It’s governments overreacting not the people. I haven’t met a single person who is actually “scared.”
I've been taking the social distancing stuff seriously, wearing a mask every time I go out, and have taken steps to get deliveries when I can to ensure I maximize the time at home.
The sky's not falling but I am a bit "scared" as you put it.
I'm scared. Not enough to be curled in a ball in the corner, but enough to be taking social distancing seriously. My wife has medical history that puts her at higher risk, plus she's in her 50s (and me in my 40s) so we're both at slightly higher risk just based on age.
I'm not saying we should not be doing anything, but we have existing protocols to deal with respiratory epidemics, which are not a new thing at all (they happen every winter).
We did not have to "innovate" with those lockdowns, prompted by completely wrong doomsday predictions amplified by the hysterical media.
> I'm not saying we should not be doing anything, but we have existing protocols to deal with respiratory epidemics, which are not a new thing at all (they happen every winter).
Good lord. Last flu season, 35 million Americans got the flu and 34,200 died. We have 1.3M confirmed Covid cases so far and 78k deaths (the real total of both is surely much higher). If that 6% CFR is 5x too high due to mild cases that haven't been counted and we made it to 35M infected, we'd have over 400,000 dead.
I'm getting the strong feeling that we're going to find out exactly how deadly this thing can be since people are so ignorantly dismissive of how serious we should be taking it.
if car accidents JUST started happening in january and 80,000 people died of them by may, yeah man we probably would have
I also agree with you that its probably a lot more prevalent. We already know that its possible to have no symptoms. But that doesn't take away that for many people it is actually a horrible virus that has killed huge amounts of people and we have no idea how prevalent it actually is because we can't do community testing yet. If you're wrong many more people die.
Can we stop the subtle browbeating please? People are going to die either way that normally would not have died.
I'm not at all trying to intimidate the person - I'm just reminding that the stakes here are pretty high and any direction we go (continued lockdown, gradual opening, sudden opening) has an effect on how many people will ultimately die.
Not even to say that human life is that sacred - almost any society if they're honest clearly don't act according to that principle. The parent poster said that government is overreacting to the problem and that he's not met anyone who's scared, and then said fear over early reopening causing a 2nd wave is hyperbolic.
This is a lot of people that are already dead - I'm making a rhetorical argument that its absolutely not hyperbolic to consider the possibility that the cases and deaths could ramp upwards sharply.