[Got Stripers]

Originally Posted by Jim in CT

What I said, is that there are MANY cases where we accept that a meaningful (and fully preventable) number of deaths will occur, in order to maintain a quality of life. But we aren't willing to maintain or normal way of life for covid. I'm not saying the lockdowns were wrong, I don't know, too many "experts" contradicting each other for me to say anything with any confidence. But I can make a valid case that we make many public policy decisions that we know will result in American deaths. The reason we don't do it, is because we don't want to deal with the imposition on our lives.

"those 40K car deaths aren’t all due to cars"

but the deaths would be avoided if there were no cars. Not all covid deatsh are strictly related to covid either. We know there has been overcounting, and we know some were already very sick and didn't have long to live anyway.

You're not refuting my case.

"We will I’m sure surpass 200,000 deaths soon and that’s WITH a partial to full (depending on local government) shut down, I can’t even imagine the death toll if we hadn’t shut down."

Yet some countries didn't shut down, and don't have death rates that exceeded ours. Lots of moving pieces, and I don't understand the science enough to conclude the correlation between lockdowns and lives saved. But the existence of countries that didn't lock down and have low death rates, appear to contradict your assumption that death rates decrease with the magnitude of the lockdowns. CT and NY have brutal lockdowns and some of the highest death rates in the nation.

Also, in the worst flu season ever, we never discussed for a second, these kinds of shutdowns.

I can’t say for certainty, but I would bet countries that didn’t shut down and did reasonably well, are not full of the selfish it’s all about me and my rights and my fun American youth. If we didn’t lock down I’d bet the numbers would be really high and the shut down would have been required even if late and the damages far worse.