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30 Deaths a Day: Time to Panic!
Yes, my fellow Americans, thirty of us a day are succumbing to a pandemic! It is an outrage that our government has failed to end this slow-rolling catastrophe, even with decades of warnings by experts! Major corporations and governments at every level should show immediate leadership by ending all events that expose Americans to this deadly threat!
Here is the official government warning:
Every day, almost 30 people in the United States die in drunk-driving crashes — that’s one person every 50 minutes. These deaths have fallen by a third in the last three decades; however, drunk-driving crashes claim more than 10,000 lives per year. In 2010, the most recent year for which cost data is available, these deaths and damages contributed to a cost of $44 billion that year.
Clearly, no socially responsible corporation should have its employees exposed to this deadly threat. Every corporation should fully enable home office work and shut down every large headquarters, starting with the parking lots that encourage irresponsible risk-taking. State and local governments should lead the way in drastically reducing the risks.
Large gatherings, such as SXSW, should be banned forever, as they are known to have alcohol and driving connected with their venues.
Wait, you say, what if we just end the use of alcohol? Sadly, this will not solve the crisis, as motor vehicles are inherently dangerous! Here are the facts from the federal government office that is wrapped up with the automotive industry:
Fatal crash totals
There were 33,654 fatal motor vehicle crashes in the United States in 2018 in which 36,560 deaths occurred. This resulted in 11.2 deaths per 100,000 people and 1.13 deaths per 100 million miles traveled. The fatality rate per 100,000 people ranged from 4.4 in the District of Columbia to 22.2 in Mississippi. The death rate per 100 million miles traveled ranged from 0.54 in Massachusetts to 1.83 in South Carolina.
It is an outrage! Something must be done!
Last time I checked, SXSW in Austin, Texas, always happens during flu season. It has never been canceled for the flu. It most certainly has not been canceled for the constant risk of death or maiming by a drunk driver. Its demographic does not significantly overlap with the demographic of those genuinely at risk from any respiratory infection, be it influenza or the latest coronavirus. It is now also almost entirely a creature of the left and located in the hardest left part of Texas.
The big tech firms, similarly, mostly employ people who in no way fit the risk profile for serious harm from flu or other respiratory ailments. The obvious economic hits should only be to cruise ships and tour packages that rely upon retired people well into the higher risk demographics. For another perspective, without PANIC! see this:
Credit where credit is due: Congressman Greg Stanton (Dem-AZ), a former Phoenix mayor, sent a reasonable, fact-based email out to his constituents on COVID-19, pointing people to the CDC website and to the Arizona Department of Health Services topical page.
HA a sorely needed reality check. Particularly vile are those who try to somehow connect the crisis to Trump or to inflate the hysteria hoping it will hurt him.
Vote Biden! It’s all Trump’s fault!
You forgot the 150 million that died in the past decade as result of gun violence, at least according to Joe Biden. For some reason I haven’t seen any improvement in the morning, and evening traffic after half the population in the US has passed away.
The only way to stop this scourge is to get rid of all those pesky humans. No people, no accidents.
More people die in bathtubs than of terrorism too.
This is China s fault
I live in Las Vegas. It is very bad here. NOT the virus, but the side-effects. Two people I go to church with know they are going to get lay-off notices this week because they work at the convention center here, and so many conventions have already cancelled. I also know so many people who are waiters/waitresses, or work in one of the big casinos as an electrician/plumber/carpenter who are starting to fear that they, too, are going to be laid off. The fear from this illness is really hitting Sin City in a big way. I doubt that many people realize how many blue-collar people will be left in a serious financial situation because of the travel bans, and the general paranoia. I’m not saying that there isn’t a problem with the coronavirus, but I’m worried for my friends.
I was thinking this too. How many billions of dollars are we spending a year to keep me safe from the Taliban, Bashar al-Assad, and the Ayatollah?
Incidentally, it’s been a while since I’ve heard about the grave danger of North Korea…
This is the real fallout from this flu — the overreaction. As I mentioned in another thread, if we close all the schools in MN and WI, I go broke relatively quickly. The publications I work on depend on schools being open. (One school closed today in a small town on the border with MN because someone who tested positive was at the school for an event on Saturday. They’re giving the school a complete and thorough sanitizing.) I’m not worried at all about the possibility of getting this flu; I’m worried about being affected by the panic. Spoke to the publisher this weekend and asked what our plans were in case schools here started closing en masse. She said “We don’t publish.” Okay then. (Anyone need a page composition expert with 25+ years of experience in page layout!?)
I also work at a church, and should it get to the point where we don’t hold services, I don’t think we’d close up our offices. We’d probably still try to do a form of online church service every week, and I am already overworked at church anyway, so I doubt I’d have nothing to do.
But that’s only part of my income. I need both jobs or we’re toast.
Are Democrats playing up the panic? Yes and no.
Yes. If you watch press conferences and talking-head interviews and listen to the questions some of these “reporters” ask, so many of the
questions are pitched to damage the President. (It didn’t help that the CDC fumbled out of the gate.) Yes, the Democrats want to do this and relish the idea that it’ll tank the economy and bring down the President. I tend to think that this is all happening too soon to have a major effect, because by the time this burns itself out (and it will), and the economy comes roaring back, it’ll be election day. Just in time.
But also no. Although the news media is largely Democrat, it is going to report on this because it’s sensational, because people are interested, and because it’s sensational people are interested. The more people panic, the more the media reports on it, and the more people panic. It’s a perpetual motion panic machine. The nature of the news media itself, regardless of who is in the White House, is to create a panic atmosphere.
What we really need right now is a media willing take its foot off the panic pedal for a bit. News, not hysteria.
Posted elsewhere by @misthiocracy:
I was about to write a comment on the threat to our nation from a hostile country’s electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack. A few years ago on Ricochet, prior to the election of President Trump, a few of our fellow members and contributors talked about this threat to national security. The writers said that the technology existed to shield the country from such an attack and that the protection would cost taxpayers only a few dollars per person. In other words, it was really inexpensive. It was ridiculous that we had not taken care of this–it was an obvious “stitch in time saves nine” situation and easy and inexpensive to fix.
I was going to write here about the disproportionate fear of the Covid-19 in contrast to the larger threat of an EMP attack. But when I went to look up the status of our government’s neglect in installing this shield, lo and behold, I found that President Trump addressed this problem almost a year ago:
Anyone who thinks this president is not paying attention and not protecting our country from the many threats out there is extremely misinformed. He has done a great job.
This has always been true, but it is so vivid with this virus coverage.
One thing I’ve noticed is how many “news” websites have added a “coronavirus” tab to their four or five permanent navigation tabs on their home pages. That little fact says everything I need to know about how freaked out the public is right now and what they are reading.
I think the public will get bored with this in a couple of weeks and that the weather will change and things will go back to normal when people feel comfortable with some as-yet-unidentified-but-in-the-works-I’m-sure disinfectant strategy.
There’s so much money in public gatherings. How on earth can our economy–and money is our lifeblood–survive without them? We have to figure out how to restore this feature of western civilization.
I am so sorry you are in this place right now. How frustrating.
March and April are town meeting months across the northern states. That’s because people have nothing else to do as winter wanes and it’s ahead of the planting season. :-) I’ve always thought there was a lot of money to be made in town meeting annual reports. Something you might look into in the area you live in.
Here I recall the consoling words of General Buck Turgidson (Dr. Stranglove 1964):
By “Addressed the problem” you mean convened a committee to talk about how bad an EMP would be? Has he done anything to actually protect us from an EMP? (I’m asking, I hope he has, but I suspect it hasn’t gone beyond the lip-flapping state).
We understand that pandemics, like forest fires, differ from drunk driving accidents and terrorists attacks in that they are self-reinforcing feedback loops, right? What would you think of a fire dept that ignored a brush fire because it hadn’t burned down a town yet? The best time to get forest fires and pandemics is early, before they get out of control.
The Communist Party in China has virtually shutdown the country in response to this virus. This is a government that treats human life very cheaply and doesn’t really care if thousands or even millions of people die. They’ve judged that the economic consequences of shutting down the country (dire as they are), aren’t as bad as what would happen if they let the virus run out of control. Maybe they are wrong about that decision, but this isn’t a government that is going to ruin its economy over the flu. The South Koreans have been very aggressive in getting on top of this early. Maybe they are idiots too. I’d prefer to play it safe.
This is outside a doctor’s office? A red flag for me is data quoted with obviously impossible precision. 99.7% cure rate for those under 50? Not 99.8% or 99.6%, or maybe “somewhere around 90%”? No one has anywhere near enough data to make a claim that precise. This tells me what you are reading on this sign is propaganda, not education.
Italy has also basically shut itself down too. And we see that they were lax in containment early on. Back less than two weeks ago they only had about 50o cases. Now they have more than 10 times as many. People shouldn’t panic, but they should be mindful and reasonably cautious. Frankly I thought over all our CDC and Government agencies were handling the situation fairly well. The revelation about the testing kit screw up and slow deployment are making me reassess their performance down. They haven’t dropped the ball entirely, but they aren’t gripping it very tightly either and this could now easily turn into a fumble. Trump’s usual Trumpiness is filling no one with any confidence, and it further encourages his media mouth pieces to just spread nonsense. The Dems have every incentive to panic and hype the bad. But ultimately they won’t have to hype anything if this thing really spins out of control, and even their usual cynicism is going to be tempered by the fact that it is large urban centers that will have to make various tough calls and emergency decisions about this disease first. One should always be cautiously optimistic about such events, and must be cognizant that they can easily spiral out of control for reasons well outside anyone’s intention or control. There is plenty we don’t know about the virus, and a million things driven by chance that can break against us. We are far from out of the woods, it is a good time to keep our wits about us, and our eyes open.
For perspective, in Italy, .01% of the population is infected with Covid-19.
In the United States, .00025% of the population is infected with Covid-19.
Panic accordingly.
What percent of the population should have the disease before it is taken seriously?
I think we are taking it seriously. I also think that we are panicking unnecessarily.
Kind of the point of the post.
Thank you, Buzz Killington. Just trying to inject a little perspective here. In view of the toll this hysteria is starting to take on the economy and even on people’s jobs, I find it irresponsible and even reprehensible to add to it in any way. Just stop.
I find it irresponsible and even reprehensible to quote statistics with bogus precision (99.7%!) to give people a false sense of security. I also don’t like the “has a 99.7% cure rate for those under 50”, which is cherry picking data to bamboozle people. The death rate for the virus is concentrated in the elderly. Are we not supposed to care about them?
The real deception here is thinking that the stock market is tanking because of the corona virus, rather than from the fact that it is a debt-fueled Ponzi scheme that has been supported for years by cheap money from the Fed. The virus is just the catalyst for a crash that was inevitable anyway. If it wasn’t the virus, it would have been something else eventually. How many people are aware that the Fed has been injecting billions of dollars daily into the overnight lending market because banks stopped lending to each other last Fall? And that without that our financial system would freeze up and the economy would hit a brick wall? The virus is just exposing the rot that has been festering for years.
I find it irresponsible and even reprehensible that I was @mentioned in this argument and now I have to endure notifications with every back and forth. A pox on all your houses!
If by panicking you mean people buying all the hand sanitizer in Costco, I agree with you. In a country of 300 million people, there will always be people who overreact. Most of the people I know are still quite blasé about the whole situation, and I don’t see panic in the official reaction.
Get back to me in 3 weeks.
3 weeks ago Italy had 20 known cases
Read this string of tweets.
Screw it. here it is.
Don’t panic. But don’t blow this off either.
I agree. I wonder how the Open Borders people are feeling right now.
Don’t panic?
That is something to panic over
Given the long incubation period and risk of contagion long before symptoms appear, what could Italians have done differently? You can’t isolate avoid infected people if you have to regard everyone as potentially dangerous and have to maintain that no-contact state for weeks. Most of the behaviors we are advised to do seem only to delay but not prevent a full-scale outbreak. And doing it now seems like a closing the barn door too late kinda thing.