Hello, all.
You are probably sick of me writing things about Covid. I am sick of me writing things about Covid too. Unfortunately though, as long as the government maintains non-pharmaceutical interventions in regard to Covid, I will continue to be fueled to be write about the matters. Anyway, as you all know quite well by now, I have always favored the "focused protection" Covid strategy in which we would have allowed the at-risk to quarantine (and receive government aid while doing so....same for businesses who have people quarantining), allowed the rest of us to live otherwise normal lives, and also allowed the rest of us to reach herd immunity in order to make it safe for the at-risk to end their quarantines. Of course, when I first proposed this idea last March, I never fathomed that we would still be experiencing these non-pharmaceutical interventions more than a year later, but here we are.
Anyway, one of the main things I have stressed over the past 14 months is that I believe that the lockdown approach kills more lives than the "focused protection" approach would. However, I have not focused much on this next thought, and this next thought deserves plenty of attention too: Even if the "focused protection" approach were to take more lives than the lockdown approach (though I doubt this is the case), that would not mean that focused protection is the wrong approach. Why is that, you might ask? Well, there are two reasons.
1) With the "focused protection" approach, nobody would be forcing someone into any situation where Covid spread is more likely. In other words, if you want to go to a crowded concert, you can do that. You accept the risk of getting Covid when you do that, and that is OK. (And, if you do get Covid while you are out and about, that is because YOU accepted the risk. The blame does not fall on the person who transmitted Covid to you.*) Nobody is forcing someone out of his/her home and into a crowded area. However, if many at-risk people choose to accept the risk, the death total would be higher than if fewer at-risk people make that choice, and that is again OK. Let people choose how to live their lives. If we were to live lives with no risk, our lives would be miserable.
2) There is more when it comes to the idea of "number of deaths is not the end all, be all". In no other facet of life do we look at rising/falling death totals or compare death totals from different geographic areas and judge policies solely on the quantity of those death numbers. And from there...Let's compare Covid to cars, swimming, donuts, and cigarettes.
Covid: Yes, 500,000 Americans have died from Covid over the past two years. However, with Covid, that 500,000 number could have been lower with focused protection, and we must acknowledge that a) some of those 500,000 had Covid at the time of death but likely died of other causes, and b) many of the 500,000 died because of Covid policies (Putting people unnecessarily on respirators, sending Covid patients into nursing homes, keeping those who had been exposed to Covid locked at home with high-risk family members). Furthermore, the lockdown restrictions have taken away people's jobs, businesses, leisure activities, communal gatherings and so on. We have taken away so much of our kids' youth and harmed so much of their development. We have done so much damage to mental health through social isolation, mandated masking, and much of what I said above. However, our leaders have had a singular focus on death toll, while putting hardly any emphasis on these other issues. Every actuary in the world must be tearing his/her hair out these days. On to the comparisons...
Cars: 37,000 Americans die per year in car accidents. Yes, that number is smaller than the Covid toll, but the "years of life lost" and "quality of years of life lost" totals in terms of Covid deaths and car-accident deaths probably differ by a minimal amount. Car accidents often take young and/or healthy lives from us, while Covid has killed predominantly the elderly and immunocompromised. That said, if we monitored car accidents like we do Covid deaths, nobody would be allowed to drive. It's very simple. By the prevailing Covid logic, you should be considered selfish for wanting to drive. While we have a year of evidence that "virus is gonna virus" regardless of lockdown measures, it is clear that, if we forbid driving, we would drop that 37,000-fatality number down to 0. However, nobody would ever dream of saying that we should forbid driving cars, because we accept that cars make our lives so much easier and happier. (Maybe I shouldn't say "nobody would ever dream" about this; given I would have said the same about lockdowns last February. Oops.)
Donuts: I don't know how many lives donuts take from us, because donuts do not directly kill people. However, donuts do not make us healthier. Donuts are sugary and provide no nutritional value. If you have heart issues, diabetes, or obesity - to name a few conditions - eating donuts could push you closer to death. Thus, by the Covid logic, it should be selfish to eat donuts, as your next donut could be the one that pushes you to the hospital. Now you are adding unnecessary burden to our healthcare system! Of course, I am being silly here. Donuts are delicious, and we like to eat them because they are delicious. I am merely pointing out the double-standard. If we had a death toll from anything related to poor nutrition, and if CNN constantly interviewed hysterical doctors and nurses from crowded heart-disease or diabetes wings of hospitals, there would be leftists picketing outside every Dunkin' Donuts in the country.
Swimming: Roughly 4000 Americans drown to death per year. Doesn't that seem unnecessary? It's 2021 - modern transportation and air conditioning have made it such that nobody should ever have to swim. (I've actually abided by this one pretty well in my life!) You know what? If we make swimming illegal, no Americans would die of swimming. Instead, we have 50 governors "experimenting with human sacrifice", as the laughable The Atlantic would say, by letting people swim in their states. Surely I jest though. People enjoy swimming, so we accept as a society that some people will drown. However, if you are personally worried about drowning, you don't have to go swimming! Likewise, if you are personally worried about car crashes or sugar intake, you don't have to drive or eat donuts, respectively.
Cigarettes: OK, by now, you get my point. However, I will hammer it home with cigarettes. We all know that many lives are lost to lung cancer and emphysema, as a result of cigarette smoking. I don't see the real benefit in smoking cigarettes at all, but smokers seem to enjoy it. I choose not to partake, because I know it is bad for my health. Many others make the same choice I do. However, we now live in a world where it is considered selfish for someone with a 99.98% - 99.997% Covid survival rate (Anyone aged 0-49 without major preexisting conditions) to do "normal" things like go to parties, concerts, or even a park and to do those things without masks*. It is considered selfish because we are worried about overburdening the healthcare system, even though nearly everyone who is making these choices is unlikely to need medical care if he/she gets Covid. However, if someone is a chain smoker, we don't criticize that person for being much more likely to need major medical care than the afore-mentioned people who simply want to live normal, healthy lives in the age of Covid.
Don't get me wrong here. I don't think we should criticize the smoker either. I am merely pointing out the ridiculous double standard. In general, a large percent of people who need medical care at any given point in time need the care at least partially because they have made bad health choices in life. We have never previously tried shown societal moral outrage at any of these people, yet the first time we are showing moral outrage is when people are trying to live their lives normally in the age of a respiratory virus? We are showing moral outrage when the almost all of the people trying to live normally are the people least likely to need medical care? It is pretty messed-up. Of course, if you are worried about the fact that people can spread Covid to doctors and nurses but can't spread car accidents or lung cancer at a hospital; please remember that, with a "focused protection" plan, any doctors/nurses/staff who would be high-risk Covid patients would not be working or would be working remotely.
That is it for today. Happy "57 Weeks to Flatten the Curve"!
*For those who don't know, I don't believe that masks work effectively to stop the spread of viruses. At a minimum, I think that the costs of mask wearing (potential bacterial growth, tougher breathing, psychological costs) outweigh whatever minimal benefits there are (if any). However, if you are at high Covid risk (or not), and you want to wear a mask, I am fine with that. I just don't believe in the mask mandates. As far as the "my mask protects you, not me" thing, I have no reason to buy that logic, or lack thereof, either. If the mask blocks aerosols on exhale (which the many studies I have read would say is not the case, but let's go with it for discussion purposes), the mask blocks aerosols on inhale too. Furthermore, if you are worried about maskless people exhaling aerosols that could enter your eyes, then wear goggles too. It would seem that "my body, my choice" is a valid argument when it comes to masks and goggles. Worry about yourself, not other people (save for high-risk individuals) when it comes to viruses. Lastly, with my herd-immunity idea, there has always been benefit to low-risk people contracting Covid; which is yet another point against masks (if we assume that masks block transmission, which I once again do not believe is the case).
Thank you for reading, and I hope that a day arrives soon when these Covid-related restrictions and mandates end and when you can stop receiving these posts from me!
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