re: Major overreaction by the government

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The difference is that a car is not going to come into contact with hundreds of other cars a day with the potential to cause each of them to have a FATAL accident in two weeks

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I would guess that most of us who think this is an overreaction dont think it would never be ok to respond to a virus this way. It's that we didn't or don't see this virus as bad enough to cause the reaction.
It's no good telling people that infections will skyrocket if the infection isn't seen as worse than the economic impacts of the shutdown.
It seems that the powers that be have not done a good job convincing people of the severity of the virus.

It's also no good telling me to just trust the experts. That should never be a blind trust, IMO. If you think it should be, I think you are naive about human nature.

And furthermore, if the experts themselves thought it was that bad, they would have taken more extreme and immediate measures to fight it. If it's worth causing a severe recession, they should have acted that way from the start.

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It's also no good telling me to just trust the experts. That should never be a blind trust, IMO. If you think it should be, I think you are naive about human nature.

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So you don't trust the experts who have devoted their lives to studying infectious diseases. Who do you trust then?

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my 72 years.

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You better hope you don't get this "flu." You'd probably be dead pretty fast, old man.

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So you don't trust the experts who have devoted their lives to studying infectious diseases. Who do you trust then?

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a. they keep changing their policies. this isn't as much their incompetency (but remember, the CDC fricked this up horribly from the get go. they couldn't even produce a working test, when ones were available, without a major frickup and snag at a time when we needed testing to isolate this), but the fact that they clearly are adapting to an adapting situation. their modeling/projections clearly are not working in the real laboratory of life and have to keep revising (which is to be expected, but hurts this godlike credibility people are giving them)

b. they are only taking the raw numbers into account. our government officials are supposed to apply that to actual policy that attempts to mediate the human, economic, and scientific concerns. they're not. they're just going purely off the numbers and saying "we don't care about the cost right now. we just don't want to look like we're not doing something".

if we don't care, then we should have been quick/harsh with these macro policies in micro application. they should have just quarantined the hot spots with the military from the get go. in LA, New Orleans should be under lockdown and shut off from the world and these policies should be applied there.

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either the experts have failed up to this point (and there is ample evidence of this, especially the CDC) or we're a bunch of frogs in one big boiling pot right now and have been lied to for months

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I have to conclude that they failed up to at least Friday. It remains to be seen whether all of these shutdown actions were for the best.

The frog in boiling water metaphor doesn't seem to hold based on the numbers from other countries, right? Is there some reason we should expect it to be worse here?

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Is there some reason we should expect it to be worse here?

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unlikely worse, nationally. we're a huge arse country, geographically

but it could get really bad in some urban areas, especially ones on the respective coasts. but we can't criticize our hyper-urban overlords or single them out to save everyone else. just like with housing, we can't make the true cost of urban living available and have to manipulate it to artificially increase the value of major urban areas

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This is nothing but a ploy by Generation X to kill the Boomers and enslave the Millennials.

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frick. They're onto us.

Oh well. Whatever. Nevermind.

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Post of the day, and it’s not even breakfast time. Too bad it’s buried this deep in the thread.....

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but moving fast to the orders of those folks is the only hope to prevent something that will make the Great Depression seem like a walk in the park.

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oh my god the talking points are out

look bro, this board is not selling Forsythia or anything

if this keeps up for a month or so, we will be in the Great Depression

i completely understand the concept of flattening the curve, but you know what that means, right? we're going to be at the same threat level for months. that means government is going to have to keep the country shut down as long as we have to keep the curve flat

it's easy to say "we have to trust the lab reports" before the riots start

It's not that they're wrong. It's that their goals may be (IMO are) shortsighted. Medicine is geared to "save everyone no matter what." I guess really it's more society as a whole these days as well.

The problem is when you shut down the world in order to save a small amount of people, you're dooming the larger amount to a more painful and drawn out economic death.

And in an even more ironic twist, it's this vulnerable population that is shutting everything down that is most resistant to help the less fortunate "because it's welfare."

And I work in the medical field.