Was Killing the American Economy Absolutely Necessary?

[mystery-ak]

May 1, 2020
Was Killing the American Economy Absolutely Necessary?
By William Sullivan

Like it or not, this is a question that will continue to be asked, and the terrible answer has already begun to take a convincing shape.

Recently, Fox News analyst Brit Hume told Shannon Bream that “it’s time to consider the possibility” that “this lockdown -- as opposed to more moderate mitigation efforts -- is a colossal public policy calamity.”  He goes on to reference the millions of jobs, businesses, and incomes lost, and further mentions the negative “effect on children who don’t have a normal life,” concluding that “we may never recover from many of these losses for a very long time if ever.”

He’s far from the first to muse on the question.  Back on March 20, Dr. David Katz, the founding director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, argued in the New York Times that our fight against the novel coronavirus could prove worse than the disease.  Armed with what was then the latest data available from South Korea, he brilliantly argues against the holistic social and economic lockdown on the grounds that the evidence clearly showed that only specific demographics were significantly at-risk of being hospitalized or dying from infection.  The evidence we’d already seen in America had “entirely aligned with the data from other countries,” he writes, which suggested that deaths were “mainly clustered among the elderly, those with significant chronic illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease, and those in both groups.”

more
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/05/was_killing_the_american_economy_absolutely_necessary.html

[skeeter]

The media will kill us eventually. They hyped this thing, scared the hell out of people and made this disaster possible. All for politics.

[Bigun]

Was Killing the American Economy Absolutely Necessary?

HELL no! Not even remotely necessary!

[truth_seeker]

Hindsight.

[skeeter]

Hindsight.

Of course. But there were a few here saying the same thing two months ago.

[jmyrlefuller]

Hindsight.

All will have hindsight (well, maybe except revisionist historians), but few had accurate foresight. Several here did.

[240B]

Yes, well the win in this whole thing is that China is dead!
Nixon opened trade to China. F--k that!
Obama LOVES Iran -- Fu--K that!
These dudes are out of orbit.
They live in a different world than normal people.
Else they would never do the things they do?

[EdinVA]

The question is irrelevant.... we are where we are.
The questions that are being ignored is why we got here is the first place. 

Where was our NBC response?
Why was the NIH not at least prepared for a response?
Why are we not quarantining people that come here from undeveloped countries like we did before they closed Ellis Island?
Where the hell is our national security?

[Bigun]

The question is irrelevant.... we are where we are.
The questions that are being ignored is why we got here is the first place. 

Where was our NBC response?
Why was the NIH not at least prepared for a response?
Why are we not quarantining people that come here from undeveloped countries like we did before they closed Ellis Island?
Where the hell is our national security?

  

[Absalom]

In my opinion, life ranks infinitely higher in importance than economic betterment.
Nevertheless how one handles its choices and applies any solutions, is telling.
The Ancients including the Babylonians, Persians, Egyptians, Romans, among
many, had numerous plagues yet survived, but how and why?
In simplest terms, because of the quality of their leadership!!!
Many rant and rave daily on TBR about this and that w/o ever coming to grips
w/a home truth that we are utterly devoid of leadership, be it the D or the R!!!
And sooner rather than later, we will pay a severe price for this.

[Smokin Joe]

Hindsight.

Right. Necessary is a hindsight question.

The real question becomes one of, knowing that we didn't know anything reliable,

"Was the shutdown prudent?"

In some areas it didn't seem that way, in hindsight, but imagine all those flights from New York connecting to flights in O'Hare, or Minneapolis, connecting to...and you get an idea of how far, fast, and extensively this could have spread.

We needed to buy time to get facts. We needed to find out if the data we had was valid (some was not).
 
That wasn't cheap, there is still a lot of obfuscation going on with the number of deaths and what people died of, and some real despicable crap with medication trials, leaving out the essential ingredient in a pharmacological regimen that has shown great results (anecdotally, of course) when tried, in reducing hospitalizations and quite possibly, deaths.
We welcomed Tamiflu, why not something like it for COVID-19?

But now, we know more. We have identified those most at risk, we are beginning to find out how many out there had asymptomatic or low intensity infections. In other words, we're getting the denominator to go with the numerator, and those inflating the numerator (number of COVID-19 deaths) are being exposed.

We have a better handle on how deadly this virus is, and how deadly it isn't.

In most places, those data indicate it is time to restart the economy.
With this coming on the heels of an oil price crash, and the lockdown propelling those numbers into record negative territory, this startup might be a little slower than the last one. We don't have the oil patch to pull it out. But that said, fuel is cheap, so maybe that will help things get going again.