Applying the 80/20 rule to COVID

 death isn't everybody's primary concern

I don’t understand. Since when do we trust the all-mighty government to make all decisions for us?

I understand mask mandates and social distancing measures. However, the shut downs and stay-at-home mandates are absolute overstepping by the gov. It’s insane to me how people so casually give up their liberty to make decisions for themselves because “the government has our best interests at heart”. That’s a terrible precedent to set. What occurs if in 20 years we have a Gavin Newsome as our president? Really? Best interests at heart? Bull.

There is no silver bullet here. Europe's approach is on one end of the spectrum (save people and let the economy die), whilst the US is at the other (try and save the economy to a certain extent but let people die). The thing about looking at current statistics of death or hospitalization is that they are true. Most people will be fine and it seems absurd to kill the economy for something like this. Yet, the more people get infected, the more chances the virus has of mutating. We not have a much more transmissible strain which will mean more infections and more deaths (even if the death rate remains the same, infecting more people in a given time period means more people die in that time period). The risk here is that a growing number of infections will lead to more and more variants, including one with a higher death rate. Then people will be truly fucked and wished we had quashed this sooner. Hopefully the vaccine will also be effective against this new strain, but we need to sit tight for now. 

We can't because the US is slowly turning into a shithole where the government can't do anything right except collect our taxes

Jordan Belfort and Brian DeChesare lol

I would love to fast forward 40 years to another public health phenomenon and see what these same fussy entitled brats have to say when Gen AD are bitching about keeping them locked up or that nature should cull the weak and move on...

Also, screaming "I'm not scared of death!" is an extremely easy thing to say when you're not imminently facing it. I was laid up in the ICU for 10 days a decade ago and given a 50% chance of walking out alive. A full life potentially cut short in my 20s. I can assure you I was "scared of death".

20 years ago we lost 3,000 people on 9/11, and have reminders in our daily life of that terrible day ever since, and vow to "Never Forget". Now, we are losing in excess of a 9/11 a day, and a large portion of this country (many of whom are "pro-life") view that as an acceptable cost of doing business so that the rest of us can get back to normal. Shameful.

What this fails acknowledge is the entire point of having lockdowns in the first place: not to overwhelm the Healthcare system.

Say that we didn't lockdown and just expected everything to be normal, its just another flu though a lot more contagious. A 10% hospitalization rate combined with its viralbility would overwhelm the Healthcare system quickly which is undesirable.

Why? We know that COVID has a mortality rate of ~1.5% or so so far. However, that's not its true mortality rate in every environment - if someone isn't treated, that mortality rate goes up as well to a significant degree.

We locked-down for the explicit purpose of slowing down infection rates until a vaccine came out. We're at that point in about a few months at the latest.

Tldr: we locked down to slow the crowding of the Healthcare system because that let's us most effectively treat COVID patients and thus have a very low death rate, relatively.

Found op's brain scan 

I've got it right now, been locked up at home for like 2 weeks. Would have preferred to do this months ago and not be on and off locked down all year.

Jordan Belfort?! You are using Jordan Buttcokesniffer in Chief Belfort to support your argument?

Last year exposed how easy it is for people to give up their freedoms.

The issue is that everyone thinks this loss of freedom is temporary but it will become permanent.

Those who sacrifice freedom for safety will get neither.

Lots of people are ignoring the fact that over 99.9% of people survive Covid. In fact if you look at the stats, the death rate for people in the US in 2020 was the same as previous years, essentially the same amount of people died in 2020 as with any other year despite the virus. 

The best way to survive Covid is to be fit and healthy. However the lockdowns have closed gyms and many restaurants that serve healthy food. 

Unfortunately, society is filled with weak men who just listen to the media and can't think for themselves. 

It is also pretty clear that scientists and medical professionals used this pandemic to make a lot of money. People talk about big corporations and big tech but we should also expose BIG SCIENCE. A lot of scientists have zero emotional intelligence or any empathy for the suffering of small businesses. This whole pandemic is just a big REVENGE of the NERDS fantasy with these nerd & virgin scientists finally having the power and authority they crave to punish society for not giving them attention when they were in high school and college.

Moshe Strugano (Attorney - Moshe Strugano and Co Law firm) says we need to work on our immunity and if we have good immunity we can protect ourselves, our family and our society too.

It's deplorable how the government handled the shutdowns the past few months. Walk down the streets of any town or city (especially NY), and you'll see McDonalds, Burger Kings, and Chipotles all open for business. Then look right next door and you'll see a small family restaurant with the lights out and the door locked because Big Brother has forbidden them from opening up until the pandemic is over. How does that make any sense? McDonalds isn't any better at preventing the spread than a mom and pop shop. And won't the virus spread more slowly if more stores were open so people don't concentrate in a few open areas? This whole lockdown was stupid and immoral.

The point others made about overwhelming the hospitals doesn't make sense either given what the OP posted. Almost all healthy people who get COVID will never have to go to a hospital in the first place. It's only high risk people who will need the hospital, and this is the demographic that we are staying should stay home to not get infected. The healthy should be allowed to roam free with masks and businesses should've never closed.

No lockdown is desirable, nobody is disputing that. The approach in the US has been horrific, along with many leading countries - this does not prove that lockdown mechanisms overall are a useful tool or not, it's a tougher issue. If our government wants to decide on a lockdown, ruining businesses and lives in the near term, they must provide the support and stimulus to float their populace. Unfortunately we are exiting an administration that decided to ignore the global concern early on (and currently), impose lockdowns, and forget to float their populace. You can't have your cake and eat it too. Not trying to make this political; however, there are clear reasons why lockdown has been such a lukewarm measure, creating justified negative reactions.

What I do find surprising is that in a forum made up exclusively of finance and consulting professionals; where we are supposed to be experts in data and thinking about the broader picture, we get hung up on single data points.

"But look at the death figures, they aren't that bad, we should open up!" 

There is genuine math, science and statistics supporting lockdown to prevent overloading hospitals, (which will negatively impact survival rates, and survival rates of non-covid related issues that hospitals will no longer have sufficient resources to tend to), as well as reducing spread to mitigate mutation (as seen in population and case dense areas of Africa and the UK).

Death is an emotional statistic, think broader here. This sucks for everyone, but at least you're just feeling overworked and underwhelmed in your bed/ living room, not overworked and underwhelmed on the front line trying to save people who think the reason for their intubation is government conspiracy.

I know ill get monkey shit with from people with a stick up their ass, but after the first month of the virus I frankly stopped giving a fuck and have been living my life like normal (as has my entire social circle). We all got covid so now its not even something we need to worry about. Live your life normally (go to bars, parties, whatever), and then avoid old people, simple as that. I'm not putting my life on hold.