I agree with "wear your masks"...kramerica.inc wrote: ↑Thu Sep 03, 2020 11:26 am It's not a hoax. But as you put it: the deaths have "maxed out at a fraction of our reality."
Now we know what the real threat is. It's real. Just like having a car accident, being in an airplane crash, or getting paralyzed/killed by a shot in lacrosse.
It's a possibility in life. There's risk in life for everything. It's why you wear a seatbelt commuting, why the airlines give the safety speech before each flight, and why there's an ambulance parked at every h/s lax game.
The threat is known, so prepare, wear your masks, and let's move on.
Unfortunately, a pandemic is not akin to the other risks you cite.
With the exception of a car crash in which you are the cause, killing those also in the crash, the other types of risks and safety measures you take, don't increase the risks to others. But even in car crashes, the deaths are limited.
Here we have a geometric progression potential from each actor who fails to protect others as well as themselves.
Just to be clear, we wish the deaths had maxed out way, way lower.
But they didn't.
The spread continued to multiply as too many individual actors put not only themselves at risk, but a geometric progression beyond themselves.
And we can have no doubt that our current POTUS had an impact upon those decisions, and continues to have an impact on those decisions.
We also can be pretty darn sure that had we followed the CDC recommendations, across all states and jurisdictions, thoroughly, we would have dramatically changed the trajectory of the pandemic in the US.
And this would have put us in a position to continue to constrict progression by common sense mask wearing, no large gatherings, and comprehensive test, trace, and isolate. The latter would only be effective if we either got the incidence low or we had massively more testing and tracing capacity.
And this would have allowed us to do Most activities, both work and some play, while letting the scientists and doctors continue to progress on therapies and a vaccine.
Instead we're in this horrible conundrum where we are trying to do what would have been far more universally possible at low incidence levels, yet with far worse consequences than if we'd done what was necessary to drive incidence all the way down ala what so many other nations accomplished.