+1Cortopassi wrote: ↑Mon Mar 30, 2020 11:39 am We are losing, and will continue to lose people. But, once this is resolved, we will (probably) discover that we were too aggressive in the measures taken, and/or they weren't the right measures to take (maybe Sweden will be a good example of what countries should have done).
Those 150k deaths per day are spread out over the entire year, but the exponential growth of this global pandemic threatened to compress most of the hospitalizations and deaths into a very short time window -- threatening to overwhelm hospitals around the world. Meaning a lot of people who wouldn't normally have to die from this virus would die due to lack of available hospital care. That's what the shutdowns are primarily trying to avoid -- the unnecessary deaths due to overloading the system.Cortopassi wrote: ↑Mon Mar 30, 2020 11:39 am In any event, if this was meant to be a world changing event, we already normally have 150k people who die worldwide every day. This doesn't look to come anywhere near even a few days of normal worldwide deaths.
I'm not saying the shutdown strategy is completely valid or justified; I'm just pointing out its driving motivation.
I suspect a lot of state and local governments will be bailed out directly or indirectly by the federal government in the coming months and years. Don't you think people would clamor for that before they would accept smaller governments and give up their government benefits and protections?Cortopassi wrote: ↑Mon Mar 30, 2020 11:39 am Take advantage to increase the size of government? If anything, this virus has hastened the path to a federal government collapse and has put many state governments on the brink, and I assume local governments are getting killed also. And what will they be able to do? Raise taxes on a population that now has 10/20/30% unemployment? Impossible. I see a lot of bankruptcies becoming the norm, and with it, smaller governments.