective early restart plans. )
List of countries with at least 5,000 known COVID-19 cases.
United States - 644,089 (566,852 / 48,708 / 28,529)
Spain - 180,659 (90,994 / 70,853 / 18,812)
Italy - 165,155 (105,418 / 38,092 / 21,645)
France - 147,863 (99,741 / 30,955 / 17,167)
Germany - 134,753 (58,349 / 72,600 / 3,804)
United Kingdom - 98,476 (85,264 / 344 / 12,868)
China - 82,341 (1,107 / 77,892 / 3,342) 4.1%
Iran - 76,389 (21,679 / 49,933 / 4,777) 8.7%
Turkey - 69,392 (62,200 / 5,674 / 1,518)
Belgium - 33,573 (22,026 / 7,107 / 4,440)
Brazil - 28,912 (13,126 / 14,026 / 1,760)
Canada - 28,379 (18,390 / 8,979 / 1,010)
Netherlands - 28,153 (24,769 / 250 / 3,134)
Switzerland - 26,336 (9,697 / 15,400 / 1,239)
Russia - 24,490 (22,306 / 1,986 / 198)
Portugal - 18,091 (17,109 / 383 / 599)
Austria - 14,350 (5,859 / 8,098 / 393)
Ireland - 12,547 (12,026 / 77 / 444)
Israel - 12,501 (9,808 / 2,563 / 130)
India - 12,380 (10,450 / 1,508 / 422)
Sweden - 11,927 (10,343 / 381 / 1,203)
Peru - 11,475 (8,113 / 3,108 / 254)
South Korea - 10,613 (2,627 / 7,757 / 229) 2.9%
Japan - 8,626 (7,547 / 901 / 178)
Chile - 8,273 (5,242 / 2,937 / 94)
Ecuador - 7,858 (6,690 / 780 / 388)
Poland - 7,582 (6,628 / 668 / 286)
Romania - 7,216 (5,627 / 1,217 / 372)
Norway - 6,798 (6,616 / 32 / 150)
Denmark - 6,681 (3,624 / 2,748 / 309)
Australia - 6,462 (2,697 / 3,702 / 63)
Pakistan - 6,383 (4,826 / 1,446 / 111)
Czechia - 6,301 (5,316 / 819 / 166)
Saudi Arabia - 5,862 (4,852 / 931 / 79)
Mexico - 5,847 (3,273 / 2,125 / 449)
Philippines - 5,453 (4,751 / 353 / 349)
United Arab Emirates - 5,365 (4,298 / 1,034 / 33)
Indonesia - 5,136 (4,221 / 446 / 469)
Malaysia - 5,072 (2,342 / 2,647 / 83)
The listings are in the format:
X. Country - [# of known cases] ([active] / [recovered] / [dead]) [%fatality rate]
Fatality rates are only listed for countries where the number of resolved cases (recovered + dead) exceeds the number of known active cases by a ratio of at least 2:1. Italics indicate authoritarian countries whose official statistics are suspect. Other country's statistics are suspect if their testing regimes are substandard.
If American states were treated as individual countries twenty of them would be on that list. New York would be ranked at #2, between "everywhere in the U.S. except New York" (#1) and Spain (#3). New Jersey would be between Iran and Turkey.
Malaysia, Indonesia, and the UAE have been added to the list since the last compilation.
I responded to a statement where someone said they thought the American federal system is part of the problem with the fight against Coronavirus. I agreed, but I did say it helped to diffuse the government in other areas which is good---and then we zoom off on a discussion about slavery? Sorry, that issue was settled 155 years ago.
You can't be serious. That issue is far from settled. Ever heard of for-profit prisons? War on drugs? Prisoner firefighters? The nifty loophole in the 14th amendment has perpetuated slavery into our own day. And there are other forms of near-slavery that are close enough to the slave as to be indistinguishable.
This is laughable. That issue has not been settled.
The topic of this thread is not the slavery issue of the past, nor the continued exploitation of prisoners today or other examples of "near slavery" and human trafficking. It is about the Coronavirus. Now if you want to start a separate thread on this issue, feel free to do so.
Some people have a hard time admitting they're wrong.
Yup, I saw something similar in the Economist. But I think Douglas Adams, as usual, got there first:
More prosaically, many countries in Europe have a Great Depression style drop in output once a year, but they call it August and collectively decide it isn't a problem.
Thank you, that's very elegantly put.
I've been wondering a bit about this. My non-economist brain thinks that although there's less money in circulation, there's also less stuff to spend it on, so it's not that bad. Or: I still have a job, so if I was taxed an extra amount equal to the amount I normally spend on childcare, commuting and going out, and this tax was given to the people working in childcare, leisure and transportation, then overall everyone would be financially in the same position they were without Covid. But probably it's not that simple ...
Yes, there'll be some deterioration but ideally you preserve the economy in aspic as much as possible - which is what the measures like wages for furloughed employees, interest holidays and loans for small businesses are supposed to achieve.
Of course, such measures are only as good as their implementation (so quid pro quos such as making wages conditional on staff being kept would be a good thing) and they can't be done indefinitely.
A 3x1m balcony (approximate dimensions as judged by eye ... it's not important enough to go and find a tape measure) doesn't provide much free range. But, I count my blessings as many flats don't have a balcony of any kind.
Forgive me if this has been posted before, I may have missed it. But I am most impressed by this remarkable broadcast by Angela Merkel. As an illustration of what leadership in this crisis looks like, it would be very hard to beat. The link comes with subtitles, and it is about 20 minutes long. But I do not believe it will waste your time. Scroll down to the video link.
Neil Ferguson (Imperial College), saying that unlocking the lockdown requires testing and tracing, (Radio 4). I wonder if this will fall on deaf ears? How else can you unlock?
Neil Ferguson (Imperial College), saying that unlocking the lockdown requires testing and tracing, (Radio 4). I wonder if this will fall on deaf ears? How else can you unlock?
You let people do what they want, and then have a second spike in infections and deaths.
Neil Ferguson (Imperial College), saying that unlocking the lockdown requires testing and tracing, (Radio 4). I wonder if this will fall on deaf ears? How else can you unlock?
Yep.
Unwinding the lockdown is actually very straightforward, you need three things:
1) Diagnostic testing
2) Contact tracing
3) Antibody testing for those that have been exposed
It's very doable... but does depend on a certain amount of central government leadership and competence.
You also need cooperation from businesses and the public, as certainly in the first phases of relaxation it would be advisable to maintain social distancing where possible. So, if a business can demonstrate that staff coming in will still maintain >2m distancing that would be grounds for relaxing the strict work from home rules for those employees, but you'd probably want to wait until later in the tail of new cases until you relax the rules for other businesses. So, for example, an open plan office may re-open if they limit the number of staff in at any one time so that there's always an empty desk between people; shops could re-open if they put in place the sort of systems supermarkets have adopted (limiting the number of shoppers, screens between checkout staff and customers) but you'd have difficulty justifying reopening hairdressers in the first phase. Businesses would need to be honest that they could reopen while maintaining social distancing, the public in general would still need to stay home as much as possible in the first phases of relaxing the lockdown.
You also need cooperation from businesses and the public, as certainly in the first phases of relaxation it would be advisable to maintain social distancing where possible.
"[C]ooperation from . . . the public" can mean many things. For example:
OpenTable bookings had declined 70% before US restaurants were closed.
Swedish movie theaters are open but revenues are down 90%.
“When will government open up the economy?” is the wrong question. Open doors and no customers is not an economy!
I know a lot of people might want to go out to restaurants, movies, hairdressers, etc., but how many of them are willing to do so the moment Donald Trump (or Boris Johnson, or whoever) says "it's safe to go out now, believe me"?
I know a lot of people might want to go out to restaurants, movies, hairdressers, etc., but how many of them are willing to do so the moment Donald Trump (or Boris Johnson, or whoever) says "it's safe to go out now, believe me"?
Me for one. But then I’d happily go and do those things now if I could.
Businesses like pubs and restaurants will probably face the same problem they had at the start of the pandemic at the end. Once the government says they can open the support the government offers will end, but if the public don't come in they'll be operating at a massive loss or need to lay off staff that the government is currently paying them to retain. So, in this sector, cooperation by the public will need to balance supporting these businesses while not having too many people in them at any one time. A phased re-opening would probably need to recognise that with table spacing a restaurant can only accommodate 25% of their pre-pandemic capacity and thus they'll still need to have government support to pay unproductive staff, even if less than what they currently get.
Yes, there'll be some deterioration but ideally you preserve the economy in aspic as much as possible - which is what the measures like wages for furloughed employees, interest holidays and loans for small businesses are supposed to achieve.
Of course, such measures are only as good as their implementation (so quid pro quos such as making wages conditional on staff being kept would be a good thing) and they can't be done indefinitely.
And of course the measures taken in the US aren't going to be nearly enough. The $1200 one-time payment isn't going to go very far, and lots of people who need it aren't going to get it. The small business loan program is already out of money.
22 million Americans have applied for unemployment in the last four weeks - and that's just the people who were able to apply. State unemployment systems are overloaded. (That some of them are running on 40-plus-year-old COBOL systems isn't helping.) In many states self-employed people won't be allowed to file for unemployment for several weeks. Unemployment is now over 20% and likely to be at 10% at the end of the year source reported in Washington Post.
These are Depression-level numbers, and many of the seats of power here are filled by fools and rapacious ghouls. Major changes won't happen until and unless we get new people in government next January, and by then so much damage will have been done that economic recovery will be a Herculean task.
So never then. Great. We’ll eventually be allowed out to do all the shitty boring shit that has to be done to keep the country and economy going, but anything fun - you know, the stuff that makes life actually worth living - will be too risky and thus still banned.
God this fucking situation just keeps getting worse and worse. The whole fucking world is fucked and it’s never going to get better.
I enjoyed the game, pity it infected 100s of people, still, the important thing is, we had a great time.
Yes, actually.
I’m very much from the “what’s the point of being alive if you can’t live” school of thought. Better to have fun living fast and risk dying young than to always take the boring safe path and survive to 100.
What’s the point of a race car that never leaves the garage? OK, it will be guaranteed to still exist for many years to come but surely the very essence, the very purpose of a race car is to be driven very very fast and if that means there’s a risk that it will spin off the track and explode against the wall then so be it.
Merely existing for as long as possible is not the be all and end all of a race car, or (I would suggest) a human.
Without anything enjoyable to do lockdown may as well be death, philosophically speaking of course.
In terms of sports there are two aspects: participation and spectating. If the initial phases of lifting the lockdown still maintain social distancing (which I think they must do) then some sports will be possible to participate in - those that don't require close physical contact: I can't see any obvious problem with tennis, cricket, athletics, swimming, cycling etc where normally participants don't get very close (there may need to be a moratorium on the fielding side getting into a big hug when a wicket is taken); but rugby, judo, football etc would be impossible to play without much closer contact, and thus may need to be re-introduced at a later phase of easing restrictions.
For spectating then most sports will need to limit spectators to whatever ground capacity allows 2m distancing. Probably not a problem for your local village cricket or tennis club, but it probably means the county championship or grand slam tennis tournaments being played to an empty stadium and only available to watch on TV. At least for the initial phases of easing restrictions.
Playing cricket is a big one for me right now - I’d been looking forward to this season and now it’s probably not going to happen. And at my age I have very very few seasons left when I’ll be able to maintain a serious push for selection to the first team, which means that phase of my career may well now be over.
I think graduated raising of lockdown might mean streaming of sporting events. In the meantime, might be the right time to get into esports.
I'm not much of a sports fan, but I can appreciate a well-played game, or a demonstration of athletic prowess. I can't get at all excited about watching someone else play a computer game.
I enjoyed the game, pity it infected 100s of people, still, the important thing is, we had a great time.
Yes, actually.
I’m very much from the “what’s the point of being alive if you can’t live” school of thought. Better to have fun living fast and risk dying young than to always take the boring safe path and survive to 100.
What’s the point of a race car that never leaves the garage? OK, it will be guaranteed to still exist for many years to come but surely the very essence, the very purpose of a race car is to be driven very very fast and if that means there’s a risk that it will spin off the track and explode against the wall then so be it.
Merely existing for as long as possible is not the be all and end all of a race car, or (I would suggest) a human.
Without anything enjoyable to do lockdown may as well be death, philosophically speaking of course.
That might be fine for you. What about everyone else? Don't they count?
For crying out loud, we're not going to be shut up in our homes forever. Many of us will be able to go out to eat and drink this summer. Sports will be back in 2021.
I can't see any obvious problem with tennis, cricket, athletics, swimming, cycling etc where normally participants don't get very close . . .
There seems to be an inherent problem with any sport where multiple people are handling the same object (like a ball) in succession.
You may need some additional considerations such as having hand gel available and regularly used, and a large supply of clean cloths to wipe sweat from the brow - the problem being ball to hand to face transmission. Possibly wiping the ball with soapy wipes counts as ball tampering. But, it's a lot less risky than a rugby scrum. Football, somewhere in between because at least in theory tackles shouldn't involve contact and players aren't routinely touching the ball with their hands.
I enjoyed the game, pity it infected 100s of people, still, the important thing is, we had a great time.
Yes, actually.
I’m very much from the “what’s the point of being alive if you can’t live” school of thought. Better to have fun living fast and risk dying young than to always take the boring safe path and survive to 100.
What’s the point of a race car that never leaves the garage? OK, it will be guaranteed to still exist for many years to come but surely the very essence, the very purpose of a race car is to be driven very very fast and if that means there’s a risk that it will spin off the track and explode against the wall then so be it.
Merely existing for as long as possible is not the be all and end all of a race car, or (I would suggest) a human.
Without anything enjoyable to do lockdown may as well be death, philosophically speaking of course.
That might be fine for you. What about everyone else? Don't they count?
Given that my preferences don’t appear to count for shit in the real world, I reserve the right to ignore anyone else’s in my philosophical one.
So never then. Great. We’ll eventually be allowed out to do all the shitty boring shit that has to be done to keep the country and economy going, but anything fun - you know, the stuff that makes life actually worth living - will be too risky and thus still banned.
God this fucking situation just keeps getting worse and worse. The whole fucking world is fucked and it’s never going to get better.
Or ...
You could change your perspective on what makes life worth living.
You could be grateful for what you do have.
You could be grateful none of your loved ones have died.
You could be grateful for those nurses and doctors who are working 14 hour shifts every day. My friend’s daughter is one of them. She’s only 25, she works on Covid ward and is sent up to help in ITU when more than fifteen patients are there. She saw five deaths yesterday, two of them of young people with no other health conditions. She spoke to me on Skype yesterday. She was cheerful, hopeful and positive.
My son is also one of them. He comes home from a 14 hour night shift nursing Covid patients and then looks after their five month old baby for a couple of hours while his partner has a short rest. Then he sleeps, then back to work. He loves his job and, even now, wouldn’t swap it for any other.
I am completely alone at the moment and can name fifty things I’m immensely grateful for. Life is very much worth living, but I’m desperate for a human hug.
It’s high time @Marvin the Martian that you stopped your self pity party imo.
For crying out loud, we're not going to be shut up in our homes forever.
Sure feels like it right now.
Many of us will be able to go out to eat and drink this summer. Sports will be back in 2021.
Quite aside from the fact that 2021 is a whole fucking year away, which is a really long time to go without something so important, how do you even know that’s the case? What if it turns out that lasting immunity is impossible and no vaccines will work? What then? Our governments have boxed themselves into a corner with this lockdown and if a viable exit strategy can’t be found then there’s no way out of it.
In what sense don't your preferences count in the real world? Cricket will be back at some point in the future. Big deal.
Take the thing that’s most important to you, and then go completely without it for at least three months, extending to an unspecified length of time in the future. Then do the same with your next three or four most important things as well.
Let me know how you feel after the first month or so, so that I can tell you they’ll be back at some point in the future and it’s no big deal.
Dude. In the history of the world, so far as I am aware, there has never been a virus which the average human survives, clears from the body, and then does NOT possess at least temporary immunity to. That's what immune systems do. If you actually defeat the bugger, you have immunity, at least for a while. (If you don't defeat it, that's another matter.)
And if such immunity exists, even temporary immunity, a vaccine is possible. It may not last your whole lifelong, you may have to get it yearly or so, but I'm certain it will last long enough to get sports back on the telly. Eventually.
Take the thing that’s most important to you, and then go completely without it for at least three months, extending to an unspecified length of time in the future.
Given that most of the people who have died of COVID-19 had loved ones, this is already happening. I'm not sure why society as a whole should prioritize your love of cricket over your neighbor's love for her husband.
For crying out loud, we're not going to be shut up in our homes forever.
Sure feels like it right now.
Many of us will be able to go out to eat and drink this summer. Sports will be back in 2021.
Quite aside from the fact that 2021 is a whole fucking year away, which is a really long time to go without something so important, how do you even know that’s the case? What if it turns out that lasting immunity is impossible and no vaccines will work? What then? Our governments have boxed themselves into a corner with this lockdown and if a viable exit strategy can’t be found then there’s no way out of it.
Whilst all things are possible, it's highly unlikely that this virus pandemic will not pass. The plagues did, Spanish Flu did.
You're not wrong that extending life at the expense of quality of life is usually a shitty trade-off but seriously, get a sense of perspective here.
Not only does Covid-19 kill, it is particularly cruel in that people are often dying away from their loved ones. That's a big fucking deal too. If nothing else, you need to protect healthcare workers. I don't have a major problem with risking my life but it's a different kind of scary when you know that going to work might mean bringing a deadly virus home to my family. And I have to go to work...
The amount of good scientific data that's out there now already, is astounding. We will beat this virus. But in the meantime, do you really want to be the guy who left all his lights on and the curtains open during the Blitz to make it easy for the Luftwaffe to destroy your whole street?
Take the thing that’s most important to you, and then go completely without it for at least three months, extending to an unspecified length of time in the future. Then do the same with your next three or four most important things as well.
ALL OF US ARE ALREADY DOING THIS. We're all making the same sacrifices you are (except that many of us don't have a toddler at home). Jesus Christ, Marvin, pull your head out.
Comments
This Guardian article making a similar point may be of interest.
(Another bad day for the globe today. And in the USA 35 States have had 50 or more deaths and 46 have had over 1000 recorded cases. Also 30,000 total new cases and almost 2,500 total deaths on 15 April, Good luck with selective early restart plans. )
(Source: worldometer @ 1.30 am BST)
The listings are in the format:
X. Country - [# of known cases] ([active] / [recovered] / [dead]) [%fatality rate]
Fatality rates are only listed for countries where the number of resolved cases (recovered + dead) exceeds the number of known active cases by a ratio of at least 2:1. Italics indicate authoritarian countries whose official statistics are suspect. Other country's statistics are suspect if their testing regimes are substandard.
If American states were treated as individual countries twenty of them would be on that list. New York would be ranked at #2, between "everywhere in the U.S. except New York" (#1) and Spain (#3). New Jersey would be between Iran and Turkey.
Malaysia, Indonesia, and the UAE have been added to the list since the last compilation.
Some people have a hard time admitting they're wrong.
We’re Not allowed to leave our homes (except in very specific circumstances). That’s the opposite of free range.
Yes, there'll be some deterioration but ideally you preserve the economy in aspic as much as possible - which is what the measures like wages for furloughed employees, interest holidays and loans for small businesses are supposed to achieve.
Of course, such measures are only as good as their implementation (so quid pro quos such as making wages conditional on staff being kept would be a good thing) and they can't be done indefinitely.
You can use your garden as much as you like. Which is about the range a "free range" chicken gets.
Angela Merkel.
The crisis is, if nothing else, showing us the gold and the dross among our leaders.
==
* apart from the one showing exponential growth of the numbers of opinions on what should have been done to stop the spread...
Here's how to never lock up and have a disaster. From South Dakota.
Yep.
Unwinding the lockdown is actually very straightforward, you need three things:
1) Diagnostic testing
2) Contact tracing
3) Antibody testing for those that have been exposed
It's very doable... but does depend on a certain amount of central government leadership and competence.
Oh shit.
AFZ
"[C]ooperation from . . . the public" can mean many things. For example:
I know a lot of people might want to go out to restaurants, movies, hairdressers, etc., but how many of them are willing to do so the moment Donald Trump (or Boris Johnson, or whoever) says "it's safe to go out now, believe me"?
Me for one. But then I’d happily go and do those things now if I could.
When it doesn't involve a high risk of spreading a contagious disease to hundreds if not thousands of people.
And of course the measures taken in the US aren't going to be nearly enough. The $1200 one-time payment isn't going to go very far, and lots of people who need it aren't going to get it. The small business loan program is already out of money.
22 million Americans have applied for unemployment in the last four weeks - and that's just the people who were able to apply. State unemployment systems are overloaded. (That some of them are running on 40-plus-year-old COBOL systems isn't helping.) In many states self-employed people won't be allowed to file for unemployment for several weeks. Unemployment is now over 20% and likely to be at 10% at the end of the year source reported in Washington Post.
These are Depression-level numbers, and many of the seats of power here are filled by fools and rapacious ghouls. Major changes won't happen until and unless we get new people in government next January, and by then so much damage will have been done that economic recovery will be a Herculean task.
God this fucking situation just keeps getting worse and worse. The whole fucking world is fucked and it’s never going to get better.
Yes, actually.
I’m very much from the “what’s the point of being alive if you can’t live” school of thought. Better to have fun living fast and risk dying young than to always take the boring safe path and survive to 100.
What’s the point of a race car that never leaves the garage? OK, it will be guaranteed to still exist for many years to come but surely the very essence, the very purpose of a race car is to be driven very very fast and if that means there’s a risk that it will spin off the track and explode against the wall then so be it.
Merely existing for as long as possible is not the be all and end all of a race car, or (I would suggest) a human.
Without anything enjoyable to do lockdown may as well be death, philosophically speaking of course.
For spectating then most sports will need to limit spectators to whatever ground capacity allows 2m distancing. Probably not a problem for your local village cricket or tennis club, but it probably means the county championship or grand slam tennis tournaments being played to an empty stadium and only available to watch on TV. At least for the initial phases of easing restrictions.
I'm not much of a sports fan, but I can appreciate a well-played game, or a demonstration of athletic prowess. I can't get at all excited about watching someone else play a computer game.
There seems to be an inherent problem with any sport where multiple people are handling the same object (like a ball) in succession.
That might be fine for you. What about everyone else? Don't they count?
Given that my preferences don’t appear to count for shit in the real world, I reserve the right to ignore anyone else’s in my philosophical one.
I think it's a complaint that he's not a dictator who can preserve his God-given right to infect other people.
Or ...
You could change your perspective on what makes life worth living.
You could be grateful for what you do have.
You could be grateful none of your loved ones have died.
You could be grateful for those nurses and doctors who are working 14 hour shifts every day. My friend’s daughter is one of them. She’s only 25, she works on Covid ward and is sent up to help in ITU when more than fifteen patients are there. She saw five deaths yesterday, two of them of young people with no other health conditions. She spoke to me on Skype yesterday. She was cheerful, hopeful and positive.
My son is also one of them. He comes home from a 14 hour night shift nursing Covid patients and then looks after their five month old baby for a couple of hours while his partner has a short rest. Then he sleeps, then back to work. He loves his job and, even now, wouldn’t swap it for any other.
I am completely alone at the moment and can name fifty things I’m immensely grateful for. Life is very much worth living, but I’m desperate for a human hug.
It’s high time @Marvin the Martian that you stopped your self pity party imo.
Sure feels like it right now.
Quite aside from the fact that 2021 is a whole fucking year away, which is a really long time to go without something so important, how do you even know that’s the case? What if it turns out that lasting immunity is impossible and no vaccines will work? What then? Our governments have boxed themselves into a corner with this lockdown and if a viable exit strategy can’t be found then there’s no way out of it.
South Korea seems to have gotten the situation under control without a lockdown.
Fuck off.
Take the thing that’s most important to you, and then go completely without it for at least three months, extending to an unspecified length of time in the future. Then do the same with your next three or four most important things as well.
Let me know how you feel after the first month or so, so that I can tell you they’ll be back at some point in the future and it’s no big deal.
And if such immunity exists, even temporary immunity, a vaccine is possible. It may not last your whole lifelong, you may have to get it yearly or so, but I'm certain it will last long enough to get sports back on the telly. Eventually.
Given that most of the people who have died of COVID-19 had loved ones, this is already happening. I'm not sure why society as a whole should prioritize your love of cricket over your neighbor's love for her husband.
Whilst all things are possible, it's highly unlikely that this virus pandemic will not pass. The plagues did, Spanish Flu did.
You're not wrong that extending life at the expense of quality of life is usually a shitty trade-off but seriously, get a sense of perspective here.
Not only does Covid-19 kill, it is particularly cruel in that people are often dying away from their loved ones. That's a big fucking deal too. If nothing else, you need to protect healthcare workers. I don't have a major problem with risking my life but it's a different kind of scary when you know that going to work might mean bringing a deadly virus home to my family. And I have to go to work...
The amount of good scientific data that's out there now already, is astounding. We will beat this virus. But in the meantime, do you really want to be the guy who left all his lights on and the curtains open during the Blitz to make it easy for the Luftwaffe to destroy your whole street?
AFZ
ALL OF US ARE ALREADY DOING THIS. We're all making the same sacrifices you are (except that many of us don't have a toddler at home). Jesus Christ, Marvin, pull your head out.