I’m just a guy. My particular area of expertise is useless in these times of the ‘rona. But I can observe and report on what I’m observing. Since I’m not a very good writer, this post will probably end up somewhat scattershot. It’s hard to get all of my thoughts down. I should probably be doing multiple shorter posts, but I’m up early on Saturday and the house is quiet.
What I’m observing is mass hysteria. Or, at least, something akin to mass hysteria.
People that I think should know better have completely lost perspective on this COVID-19 issue. Many of the sites I link to in the right side bar have gone bonkers over this virus. Just go to the wikipedia page for the Spanish Flu. 500MM people (about 1/4 of the world’s population) were infected. About 40MM people died. I have not seen anything that suggest similar numbers for the Bat Soup Flu. With more than 7B people in the world today a similar percentage of dead would be in the neighborhood of 140MM. Nobody is talking about numbers like that.
We live in a better, cleaner, and wealthier world than that of 1918. Our medical services are in much better shape to fight the spread of deadly disease than was the case 100 years ago. So we have that going for us.
What we have going against us is that same wealth and medical services. People today are surviving with, even thriving with, conditions that would have killed them 100 years ago. There are people with what are now being labeled comorbidities that would not have been alive 100 years ago to catch the flu. These people are at serious health risk for this new virus. I may be one of them. I need to manage that risk. I don’t need the government, the media, academia, entertainment and the like destroying my children’s wealth in an effort to keep me from getting sick.
One of the tragic outcomes of this unnecessary lock down is the stoppage of sporting events, concerts, theater, etc. We are facing a problem with the Wu Flu that will likely be hard to deal with and we are now going to face it with much of the joy sucked out of life. But hey! You can sit at home and watch Opera online by yourself for free! What a deal.
I’m not against all of the responses. Some, like the China flight ban, and the quarantine of recent arrivals from foreign lands is probably appropriate. Maybe stopping Baseball, Basketball and Hockey is a good thing, but it sure doesn’t look like the sort of thing a society confident of it’s future would select.
I picked up on the idea of the U.S. having the worst political leaders way back when the Instapundit started using the term. I liked it then and like it even more now. The ‘rona virus hysteria is highlighting the lack of seriousness of our political class in ways that were previously unimaginable. In their wildly inappropriate and unsuccessful responses to this pandemic, they have assumed powers they don’t have and have also done the one thing that should not have been done. They are destroying the economy.
The economy produces wealth. The one thing you need more than anything else to combat the scourge of this virus is wealth. A government can siphon off some level of the wealth creation for various public goods efforts like stopping the spread of the virus, but it can’t take all of it, and it should shepherd carefully the environment within which this wealth is created. It should not put in place policies, such as closing all non-essential businesses (Who gets to make that call? Selling luxury kitchens was an essential business for me, but that is now gone. Because some unknown bureaucrat somewhere classified the luxury kitchen business as non-essential)
The economy is the people. The economy is nothing more than a scoresheet of the people of this society going about their activities to improve the world they live in. The economy is the people working to provide a better future for their offspring. The economy should not be messed with as it has serious effects on the well being of the people.
As I write this post, there has been very little written or broadcast about Sub-Saharan Africa or India. There really has not been a lot written or broadcast about China outside of Wuhan. There are a lot of people in these parts of the world in societies that are not as wealthy as the U.S. If this virus is the Spanish Flu on steroids that we are led to believe it is, we should be seeing images of bodies lying in the streets of Mumbai, Chennai, Lagos, Nairobi, Beijing, etc. I do believe this is mostly an artifact of testing. If you go looking for the virus via testing, you’ll find the virus.
This is probably the most under reported aspect of the whole crisis: We have been sold the notion that these lock-down, house arrests, shelter in place orders, whatever you want to call them are necessary so that we, the citizens, don’t all get sick at the same time and overwhelm the capacity of our hospitals. There is growing evidence that going to the hospital will kill you. So… why are we going through this?
We will all be able to look back on this post, hell… the whole series of posts since this crap started, and see if I was right of wrong. You that survive me can laugh all you want as you bury me or put my ashes in a closet. If I’m even close to correct I’ll remember who put me and my family in the poorer conditions we are certain to face.
Tags: Bat Soup Flu, Fu Man Flu, Kung Flu, Screwing the Youth, Wuhan Flu, Wuhan Flu Apocalypse