Brad H
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ORIGINAL: unome
quote:
ORIGINAL: Brad H
When you start putting your financial desires over the health and well-being of your kids and society, you have really failed miserably as a nation.
Everyone puts the health of their kids generally above their own financial desires. Heck, just having kids is putting your kids above your own financial desires! As would most of us, I would have a whole lot more money if I had not had children, but like almost every parent, I would never choose to reverse my choice to choose children over greater personal wealth accumulation. Money has never called me Dad or told me they loved me. Money has also never yelled at me, needed a diaper change or been a snotty teenager, but parenthood is taking the good with the bad.
Still, I think you are stating another false choice here.
Our children will be the ones saddled with our massive debt that had grown immensely in this pandemic so I cannot see financial damage as being completely unrelated to my kid's well being. Looking at health and financial choices is a tricky one and far less simple than choosing health.
Take safer cars. More people die EVERY YEAR from car accidents in the world than will die of COVID-19 this year. And there will not be a vaccine or herd immunity to solve car accidents.
Could we make safer cars? We can and do and car accident deathss have dropped by 30%+ in the US over the years despite more care and more people. But we could still save more people, especially worldwide. The problem is that the only way to do that would be to make cars too expensive for most people to drive them. Not a viable option, so we are left with more than a million deaths a year. And lots of young people in these numbers.
Life is about balancing a whole bunch of trade-offs. One of the best ways to make safer cars is to use more steel. Make them sturdier. Of course, this would cost money and require more gas, read more CO2 emissions and global warming, to drive them.
We need to make trade offs whether we like to think about it or not. We are choosing more car accident deaths over the poor not being able to afford cars and increased fossil fuel usage and CO2 emissions. We do try and mitigate this by making choices that reduce these deaths in a reasonably inexpensive way. Car seats and airbags save countless lives and do not add that much to the cost of the cars as to make them unaffordable, at least in the US.
Could we save some lives if we shut everything down and did as much virtually as possible? Yes, we could. But there are pretty substantial trade-offs to doing this.
We clearly should make some of the trade-offs for health protection, but your black/white, choose health or money proposition is simplistic and not really the actual choices we are facing. Our choices are much more nuanced than that.
Despite the argument (Coronavirus deaths in the US v traffic deaths globally) being somewhat challenging, I'll try my best.
You may want to check your facts. Right around 35k people die every year in the country due to traffic accidents over the past decade, and we are on pace for about 1.5 million people dying from the Coronavirus around the globe. Now, I understand you said (traffic accidents) in the world, but in the United States that just isn't the case, not even close. And last I looked, we were talking about the US, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year
Approximately 165k have died from the Coronavirus in the past six months in the US. In other words, you are close to 10 times more likely to die from the Coronavirus in the United States than a traffic accident, and that is with the safety and social distancing practices we have had in place. In addition, we have no idea of the long-term implications for those that beat the Coronavirus (KEY POINT). Are their lungs permanently scarred? Are people's immune systems going to be permanently compromised? The truth is, we really don't know.
So no, the comparison is bad. It's just like the comparison of dying from the flu, which has killed about 37k a year over the past decade. We know the long-term implications of flu strands. We know how to treat it. We understand the risks. With the Coronavirus, we know almost nothing.
The good news is, there is the prospects of a vaccine for the Coronavirus, which may lead to an end date at some point. So, the question is, what do we do until then? Do we try our best to keep people alive by inserting social distancing protocols? Do we just say screw it and send everyone back to work in an attempt to moderately boost up the economy, thus killing off a portion of the consumers? Do we send people back to work that are less of a risk?
Unlike cars, which have been around for 100 years, we know certain things about the virus, but we are a long ways from completely understanding it. It seems to be a very fluid situation, with new data coming out every week. They are now saying that there has been a 90-100% uptick in spread among teenagers in the past two weeks. Just when we think we understand it, the numbers take a radical turn. The one thing we do know is that if you stay home, take safety precautions and try to minimize contact, you should be okay. With cars, we have improved safety standards over time, and deaths have gone down quite a bit since the 60's. With the Coronavirus, as I said earlier, there is a lot of unknowns. We don't know the long-term implications.
In Europe, the countries have tremendous transit systems in place. In America, to our own detriment, we are married to driving cars. It's that old, rugged individualism that keeps rearing its head. The worst drivers on the planet are in Africa (very few safety precautions). The least amount of traffic deaths occur in Europe (tremendous mass transit system). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate There seems to be a strong correlation between safety measures/means of transportation, and death rates when it comes to traffic deaths, globally.
I agree, it is about balance and trade-offs, but you may want to have the right data if you are going to start analyzing it and serving up advice. The reality is, the numbers on the Coronavirus are still very raw. To say we completely understand it would be way off base. My best advice would be to try to minimize the damages in hopes of a vaccine. If the quest for a vaccine comes up fruitless, we may eventually have to take a different course. As I see it, the economy is going to take a hit no matter what course you take. There is no simple answer. So the question remains, in the meantime, do we value human life over modest (at-best) capital gains? In my opinion, there is only choice at this point until we have more data.
In the meantime, perhaps we should stay away from comparing Coronavirus deaths in the United States to traffic deaths globally. There seems to be little correlation. From this point forward, lets compare apples to apples. The argument seems to be confusing, at-best.
< Message edited by Brad H -- 8/11/2020 8:53:08 AM >
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RE: Covid 19 and those infected - 
Or maybe that was just a massive slam to everyone here. 
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