51percentcorn wrote: ↑Mon Oct 26, 2020 8:35 am
The bigger issue - IMO - is the virus/pandemic as a whole coupled with the belief on a large part of the population that personal freedoms outweigh anything including public safety which of course has been fueled by one person - somehow hard to believe we got here but hey - maybe we will get disinfectant and UV light inside the body.
I'm not a Trump supporter or voter but there is no doubt we've taken on a huge restriction in personal freedoms to fight something that while dangerous is less dangerous for most of the population under the age of 65 to walk out the door. The harm being done to society overall to fight something that is generally uncontrollable will be written about for years.
Further, we aren't talking about a month or two of restrictions but working on 7 months. If you look at history, with the Spanish Flu being the most apt, most restrictions lasted 10-12 weeks - and many of those restrictions were on the sick and not healthy. You can also look at the flus of 1958 and 1968 that killed more people per capita than right now but there were no societal changes or lockdowns. The public health officials knew that society wouldn't stand for it. You can see it in Europe as there have been numerous protests against the ratcheting up of restrictions.
I'm all for being safe but at some point we need to start looking at these actions for what they are and taking the appropriate reasonable steps to allow those with minimal worries from COVID live their life. One of the glaring fallacies that was perpetuated in the beginning was the colds are not deadly to elderly people and, thus, COVID as a coronovirus and, thus is a cold. That isn't accurate. We've all dealt with colds and we all know they don't kill anyone. They might just knock you up for a few days.
That isn't true. To the elderly (the population , it doesn't matter if it is the flu or a cold...it can be a deadly event. In fact, rhinoviruses - the common cold - is more deadly to the elderly than the flu (
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5343795/). But overall rhinoviruses like coronaviruses are essentially a non-event for 99.999% of the population under 65. Of the deaths reported by the CDC 165,000 have been over the age of 65. Approximately 20,000 are under the age of 55. 43,820 people have died under the age of 24 from all causes this year. Of those, 462 were from/with COVID. That is 1% of all deaths.