And don’t you just love the overwrought persecution act when asked for a cite?
God damn right I’m not interested in opinions. I’m interested in FACTS!
I’m interested in facts and informed opinions. There are some posters here that I count on for the latter. Others, not so much.
Opinions from downright morons, or mentally ill conspiracy theory folks are really not a good place to start forming public policy, especially when dealing with a pandemic.
No, the opinion of a deranged individual shouting about how weasels are taking over the world, and that we should all smear ourselves with jam is not “just as good” as the opinion of someone grounded in reality.
The opinion of someone who says that waving a crystal in front of your stomach will cure your appendicitis is not a valuable or worthwhile opinion.
Some opinions are worse than useless. They can be disregarded in their entirety. Opinions are not equally valid, and we do not have to waste our time with the ones given here.
Here’s a decent article from 6/29/20 on what’s changed: https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/933028
When it comes to experts, the one I pay attention to is Dr Anthony Fauci. Aside from his education, his background, his length of employment, his projections have been right on the money.
Unfortunately.
In my never-humble opinion, folks who tout “herd immunity” have no idea what they are talking about.
~VOW
Not entirely but within the ballpark.
And that’s the point - whenever he has ventured an opinion, it has generally been guided by the best evidence and knowledge available at the time. Nobody’s going to get it right 100%, but he’s done better than most by actually, ya know, understanding the science and working from there.
And he doesn’t bluff, i.e., pretending he knows stuff that no one knows yet.
So, why is the answer to this “give up on masks” rather than “we need public service announcements instructing people how to use masks properly”?
The airlines tell us how to use a seat belt EVERY SINGLE FLIGHT. How hard would it be to put up a bunch of youtube videos and graphic signage teaching/reminding people how to wear masks?
The modest proposal is, I know, tongue-in-cheek, but there’s actually a strong argument against this: a lot of affected people are NOT in that elderly population, and still make significant contributions to the economy.
I’m 60 and have a number of the underlying conditions. I have had them for a few years. If you figure my salary, what my billing rate is to my employer, and the value of the work, having me drop dead right now would produce a significant loss in income in the short term, as I expect to be working for another 5 years. Now, that might well be offset in the long term by the Social Security benefits I don’t collect at age 65, but who cares about that?
Worse yet is if I get sick and am disabled as a result. Likely higher medical costs in the short term - as a stay in the hospital which I survive is quite possibly higher than one in which I have the sense to die quickly. Same immediate loss in economic contribution. Much higher near-term costs in sick leave or even disability payments. My expected lifespan might be shortened somewhat, reducing the Social Security costs, but there’s no guarantee of that; I might hang on until I’m 90 just out of sheer cussedness.
So: if we could just arrange it so that the death and disability are limited to those who are done with their working life…
Or you lose your job and your health insurance, but you’re still too young for Medicare.
But I don’t understand the argument. What’s proposed by the topic starter is that you would be accommodated as much as possible to stay at home. He is not asking you to drop dead.
I don’t get why this suggestion is being cast as evil. If we could fund a program where at risk people are either guaranteed WFH rights and those whose employment doesn’t allow thatsome kind of financial assistance, what’s so crazy about a demographically targeted lockdown?
It doesn’t include the provision that the young and healthy are blocked from associating with those that are at risk.
Ok, include that. Problem solved. Lol.
Not seeing the humor, but that may be because I know people that have gotten sick and/or died from this pandemic.
When was that? Because there’s a whole lot of research that was published about the evils of saturated fat (neatly ignoring trans fats and sugar) because it was politically correct at the time. And “politically correct” mostly means it served the interests of the US food industry.
It started out well-intentioned. In 1955 then-president Eisenhower suffered a heart attack, and the nation panicked about heart health. And the first fingers were pointed at fat, and that became the orthodoxy, and it took years for that finger to be re-positioned.
The humor was in the fact that your objection was silly. If we are going to do an “isolation of at risk people” policy, it would include rules about healthy people interacting with them. I mean, of course it would?
If you read the “modest proposal” portion that I replied to, the suggestion was indeed that the older folks should indeed be encouraged to drop dead. That was tongue in cheek and as noted, very loosely based on something written by Jonathan Swift.
My reply actually didn’t quite address that, since I focused on those approaching that cutoff. But I made the point at the end that finishing off pensioners would be good economic sense (and no, I do NOT support that!!).
I’m not actually arguing with the OP’s premise - though it would be tough to implement and a lot of “not high risk” people are coming down with this and dying of it.
As has been said a few times in this thread, that’s simply not possible. You are trying to isolate all of the “at risk” individuals, meaning that they not only cannot work, they also cannot go out to buy food or other supplies that they may need. You are telling them that they must depend on others to not only bring them food and supplies, but that they also have to depend on them to not contaminate the food and supplies that they bring. They also cannot get any services that would require contact with non-at risk people, like physical therapy or medical procedures.
Then there is the problem that the number of at risk people outnumber the number of “non-at risk”, even more so once you take out people under the age of 18, who are not going to be doing much production in the economy.
Finally, you have the problem that those who are not “at-risk” are still at risk. They have a lower risk, but it’s not zero. It’s also not just about death, but about permanent damage that may disable them the rest of their lives. Even if they make a full recovery, they are still taken out of the workforce for a couple weeks.
So who is going to deliver goods and services to the “at-risk” population?