Insider Advisor

“The Final Authority on Everything!”

ADVISOR

WARNING! The Advisor has been known to be politically incorrect and may send certain Millennials scurrying to their safe space. Please read at your own risk.

Putting Covoid-19 In Perspective

I’m trying to get with the program and be a good citizen, but somewhere in my mind I keep feeling this coronavirus crisis is being over-hyped. I’d be interested in the Advisor’s perspective. T.G. Boulder, CO but very unlikely, you knew someone who died. Most likely, you never gave it much thought, nor did you or the rest of the country change your behavior in any way. Now ask yourself how you, and the country, would have responded if the news cycle was 24/7 100% coverage of every confirmed infections, every confirmed death - by state, by county, by hospital. (As it has been for Covid-19) If every panicked politician and public official was on-camera daily, on Next Door, on Facebook offering dire warnings and tips to stop the spread of the deadly flu. The exact same disease that you and the rest of the country probably ignored would certainly have caused wide-spread panic.

Great question T.G., and one that is being asked by many independent thinkers. Let’s look at the last regular flu season for that perspective: The CDC reported 350,000 hospitalizations and 24,000 deaths from the regular flu last season in the US alone. Maybe you got a flu shot. Maybe you knew someone who actually got sick. Possible,

But why didn’t that happen? Weren’t 24,000 deaths in one flu season sufficiently noteworthy? Why didn’t we shut the country down, destroy thousands of businesses and millions of jobs and add $trillions to our national debt? Why didn’t we close the restaurants, the bars, the gyms, the beaches and the parks? Why didn’t our government gin up the national hysteria over the flu that they have done over the Covid-19 virus? Why didn’t we all agree to give up our constitutional right to free assembly? Wouldn’t we have saved lives by doing so? The answer is, “Of course, we would have.” But in a rational society of 330,000,000 citizens we normally understand that there is a cost to being up, around and productive. We lost 480,000 citizens to automobile accident last year. We could have saved every single one of them by simply banning driving. We did not because a rational response to those deaths included the reality that life must go on. Commerce and the economy must be sustained, in spite of the cost, because we all rely on our heavily integrated economic infrastructure for our continued existence. Yes, we can improve safety on the highway and we must be focused on that issue, but at some level, there are losses we must accept in order to sustain the engine of our economy.

An over-reaction to the coronavirus or any such crisis could, indeed, cause the cure to be worse, perhaps far worse, then the disease.

Covid-19 is a killer, T.G., and should not be underestimated, but the almost nil response to the regular flu, also a killer, vs the supernova response to Covoid-19 goes unexplained, in the opinion of the Advisor.