cracked_ribs
Well-Known Member
This perfectly sums up my frustration with the whole C19 situation...I look at that graph and think, "man, that curve can't get much flatter." But there is still a certain fraction of the population who are demanding MORE steps be taken to curb the virus, and saying things like "why do you love businesses more than human lives?" when the businesses at risk aren't the Amazons and Walmarts of the world - those companies are rolling in money now, more than ever. The businesses at risk are these little mom and pop operations, and those businesses are somebody's life.
I'm not at all someone who doesn't think it's a real illness or that masks don't work (a theory I find surreal - it's just a respiratory virus, the same PPE works with it as every other coronavirus and rhinovirus and so on) but man, let's not pretend that living through this is like living through the Black Plague. Or even the London cholera outbreak. Or really, any historically noteworthy outbreak of disease. Our fatalities are in the dozens. I'm not saying the steps we've taken have been bad or wrong or that they aren't part of the reason we've only had about 200 people killed, just that 200 people, mostly in care homes already, is not exactly the apocalypse.
But there are real consequences to the response and it seems like everyone is acting as though it costs nothing to just keep tightening down restrictions. Well, it might be worth it and it might not, I'm not arguing the relative costs exceed the benefits or vice versa. But let's not pretend that there aren't some really serious downsides to our response. Small businesses like the restaurant above are at real risk and that's someone's livelihood. And the debt we're all racking up (or that is being racked up on our behalf, nobody actually consulted us about this) is going to be a drag on the economy for years or decades. All the money we have to spend to pay it back in the future is money that won't go to health care, won't go to education, won't go to new bridges or helicopters or whatever your favourite state purchases are.
I'm not trying to argue we should do nothing, or even that we should do things differently, necessarily...maybe we lucked out and are getting the most bang for our buck with this exact path, I don't know. I'm not an epidemiologist and an economist, and I think you'd have to be both to really give a good opinion on what's best here. But I am saying we need to take the consequences of our response seriously, because they will also have serious costs attached to them.
