CDC's New Symptoms

i understand completely where you are coming from re my last statement in my previous post on this matter. what i wish we all had were reliable statistics on other causes of death during the same period as the covid experience so we would compare the impact of those other mortalities with covid. so far i have not found any source for that information, bits and pieces here and there but no side by side data. i know you are not supposed to consider money when you are saving lives, but the US approved three trillion dollars just to help with the impact of covid. its not the total bill. that is 8000 plus in new debt for every man, woman and child in the US. it is twenty million dollars for every covid death so far. i will guess we do not spend anything like that to fight diabetes, tuberculosis or malaria on a per case basis. so i guess my question would be do we need to give away another twenty trillion or so in US debt to fight against these other causes of death so they are considered equally important to covid deaths, or do we need to back off of our investment fighting covid, or perhaps just let nature take its course which i believe is what is going to happen no matter what we do.

 

You fail to consider other options demonstrated by other countries.

In your discussion you only give two options:
1) Spend 8,000 + per capita.
OR
2) Do nothing and let nature run it's course.

There are other options that you do not describe.

Many countries are able to cope with COVID at a very small cost. Taiwan, a country with a free people and democratically elected government, is able to keep their economy open with very minimal cost. The have implemented a low cost system of contact tracing and quarantine. The quarantine is government supervised.

To keep the contagion going, as a communicable disease, the coronavirus needs to communicate itself from host to host. Simply breaking the chain of communication is enough to stop the contagion and avoid all its costs.

Many simple minded people only see binary solutions. They only see one extreme or the other. Total lock down of the entire population vs do nothing. They are not able to see other options.

To be clear, contact tracing and managed quarantine only effects the very small percentage of people who are currently contagious and those who have been in recent contact with contagious people. It does not effect the entire population. This is why the costs are so low and the impacts to personal freedom are low too.

Implementing an effective system for contact tracing and managed quarantine would have a far lower cost than simply letting nature take its course.

This is a situation where a small amount of good leadership can avoid tremendous cost.

 

my friend i am sure if you will reread the ending of my post you will see three options. what we are doing now with the high cost, letting nature take its course or "backing off of our investment in covid" (by which i mean to reduce how much we are spending on covid). otherwise i generally agree with the philosophy of your post if not some of the specifics

 

They also shut down immigration immediately (before most countries had even started to realise a contagious virus was around!) plus produced millions of masks per day and enforced their use. I have relatives there and the children did not miss ONE single day of school!

 

I asked today in a HARDware store about woodie and was told to use a preservative.

 

Good point about early border close in Taiwan - a shame the WHO didn't embrace Taiwan's warnings and concerns early on.

 

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