To those who portray the response to Covid as a binary choice between “staying inside for a few more weeks” and “killing grandma” the justification often comes down to “if we can save just one life…”.
It’s the same form of emotion-driven logrolling that drives many peoples’ responses to a depressing list of issues, from gun control to welfare policy.
And those approaches, being logrolling emotional manipulation as they are, almost never ask the same question from the other perspective. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to notice that the most prescriptive of the “Lock It Down”-ers are people with public union jobs, or who can live on residuals.
They need to. Increased unemployment kills.
Opioids, alcholism, violent and property crime and suicide all spike, hard, when unemployment rises. Let’s look at the increase in deaths from opioids alone:
A 2017 National Bureau of Economic Research paper finds a 3.6% increase in the opioid death rate per 100,000 people for a 1% rise in unemployment. There were 14.6 opioid death rates per 100,000 in the United States in 2018. If we use the more conservative estimate of a 20% unemployment rate without a quick return to lower levels, then there would be an estimated 59.4% rise in deaths per 100,000, leading to an increase of 8.7 deaths for a total of 23.3 for opioids.
With a current U.S. population of 331 million, there are 3,310 groups of 100,000, meaning there is potential for an additional 28,797 deaths from opioids annually. Consider that for 2018, the Centers for Disease Control reports that there were 67,367 deaths from all-drug deaths, with 46,802 of those coming from opioid use. The 46,802 deaths were considered an opioid crisis. A possible 75,599 should not be dismissed quickly.
And those increases carry over to other areas – crime, suicide, domestic abuse, pretty much every one of life’s travails and miseries.
I’m not one of Jason Lewis’s “Rip off the Bandaid” crowd. I have people in my family with all sorts of reasons to be concerned about lung problems. But then I’ve got a job where i can work from home (God willing). I have options.
Know any people in your life who don’t?
http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html
Published in 1850, and politicians STILL keep making the same mistake, over and over . . . .
Changing the Interstate highway speed limit to 10 MPH could save a life or two.
Apparently, being out and about is getting less safe, too.
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2020/04/09/traffic-deaths-spike-in-minnesota-despite-low-vehicle-volume
Forgot to add to my last.
Yet, they don’t care about lives in the wombs of women. It’s essential, at least in Michigan, to keep Planned Murderhood open, but you can’t plant a garden. Democrats believe that illegal aliens, Africans, Iranians all take precedence over American citizens. God forbid that illegals can’t vote in person, so now they think that it should be done by mail. In addition to his other unconstitutional edicts, Governor KKK Blackface Northam has eliminated the Virginia law that ID was required to vote.
The earliest and most aggressive lockdowns were by Mike DeWine Governor of Ohio and Larry Hogan Governor of Maryland, both of whom are —you guessed it—Republicans.
The lockdown measures have also been regularly reinforced by Vice President Pence. Also definitely a Republican.
Em, I read Mitch’s post several times and missed the sentence where he mentioned party affiliation.
Actually, Emery, your statement that they had the most aggressive, is totally wrong, as usual. And according to several relatives in Ohio, three of whom are Democrats and two good friends that live in Maryland, I can conclude that both of those governors are RINOs. That said, Ohio allowed golf courses and parks to remain open.
@ golfdoc50: Governments in Europe are also closing everything to stick it to Trump.
Democrats are so good at this, they made other countries do the same thing. 🤦🏼♂️
GDP forecast before coronavirus was 1.2%. Financial analysts saw recession before year was over. Wages stagnant.
golfdoc50 on April 21, 2020 at 8:17 am said:
Em, I read Mitch’s post several times and missed the sentence where he mentioned party affiliation.
Emery on April 21, 2020 at 9:39 am said:
@ golfdoc50: Governments in Europe are also closing everything to stick it to Trump.
Democrats are so good at this, they made other countries do the same thing. 🤦🏼♂️
GDP forecast before coronavirus was 1.2%. Financial analysts saw recession before year was over. Wages stagnant.
DebatingAttempt to engage in debate with Emery is like playing chess with a pigeon: Eventually, the pigeon knocks over the pieces, craps all over the board, and struts around as though it won.Like many afflicted by TDS, Emery’s a fanatic. A fanatic is someone who can’t change his mind, and refuses to change the subject (h/t to the old River City Mortgage ads I used to hear on AM1280 before I left the People’s Republic of MN).
On 8 Apr at 10:58, Emery (or one of his personalities) wrote this:
The red states will be next, geography will protect them for only so long and the poor healthcare systems in those states won’t cope when the deluge hits them. He can spin it so long as it hasn’t hit his voters, but it’s coming for them too, especially since their governors have been in denial and slow to respond. Preventative measures could have been put in place but there are still states without lockdowns.
So first, he criticizes red-state governors for not locking down things, then he criticizes other red-state governors for locking things down too much.
I think we all need to ignore our resident troll. He is either incapable or unwilling to engage in reasoned debate. And it’d be something of a miracle if he could comment on one post without mentioning Trump.
It doesn’t surprise me to see the prevailing mentality of so many on social media to be basically “hide in your house until the mean old COVID-19 goes away.” Despite the data coming out suggesting the mortality numbers on this have been skewed. Despite the reality of the psychological effects of people self-isolating themselves being a poster child for the concept of a treatment being worse than the disease.
My mother-in-law falls into the high-risk category, and my family sees her often enough there’s some concern there. So I have 4 choices:
– Go back into the office when it reopens, and then have no contact with my wife and kids, so that they can visit her without potentially endangering her.
– Go back into the office and my wife, kids, and I have little or no contact with my mother-in-law.
– Opt to continue working from home for a while even after the office reopens. Like Mitch, I have the flexibility to continue to do so.
– Roll the dice. Either we don’t get my mother-in-law sick, or we do, and she doesn’t need hospitalization. Or we do, and she does get sick, and needs an ICU bed.
For people without the third option, there comes a point where the last option outweighs the others. But it strikes me the people on social media doing their cute little COVID-19 treatment waiver graphic for anybody who says “Enough!” to this situation are probably incapable of identifying with others’ situation: To them, it’s your fault if you killed “Grandma” for going back to work. You deserve it. So what if your family was starving? So what if you couldn’t pay the rent/mortgage/car payments? It doesn’t matter, compare to this one little thing: The exception to which we’re managing. It’s like when the MAC in the Cities spent millions changing all the terminal signs to say “Terminal 1” and “Terminal 2”, instead of “Lindbergh” and “Humphrey” terminals, because a fraction of a percent of the annual passenger traffic was confused.
On Monday there were 4 new cases in the state. Yesterday, there were 2. Today? Zero. Time to open ‘er up, something is very broken in the models the experts were using.
The IHME model issued for Hawaii on April 13th said that by now we would be having as many as 300 deaths per day due to covid-19. Or as few as two.
What utter garbage.
Normally around thirty people a day in Hawaii die of various causes. So, the IMHE model told the politicians that the covid-19 daily death count would either be lost in the noise or would totally overwhelm the medical system. Or be someplace in between.
This is not data that politicians can use to make policy.
Heads should roll, but they won’t.