This is not about "the stomach." What happened during the 2017 flu season that required the stomach for just getting on with our lives?
What are the numbers for excess deaths due to COVID-19 so far, and how will this compare with 2017? Yes, it's different from the flu, but it's also quite similar to the flu in that
it preferentially kills certain groups of people and just makes everybody else a little sick for a while.
From:
An emergency medicine physician projects that if schools open in the fall, they'''ll close by the end of October with COVID-19 outbreaks
I believe that the data shows that flu kills more kids, but it's only
this year that we can't go to school.
You and I both know that a Handwashing Mandate would be far more effective in stopping the spread of all these diseases -- assuming that we should actually be interested in doing so, and a lot of people besides me think this is a stupid idea. But a Handwashing Mandate cannot be visually verified, so the default is nice, visible masks that don't do a goddamn thing except signal obedience and virtue. Hell, you can't get the floor staff in a hospital to wash their hands often enough. If you wanted a government intervention that might have a chance of actually
doing something, local health departments would require handwashing stations at the entrance of all public buildings, and plumbers would then become the recipients of government favor. But Amazon and Walmart can't get their piece of this, so it won't be done.