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It's honestly just so mystifying how, if you have people working to prevent a thing from becoming a serious problem, and it's never a serious problem so you realize you don't need them, and you fire them all, somehow it's right after that that the problem becomes serious. What amazingly bad...

I still don't know how much of it is intentional. I've seen at least one newspaper print a piece about how this could actually be good for the economy because it'll disproportionately kill old dependents. And there was that thing recently with someone somewhere in the DOJ issuing orders to take...

US did not do well at all with travel bans, because they're inconsistent, and being handled in a way basically calculated to maximize the spread of the virus in the US. Look at pictures of people stuck in wall-to-wall standing room only for multiple hours at various airports because they...

No, that's not what "flattening the curve" means. Flattening the curve means slowing down the spread so that fewer people get sick at any time ever, not just so that it's spread out more. The point of the flatter curve isn't just that it's spread out more to even load on the health care system...

No one said it was. But it's the thing we can actually do, those of us who aren't researchers or epidemiologists or whatever. I think you're underestimating the degree to which social distancing is non-boolean. You can wash your hands more often for ten years, no big deal, and even that helps...

It isn't in and of itself. The curve is quite likely to eventually get fairly close to zero. It might take a long time. But flattening the curve reduces the total harm during the time the disease is active. Again, look at the charts of St. Louis and Philadelphia during the 1918 flu. Flattening...

"Under" isn't a boolean, in this case. The amount of overrun matters. We're never really "under" capacity here, but there's a huge difference between levels of oversaturation. If we have 5 people that need ventilators, and 4 ventilators, one person dies. If we have 15 people that need...

The point of flattening the curve is to buy time and keep the medical system less overwhelmed, you still end up with a lot of people getting sick, although possibly fewer if, say, the weather changes in a way that makes it spread slower.

Not in the least! It's just that a very short time ago, you were so unfamiliar with "cause" and "effect" that you expressed the inability to see how people posting anti-semitic rants could lead to harm to actual people, and now, you understand cause and effect so well that you're comfortable...

Oh, I didn't know you were an epidemiologist!

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/whats-your-risk-dying-covid-19-inadvertently-death-someone-scott/ Useful concrete numbers about likely impacts, statistically.

Maybe relevant for people who want to read more about this.

Okay, that's fair. But given how quickly it's been happening, and and the supposedly relatively low mortality rate, it still looks pretty bad. Apparently so. But you said you're 27, I'm assuming you are at least in principle capable of considering, not just the immediate and intended effects...

Then, statistically speaking, you will be the cause of at least one person dying, on average. Maybe it'll be none. Maybe it'll be 20+. But you are taking actions that could cause someone to die, when you could, at virtually zero cost to yourself, not cause anyone to die. And yes, it's...

Yes, but you don't get to have different facts. And given your stated values, your proposed course of action is, in fact, directly contrary to your stated values. "Business as usual" is not a sane or rational response to an epidemic. It just isn't. This isn't a question of what your values are...

"We can't do everything, therefore, we shouldn't do this thing" is a bad argument. Epidemics and pandemics have well-understood and very carefully studied impacts and mitigation strategies. We know how to drastically reduce the lasting harms done by them, and we know how to increase those...

This is missing the point: People dying from this is still economic harm, and much more severe economic harm than we suffer from quarantines. Even if we assume all of your ideological stances to be reasonable, what you are advocating is worse at obtaining your stated goals than the best...

So... in order to avoid the economic consequences, you're going to maximize them? Spreading diseases also does economic damage. Mass graves large enough to be seen from space are lasting economic damage.

Back when the "Spanish" flu (believed to have originated in Kansas, but Spain was neutral in the war going on at the time and thus not having its news censored) was happening, Philadelphia said "haha losers we're not panicing over this", and St. Louis shut down and cancelled public gatherings...

Why 88, and not, like, 90 or something? What ever happened to round numbers?