Yeah I know humanity has registered pandemics, but this one is largely killing people who would’ve otherwise been dead in the year 1,000. How long did people live back then, 50?
Yeah I’m really wondering about the fall now. I teach in a school with 1,500 ish students total plus well over 100 staff. I wonder if we’ll be going to back to business as usual in the fall.
A very interesting question indeed. Had this spread in the year 1,000 would they even have noticed? I never thought about that. My guess is they wouldn’t have noticed given the multitude of other, worse health issues they had to deal with.
This makes sense to me. I saw one estimate from Bowser’s office that up to 20% of currently closed businesses in DC may not return, that’s a huge hit not just to those businesses but to the city’s revenue stream and everything that depends on it.
There is an interesting debate to be had about putting dollar values on human life. When cuomo says “you can’t put a value on life”, that’s just not true. We do all the time. One argument I’ve heard along these lines is if we value human life infinitely why isn’t the speed limit 15 mph on all roads? You could pretty much eliminate all traffic fatalities (30-40k per year). The price of those 30-40k lives is the convenience and economic benefits of driving fast.
These are not good analogies imo. Why would controlling this pandemic make the next one worse? There will be new vulnerable populations by the time the next one comes. It’s not like a forest fire that wipes out all the fuel and can’t come back right away.
It’s interesting that PG county has a lot more cases than montco but montco has more deaths. I wonder if that’s cause the drive thru testing at fedex was the first of those and the case counts are actually similar.
Last Sunday was 1570 deaths and we’re well below that, hopefully tomorrow will be less than last Monday and so on, and then we can say for sure we’re on the downswing.