Gee, I turned 16 that year and I had forgotten all about it.
The mystery of why today vast numbers of governments around the world (but not all) have crushed economies, locked people under house arrest, wrecked business, spread despair, disregarded basic freedoms and rights will require years if not decades to sort out. Is it the news cycle that is creating mass hysteria? Political ambition and arrogance? A decline in philosophical regard for freedom as the best system for dealing with crises? Most likely, the ultimate answer will look roughly like what historians say about the Great War (WWI): it was a perfect storm that created a calamity that no one intended at the outset.
My guess is that we have somehow become a timorous, credulous, and sevile society. Include me out. (I’m an old man. I have the right to be cranky.)
Again, an error in thinking crops up.
ReplyDeleteEveryone already admitted that we have been tolerating X number of flu deaths each year, as we do Y number of automobile deaths each year -- and not that we should, as these numbers are horrible. This article simply looks at how we came to say that such-and-so tens of thousands of viral deaths are okay with us. I imagine the auto deaths figure was a more gradual number, and formed out of horse or other travel deaths that had become acceptable.
Let's pull up that auto death idea. We put limits on freedoms when we say that we will not tolerate texting and driving. Or drinking and driving for that matter. The idea is that the roadways are public ways and may have publicly-enforced rules.
A latest estimate of how many will die from Covid-19 by August something, such that it would be tallied on, say, the John Hopkins site, is over 130,000, the number I calculated roughly being how many would die if we could just make the number of deaths go down each day at the same rate they have gone up, adding 60,000 to the, well now 73,000 dead.
I had previously discussed here the accounting. Reports are coming out today that if we subtract the number of actual deaths this year, from the number of deaths we would otherwise have expected, the number is way higher, in some areas like New Jersey, 50% higher.
It's called "excess deaths". This excess includes those with injuries and chronic conditions like cancer, and heart attack sufferers, who did not go to the ER. What's not factored into the news reports, are the lives that covid-19 has saved, drug overdoses, auto fatalities, and the like, which are down.
We always knew the true death toll would be higher than the count, but this much higher makes covid-19 looking to be far more deadly than the 116,000 excess deaths of 1957, even factoring in the population increase -- an important factor in another way too, that speaks to the density of the population.
The article here states that the USA willingly accepted sacrificing these 116,000 people, changing no policy whatsoever. Let's grant this for the moment. Yes, I began saying, we have come to say that it is okay for the flu god to take 30-80,000 or whatever of us each flu season, just as we sacrifice so many of us to the auto god -- so that we may have the pleasure of driving. These are called "expected" deaths, versus "excess" deaths.
Let's go further, to say that it is perfectly okay for another 200,000 of us die each year from covid-19 -- or whatever the periodic spike would be. It's okay, "expect" it. Do we say the same for the next pandemic? And the next, turn excess into expectation?
The crisis that we have is that not one of us should ever be given the license to call so many deaths okay. It has never been okay to be a public menace, which is what the militia monkeys and beach goers are.
Another way of looking at it. When we talk about abortions, the problem with charging a woman or doctor or mid-wife with murder, is that there is nothing in our constitution that says it is a human being. There's nothing in the Jewish or Christian scripture either. We cannot prove murder, therefore. Do we anyway, take the woman's freedom away, her right to choose? Anyone who is a pro-lifer and says, "Yes, we should," should not also be calling for the freedom to pass along a deadly virus, creating known versus "belief" deaths.
The issue is, no one should be able to decide that you and D, or M & I, ought to risk death unnecessarily. The argument is always their lifestyle, or their political persuasion, or their whatever, versus M's life. Unless the author of the article is a Mayan priest, who is license to decide whose heart gets cut out, he is unqualified to decide.
The 1968 flu pandemic resulted in an estimated one million to four million deaths, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica. I do not recall a lockdown or a panic such as we are witnessing now. It certainly didn't stop Woodstock from happening So far, according to Johns Hopkins, the global mortality rate for SARS-CoV-2 is 270,404. It seems we used to be made of sterner stuff.
ReplyDelete