The Tragedy of the New Coronavirus Spikes
RealClearPolitics links to TFA, and just below links to this story as well, “Where are all the deaths?”<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spectator.us&#x2F;where-deaths-coronavirus-wave&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spectator.us&#x2F;where-deaths-coronavirus-wave&#x2F;</a><p>They both overstate their respective cases.<p>I also would toss this one into the mix, “CDC Now Estimates there have been over 20 million Coronavirus cases”;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;outkick.com&#x2F;cdc-now-estimates-there-have-been-over-20-million-coronavirus-cases&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;outkick.com&#x2F;cdc-now-estimates-there-have-been-over-2...</a><p>The upshot is that this article could more accurately be titled <i>Where’s the tragedy of the new Coronavirus spikes?</i>. Strip away the politics and we have a huge uptick in case with in some cases the lowest death rates we’ve seen since March.<p>The media keeps loosing the message in the midst of the disaster porn and political finger-pointing. We need the economy to be open to the absolute greatest extent possible while hospital capacity remains near maximum. The long-term damage (in dollars and lives) in over-regulating the extent of the lockdown could exceed the damage of COVID by an order magnitude.<p>Needless to say, the more cases we can shift forward into summer and fall, versus having to deal with those cases in winter concomitant with flu season is how we prevent the disaster of a second wave. Hospitals in winter can be overwhelmed by a bad flu season alone, and COVID didn’t go exponential until after flu had tapered this year. We do not want to see them peaking together in vulnerable populations.<p>This drumbeat of articles like this just totally miss the point entirely, as if we could just keep handing out trillions of dollars a month indefinitely until a half billion doses of vaccine are ready to go, and as if even if we did that we’re not inadvertently causing hundreds of thousands of death due to side effects of quarantine and things like canceled elective procedures.<p>A lot has changed over the last couple months, but the media is still “reporting” like it’s February.