Dollars and lives

What "essential" means:
It really hasn't occurred to most of you that businesses fail from not engaging in business. This just tells me the socialist indoctrination centers (schools) have utterly failed to explain how business works.
And let me stick in a note here that no matter what you think of the type of business, they have employees who suffer first. Go ahead and get your hate-on about whomever, but the wage earners will be out of jobs.
Quite soon we're going to need a combination of treatment options, targeted quarantine, and enhanced safety measures that let most workers and customers get back out at least partially into public, not just to buy food, but to support all kinds of economic movement.

11 comments:

David Foster said...

GE Healthcare, which is ramping up ventilator production, says that some of the suppliers they need have been shut down as "non-essential"

https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/62345.html

Grim said...

I saw a picture from a hardware store up north where a sign read that gardening seeds were 'non-essential' and thus not allowed to be sold (although present on the shelves). Really, we don't want people growing food? Starting a food garden (a "Victory Garden," so to speak) seems like a nearly ideal way to respond to this.

Elise said...

The linked article says:

How many people are you willing to starve and murder over a virus that the experts agree won't be significantly worse than the four previous major viruses, in the last half century? And if you can't name them without looking, then your opinion is irrelevant.

I don't know what those major viruses are or how bad they were. Does anyone here know?

raven said...

H1N1, Asian flu, Hong Kong flu......?

I got so sick in 1977 I was alternately sweating like a laborer in the tropics and shaking with cold in a sleeping bag in a heated apartment. Actually experienced the teeth rattling. Some weird flu.

IMO- ventilators- low down in the list of priorities- they say there is a very low survival rate if you have to go on one, especially when the underlying condition is a lung issue.
No matter what enforced lockdown is enacted, it makes no difference unless every last case is eliminated, worldwide-which is an impossibility, because it will just come roaring back. We have to keep our economy going so we have resources to fight this.
I don't know why the world is reacting this way, I suspect it is a form of mass hysteria, reinforced by the instantaneous nature of communication these days.
The number one priority should be a quick antibody test, so we can figure out where in the curve of infection we really are. Rational decisions are hard to make without good data.
So far, all the data about death rates and underlying conditions indicated this virus is simply pulling demand forward, AKA largely killing those who are unlikely to live more than another year or two anyway. Tragic? Yes, but not a civilization killer, like a world wide depression and implementation of socialism will be.

Elise said...

I think the reason for the lockdown got very confused early on. One argument for it was that if we socially distanced and stayed home, the virus would die out because it couldn't spread to enough people to keep going. That is, the infection rate would drop to less than 1.

Then the argument became that socially isolating/staying home would flatten the curve. The virus would still run its course but it would do so over a longer period of time so medical providers/facilities would not be overwhelmed. Pretty much everyone would eventually get the virus (we can't get the infection rate to less than 1) but we'd sort of take turns doing so which would mean that when someone did get sick it would be possible to treat him or her.

The latter made sense to me and still does but it also seems to mean that the lockdown will have to last quite a long time which simply isn't economically feasible. I know someone (Laura Ingraham maybe) took some grief for saying that we needed to have an end date for this lockdown but in some ways she's right. it keeps getting extended for another couple of weeks or a month. That's not sustainable.

Elise said...

Ah, sorry: That's not sustainable indefinitely. Or: We can't keep doing that.

E Hines said...

H1N1, Asian flu, Hong Kong flu......?

Ebola

Eric Hines

ymarsakar said...

I detect a slight increase in the fear factor here.

It's fine for the System to burn up. It's not going to affect the Heavens or the stars. Humanity will just learn that they need to deal with a spiritual great awakening, as the Q Anon faction thinks is happening.

The current financial system has needed a reset or purge for some time now, even before the Federal Reserve came into being (and that story is amazing all on its own).

People are at home with their families. They can stop working their slave jobs as slaves of the corporations. They can start researching and thinking, which they had little time for before.

ymarsakar said...

Many Americans already got the Corona whatever, in November around 2019.

I wouldn't say they are completely immune, but they have already gone through it.

And before 2019, there were the 'exotic' diseases from over the border, after 2012.

Anonymous said...

H1N1, SARS, MERS, the swine flu some years back, perhaps West Nile or Zika? Those would be my guesses. I don't know if Ebola counts, since it has not really gotten here yet. [Please, G-d may it not, not until we get a lot more doses of the treatment ready at the very least.]

LittleRed1

Elise said...

Did some investigation (I love a good obsessive-compulsive project). Here's what I found:

https://weather.com/health/cold-flu/news/2020-01-31-5-worst-flu-outbreaks-in-recent-history
Russian flu (1889) - 1 million deaths worldwide
Spanish flu (1918-1919) - 50-100 million deaths worldwide; 675,000 in US
Asian Flu (1957-8) - 1.1 million deaths worldwide; 116,000 in US (apparently over the course of a year)
Hong Kong flu (1968) - 1 million deaths worldwide; 100,000 in US (again apparently over the course of a year or more)
H1N1 [swine flu] (2009) - 151,700-575,400 deaths worldwide (80% younger than 65); Wikipedia says 12,469 deaths in US

According to Wikipedia, the 201-2016 Ebola epidemic killed 11,323 worldwide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_African_Ebola_virus_epidemic

So far, COVID-19 - 64,316 deaths worldwide, 8,283 in US
https://www.bing.com/search?q=covid19+by+state&form=APMCS1&PC=APMC

The IMHE projections for US - 93,351 deaths by August 4 assuming full social distancing thru May 2020
Take this with a grain of salt. The range is 39,966 - 177,866; and their projection for Alabama makes no sense and is way off so far.
https://covid19.healthdata.org/projections

I didn’t find a global prediction for COVID-19 deaths that made sense to me.

So Asian flu and Hong Kong flu were worse than COVID-19 is projected to be although not by much and possibly over a longer period of time.