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stone monkey, on 24 March 2020 - 05:27 PM, said:
Is it me, or has the right in the US now literally gone insane? It seems they're now eagerly talking about sacrificing possibly millions - and certainly hundreds of thousands - of peoples', lives, by early relaxation of mitigation procedures, to make sure the economy stays on track. I'm not sure that they even want to realise that, even were the economy booming, having a few million people drop dead over a period of a few months wouldn't be good for anyone's bottom line.
If they take this route, which, astonishingly even for him, Trump has been making positive noises about, people will need to go to gaol; and the GOP should either cease to exist or be out of power forever. The Party of Lincoln will have become - even more than it is already - the Party of Corporate Mass Murderers.
If they take this route, which, astonishingly even for him, Trump has been making positive noises about, people will need to go to gaol; and the GOP should either cease to exist or be out of power forever. The Party of Lincoln will have become - even more than it is already - the Party of Corporate Mass Murderers.
'Sending People Back to Work Now Will Not Save the Economy. It Will Doom It.
[...] Let's recall why public health officials have asked Americans to stay home in the first place. It's not because COVID-19 is incredibly deadly (though it does appear to be more fatal than the flu). Rather, it's because the new coronavirus is so highly contagious that if even a small percentage of the people who stand to be infected end up hospitalized, it will completely swamp our health care system, as already seems to be happening in New York. If even 20 percent of Americans catch this thing in the next year—which is the sort of best-case scenario researchers are envisioning—vast swaths of the country will run out of hospital beds. We will not have enough room in intensive care units or available ventilators to properly care for the ill. Heck, we already don't have enough masks. Lots of people with COVID-19 will likely die because there simply will not be space or resources to keep them alive. People with other serious conditions will die as well, because they too will not be able to get care. All sorts of acute illnesses will become more deadly.
Many people will not return to their normal lives in a country that is being ravaged by an unchecked disease just because the president has announced a "reopening." Many aren't going to return to restaurants and bars or go on family vacations to Disney. Many companies aren't going to tell their employees to come back to the office. Many cities and states will keep businesses shut down in order to try to contain the illness as much as possible within their own borders. But some won't. And many Americans will try to resume life as usual, the same way many are ignoring the warnings to stay in now, which means the virus will continue spreading. We will have a half-functioning economy and nonfunctioning health care system, with untold numbers of Americans dying from an illness that causes victims to suffocate as fluid floods into their lungs, on the way to total organ failure.
[...] The coronavirus crisis is going to create a severe economic hardship. There's no escaping that. The question is whether it will be a short-lived disaster that we can begin pulling ourselves out of with the help of a serious public health mobilization, or if it will be a long, lingering horror we muddle through as people die. The fact that Trump is already having doubts about the half-measures he took last week unfortunately suggests he doesn't have the stomach or foresight to pick the right course, because he's too worried about the daily fluctuations of the stock market. Instead, he's steering us toward a long pandemic and a depression all at once.'
https://slate.com/bu...oronavirus.html
This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 24 March 2020 - 05:41 PM
