{"id":75737,"date":"2020-11-04T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-11-04T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=75737"},"modified":"2020-11-01T09:23:44","modified_gmt":"2020-11-01T15:23:44","slug":"in-a-rational-utopia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=75737","title":{"rendered":"In A Rational Utopia…"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n

Liberals are all excited about the number of Covid cases.\u00a0 Not me.\u00a0
Cases don’t matter in a public policy discussion, only effects on the
public, i.e. hospitalizations and deaths.<\/p>

Think of it this way: Covid is a virus, as is the rhinovirus, which
causes the common cold; influenza, which causes the flu; and herpes
simplex, which causes cold sores.\u00a0 Those viruses are everywhere and
everybody has them lurking in their bodies all the time, but most of the
time they cause no symptoms so nobody cares that they have the viruses.<\/p>

We don’t count cases of cold sore outbreaks because nobody dies of a
cold sore.\u00a0 We don’t count cases of the common cold because nobody gets
hospitalized for it.<\/p>

We do count cases of the flu because that does kill people – very young
and very old, mostly.\u00a0 But not inactive cases.\u00a0 We don’t go around
randomly testing people to see if they have influenza virus in their
bodies.\u00a0 We only count cases that are bad enough for hospitalization or
result in death, because those are the cases that have a public impact.\u00a0
People walking around with virus in the body but no symptoms are ignored.<\/p>

That’s how we should be handling Covid.\u00a0 Count hospitalizations and
deaths, only.\u00a0 By that measure, the epidemic is over.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 125 people die
every day in Minnesota, from all sources.\u00a0 The number of people being
hospitalized or dying from Covid is in the single digits.\u00a0 If we weren’t
specifically searching for it, Covid would be indistinguishable from
statistical background noise.<\/p>

The epidemic is over.\u00a0 We won.\u00a0 Open everything.<\/p>

Joe Doakes<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

We have an entire generation – and on the left, probably more like two entire generations – who think “hardship” was “losing the 2016 election”. They hear people talking about the Spanish Flu, the breakdown of Europe, the Depression, World War 2, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, Stagflation and the National Malaise, the Cold War and the Nuclear Arms race, and seem to feel left out of the Existential Dread sweepstakes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And so Covid will serve as an existential crisis for a generation that doesn’t really know what existential crisis is. <\/p>\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Liberals are all excited about the number of Covid cases.\u00a0 Not me.\u00a0Cases don’t matter in a public policy discussion, only effects on thepublic, i.e. hospitalizations and deaths. Think of it this way: Covid is a virus, as is the rhinovirus, whichcauses the common cold; influenza, which causes the flu; and herpessimplex, which causes cold sores.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=75737"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75737\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":75743,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75737\/revisions\/75743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=75737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=75737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=75737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}