And Texas Caves In

Lantley wrote:
Lots of criticism but no substantial ideas on how to proceed. Should we have never shut down? What would the the infection rate have been with no shut down? How many deaths? Now that we have shut down do we just open everything back up tomorrow as though nothing ever happened?
Do we need to tread carefully and wait at least until accurate adequate testing is available nationwide.
Yes we know lots of people are unemployed that was deliberately done to hopefully save lives.
The pandemic, the deaths,the unemployment and the financial crisis are really a crisis created by nature. It has created a tough reality for all of us.
Once upon a time when the going got tough the tough got going. Unfortunately we don't understand tough living, sacrifice, doing things for the good of everyone. We are a bit too caught up in diversity that we can't grasp the idea of "Good of Everyone" vs. "I'm Good"
We live in a "look at me era" were we think sacrifice is something other people do. We think money solves all problems and that somehow if we could get are money back flowing it would resolve the crisis.
Opening the economy without ample testing in place nationwide , will not eliminate the virus, it will only set us back and create more cases, more suffering and more death.

The “me first” cuts both ways. People on both sides of this discussion want what they believe is the right thing for themselves AND for others. They’re just using a different metric to gauge that. The virus will take lives. Shutting down will too. Is saving the lives of primarily elderly folks with other health issues a priority over those that will succumb to other means? Those delayed “elective” medical procedures where cancer or other fatal disease may have been discovered, the prolonged overwhelming of the medical system with routine physical care when they do eventually reopen with a backlog, the suicides, domestic abuse, malnutrition and other collateral damage. There are no easy answers.

Taking measures like shutting some things down is appropriate but with the proper balance. In many places we are quite simply overkilling it to the point where the predictions of death totals are on the order of a seasonal flu, for which we take no severe government action. This pandemic is an out of the ordinary situation and I would argue that if we control it to the point where it isn’t much (medically) worse than other “normal” years then we went too far if for other reason than the collateral damage (in health and lives) we caused saving those additional lives now. I also believe that enough folks are sufficiently educated that opening back up will be nothing like before. Sure there will be plenty of reckless folks but fortunately it takes more than a few to keep a pandemic spreading.

Nobody (especially in government) wants to be the one who “didn’t do everything possible to save lives.” The problem is everyone is so focused on the traceable, measurable here-and-now virus deaths. I don’t see anyone looking at the opportunity cost (including lives lost) to our future.

This is all my opinion, as someone who is not suffering as a result of these measures. It is not about me; it’s about others and our future as a society.