Quote:
Originally Posted by photoLith
608 child passengers age 12 and younger died in motor vehicle crashes in 2019. So, children are twice as likely to die in a car wreck then covid, yet you dont see society freaking out at all over that.
|
In the first year of the pandemic around here, covid was #8 for cause of death across all age groups. For younger people it is much lower. There were more years of life lost to drug poisonings/overdoses (fentanyl etc.).
The typical response to this framing is that if we had not freaked out about covid a vastly larger number of people would have died. Many people said the fatality rate is about 1% so around 1% of people would have died with no lockdown or mitigation measures. Then on top of that there is the "healthcare system collapse" theory which states that if the covid hospitalizations hit a certain point the deaths go dramatically higher than just the covid deaths. How this actually happens usually isn't spelled out.
I think that's all a bit unrealistic/hysterical and obviously was never how things played out but that view had a big impact on the perceived severity here, even just a few months ago. It seems to be losing some support now, and even our public health officials have pointed out that mitigation measures aren't working very well and the hospital numbers are dubious (they are just a count of whoever tests positive while in the hospital, not net impact of covid on the system).
Another theory was that the government has to tell people what to do (everybody is a wooden block/idiot) so if for example you implement a mask mandate 100% of people will wear masks (or all except for the evil people) and without it 0% will wear masks. Therefore if masks do anything, 100% of the gain is attributable to mandates. This is very common thinking not specific to covid. You hear it a lot from people who think that if the government could just control everything we would live in a utopia. Unfortunately it is not how things work in the real world.