Charles Chase4 said:While I’m trying my best to be considerate of everything surrounding this new virus—and I’ll be the first to admit my own perspective on how serious this situation is has shifted quite a bit over the last month—I still can't help but notice a certain level of absurdity. There seems to be a significant disconnect between the raw data and the sweeping restrictions being implemented globally.
Yes, every single human life is priceless, but let's be honest: hundreds of thousands of people pass away every single day across the globe.
I find myself wondering what would happen if, every time we picked up our phones or turned on the TV, we were met with live counters showing deaths from every possible cause—from the common flu to smoking, alcohol, or just about anything else you can imagine. We're talking about numbers that dwarf the ones currently making headlines.
For instance, you could technically prevent every single traffic fatality just as effectively by banning everyone from leaving their houses and having the police intervene the moment they see someone sitting in a car. At the end of the day, those are also someone's family, friends, or neighbors.
Then there’s the inevitable argument regarding hospital capacity, which I respect, but let’s not forget that here in the States, we have waiting lists that stretch out for YEARS for basic medical screenings. In that waiting period, more people will likely die than will ever succumb to Coronavirus.
Take a moderate earthquake, for example. If the damage is limited to cracks in old facades and historic churches, and we only need to find housing for about a hundred people in town and half of the local HOSPITALS—which, frankly, are some of the most dilapidated buildings in the country—then the situation is nothing short of insane and SCANDALOUS.
I highly doubt the economy is going to grind to a halt just so we can build twenty brand-new medical facilities to replace these crumbling structures that are a safety hazard even during peaceful times.
I don't know; it all feels like a global chain reaction of panic-driven policies. Given the nature of the virus, I don't see any other way out than eventually coming to terms with its existence, filing it away alongside all the other diseases that claim lives, and slowly returning to business as usual.
I'm not necessarily trying to make a grand point, and I am personally following all the guidelines, but there it is—just my two cents. 🤷
Look, I basically agree with you on almost everything, except for the part about the hospitals.
Doctors and nurses are among—I won't say the most vulnerable, but potentially the biggest carriers for spreading the infection. And frankly, we were facing a shortage of medical staff long before any of this started.
Beyond that, the mass hysteria caused a situation where people with Coronavirus got priority treatment, leaving certain critically ill patients without the urgent care they actually needed. The earthquake in Washington, D.C., and the fact that some wards or entire hospitals were non-functional just compounded the problem.
Honestly, I worry more about patients hospitalized for cancer or other malignant diseases than I do about a few thousand thirty-year-olds catching the virus.
And as a father of a three-year-old, I had to laugh when someone wrote that we needed a pandemic just to realize that our social lives are technically called "quarantine." 😁