Here's when COVID-19 is now projected to peak in Oregon

You mak a great point about this. In Portland, domestic violence is way up, violence in general is way up, and property crime reports are skyrocketing. Gun sales to first time buyers in Portland is spiking and some gun stores have few or no handguns left in stock. Perhaps it wasn't wise for the Portland Police Commissioner and Mayor to publicly announce that the Portland Police Force will not answer any crime reports except those involving the possibility of grevious bodily injury or death.

To me, that was foolish beyond belief. In effect, they were saying that the Second Amendment, and the second amendment alone is going to protect your family. Adding all those guns to an already volitile and possibly abusive domestic scene cannot be a good thing. I think any surge in gun deaths in the future ought to be considered as part of the cost of a shut down.

I do not disagree with you here and I do not take offense from your level headed observations. With that being said, you may have overlooked the undeniable fact that almost every single shutdown was decided on and enacted by carreer politicians who have little or no training in the evaluation of science, virology, or epidemiology. As a matter of fact, I do not think I have even heard a single politician evaluate the death toll from Covid19 versus a normal flu season. Interpreting science is not an easy thing to do and the one thing scientific papers usually lack is any context in numbers. For example, the Governor in Oregon can hear that we expect 171 deaths in Oregon from Covid 19, and from that information make what she sees as an informed decision to save some lives. If the 171 number seems like a lot, then one is missing the context of comparing that number to the 572 deaths from the flu in a normal flu season.

And doesn't this set a dangerous precedent? If a governor can destroy a state's economy over one-third of a flu season, shouldn't this same governor destoy businesses every flu season?

 

You make a good point and I am glad you brought that up. Why not leave everything to experts? We could have a technocracy and every decision would be handled for us by the same entities that brought us the DMV. Perhaps the experts have a history of making terrible predictions and relying on those government experts who may not be competent enough to make it in a commercial environment is poor public policy. Should we really rely on those same experts who thought the Titanic was unsinkable? How about those experts that predicted that Y2K could end civilized society? What about those experts that predicted the 5th Street Bridge in New York City would be completely under water by the year 2000?

I am not sure if the tide was turned by the brave and heroic actions of the government or if there was really ever much of a tide in the first place. Florida had no shut down orders and their Covid19 death and infection rates are plummeting. What this tells me is that no one knows what would have happened if the government did not issue shutdown orders other than the economy wouldn't have been wrecked. I think we have to look at this as a potential threat of a pandemic with an incomplete data set to support the facts versus and absolutely certain threat of wrecking the economy. For far too long, everyone is looking at this as something we have to do regardless of consequences. I am advocating that we need to balance the threat level versus the damage that can be done to solve a problem which doesn't appear to be as bad as advertised based upon the downgrading of the experts predictions.

 

If we still had the post of the month thing going, I would nominate this post for that. Thanks for that indelible picture in my mind of you hiding out in your bunker. I already have the vanilla icecream and honey, but I will pick up limes the next time I'm at the grocery store. Well, that is unless some lunkhead hoarder is trying to stave off scurvy.

 

Thanks for providing the links. I see you got links across the political spectrum. That makes a great argument.

 

Great post! I cannot agree more with this. They are counting the death rate as the number of Covid19 related deaths divided by the number of confirmed cases of Covid19 infection. Since a huge portion of the population will not get tested and those who are infected may be asymptomatic, the death rate is probably orders of magnitude lower than the death rate percentage which is being given out by those advocating more stringent measures (and therefore less freedom) for everyone. Perhaps getting some sort of base infection rate would be useful. If it turns out 90% (just an example for argument sake) of the population already has Covid19, then social isolation makes no sense. If 1% of the population has Covid19 (simply a number for the sake of argument) then perhaps finding the 1% and tracking down potential contacts makes more sense than enforced isolation. But does the governor of Oregon even know what that number is? No. But decisions are made based upon an terribly incomplete data set. This is a poor way to shape social and medical policy.