Originally Posted by
BrunoLawerence
The fact that everyone is still trying to compare covid-19 to a regular flu season in this thread is absolutely depressing. This pandemic has already killed as many people as a typical flu season in about half the time WITH dramatic social interventions! When I last responded here there were ~13K deaths. Now there have been nearly 30K deaths and growing. That was 1 week ago! Yes, the original model (which was based on if the virus ran through the country without interventions) overestimated the number of deaths. But as was mentioned, those models were what was expected to happen if we did nothing. The interventions are working. If the interventions were lifted, would you really want to go to a movie, concert, or large sporting event anytime soon?
Is now the time to open the country back up? I would agree that the timeline for this should be based on where you live and some areas are closer than others. Does rural Montana require the same constraints as NYC? Probably not. However, proper protocols need to be put in place before this happens. We need appropriate testing so contact tracing can be performed, which is not happening. What we are left with is an administration that did not take this virus seriously at the onset. Established poor procedures and protocols which allowed this to spread rapidly. We have an administration who wanted to promote propaganda and falsehoods. Oops, it turns out hydroxycholoroquine isn't all that effective against the virus based on the most recent studies. We have an administration who is too worried about blaming others than developing solutions. We are now attempting to defund the World Health Organization?? WTF?!? When did the WHO become the enemy? The United States is doing far worse than most other countries when it comes to dealing with this. Instead, we have a President who is more concerned with putting his name on paper stimulus checks (likely delaying when people will receive them) to score some political points for the election. What episode of the twilight zone is this?
The lack of leadership and piss poor response we have had to this pandemic is going to do nothing more than prolong it, which will do far further damage to the economy in the long run. So maybe some of the folks that I was arguing with have a point. We should simply have done nothing and let this thing run its course, costing possibly millions of lives. Given this country's lack of leadership we will be digging ourselves out of this for a long time after other countries have recovered. Most of the world will probably end up with a travel ban on Americans if this keeps up. I guess that is how we are making america great again.
I guess that would be a failure of the criminal justice system if we released 4000 inmates convicted of nonviolent crimes and they all turn violent after their release.