Greg Gutfeld repeatedly makes the point that the people who claim that we can’t make choices between health and the economy are acting like children. Kevin Williamson takes the kids to task, including AOC.
8 thoughts on “The Lies We Live By”
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You don’t get “the data” by withdrawing from normal societal interaction. When you do that, what you do get is data that is skewed in some form.
As this article points out, you don’t obtain nourishment without actually eating a meal. We won’t get actionable data on this virus without taking some risk.
Putting aside the facts that COVID-19 in the US is largely a hoax perpetuated by the democrat/muslim/socialist left to prevent President Trump’s re-election, it’s a false choice and failure of imagination to think we have to pick a healthy economy or healthy people – we can easily have both.
The old saying that “you can’t put a price on a human life” has always been wrong. We do it all of the time. Imagine the case of a sick child with a terrible disease (make it a cute little girl because boys don’t get nearly as much sympathy). You’re someone who has to determine how much your government agency or insurance company is willing and able to spend to save that child. A million dollars? Yeah, we’d do that. How about $10 million? Or $100 million? A billion dollars? The entire US federal budget? There would come a point where you’d have to say “We can’t do that” and that point is the price of that human life. Now, make it an elderly person in a nursing home. You’d get a different number.
We cannot destroy the US or even a state’s economy in the name of public health. We can take measures to try to protect the most vulnerable while everyone else has to accept the risks as we go about our lives.
Living in Alabama, I’ve come across a very handy website that I use to gather statistical data.
https://www.alreporter.com/mapping-coronavirus-in-alabama/
Alabama’s population is a bit over 4.9 million people. We have a serious obesity problem here which leads to other health issues. Still, here are some numbers from that website to offer some perspective:
Total number of confirmed positive cases: 13,050
Total number of people hospitalized: 1,523
Total number of people currently in a hospital: 673
Total number of deaths: 522
Number of cases ages 0-4: 116 (1%)
Number of deaths ages 0-4: 0
Number of cases ages 5-24: 1387 (11%)
Number of deaths ages 5-24: 0
Number of cases ages 25-49: 5085 (40%)
Number of deaths ages 25-49: 14 (3%)
Number of cases ages 50-64: 3123 (24%)
Number of deaths ages 50-64: 84 (16%)
Number of cases ages >= 65: 3142 (24%)
Number of deaths ages >= 65: 421 (81%)
Across the state, hundreds of thousands of people have lost their jobs. I don’t have the data on how many small businesses are gone forever but it’s likely quite high. We began reopening businesses here on May 1st but many of those lost jobs will never come back. It may take years to overcome the losses of the past few months. Covid is far from the only public health problem we have here in Alabama, and all of those lost jobs and businesses mean less tax revenue to address those other issues. Poverty kills, too.
Whoever said “You can’t put a price on a human life” never worked at a life insurance company….
Or a health insurance company. Or Medicare/Medicaid. Or the VA.
Or worked a risky job.
If only there was an occupation that took the risks vs rewards into account, kinda like an actuarian system, where there was a serious look at the cost vs affect of any situation. Well, that would be great.
My guess is that the reporting and dealing with this “crisis” would be far different if Clinton-2 had won,
Had Hillary won (shudder), any criticism of her would automatically been branded as sexist, just as any criticism of Obama was labeled racist. For the kind of news coverage she would have received, you can look back at how the press covered Obama, or more recently, how Kim Jung Un is portrayed on North Korean TV.