It is often said and not often enough repeated that the political response to the current pandemic (the cure) is worse than the disease. That keeping people home, out of work, quarantined, or confined will do more damage than letting the virus work its way and burn itself out.
Part of the thinking behind that is simple. Every year millions of Americans get the flu, hundreds of thousands are hospitalized, and a lot of people die. Every year. From the flu. Politically and economically this is no different than the way the political left ignores how much more gun crime and murder occurs in the cities with the most gun control law. In other words, it is all press, optics, and priorities. And yet they demand more of the same for the safer parts of the nation.
As another example, imagine if Democrats and the media never said another word about Climate Change. It’s easy if you try. Normal folks would neither notice nor care. The world would turn, seasons come and go, hundreds of billions saved for more useful purposes.
Flu is, of course, a real problem. Every year.
And every year prior to that. And every year moving forward. And police-state socialism is not the answer.
But when COVID-19 came roaring out of China and crept across our boarders hiding among returning travelers and foreign visitors alike the response was different from anything ever seen.
How unusual? I just got off the phone with someone who was a kid during WWII. They cannot recall anything like this during the war or after. And what’s up with the toilet paper?
To its credit, this coronavirus seems to be a more contagious flu. Easy to spread. But as I intimated in the opening, how is the response not more dangerous? Getting it and surviving it which is actually the most likely outcome will build immunities. But we’re working overtime to prevent that. And exaggerating the tragedy as if we’ve never seen flu deaths or people succumbing to pneumonia, all of them a tragedy, but none of them politicized until now.
During a White House Task Force briefing this week, a reporter asked President Trump, “How many deaths are acceptable to you?” Trump fired back, “Zero.”
Today the media is making a big story about a reportedly healthy 44-year-old man in Texas who succumbed to the Wuhan Flu in two days. I’d suggest something else was behind that but assuming that’s not the case, what about the six people in Tennessee who killed themselves last week? That was more people than died from the coronavirus in that state.
Normal, healthy people, business owners, their employees, and those families could be destroyed, government hand-outs be damned. Over 3 million people filed for unemployment benefits in one week, three times the US historical record. The next week won’t be much better.
Forced out of work in a booming economy by people who wanted nothing more than a recession and a stock-market collapse.
Entire industries have been brought to their knees and with that will come damage we cannot begin to calculate or assess. Why? Because of the flu. Yes, it’s a contagious beastie and no one wants to see boomers removed (except for a few sniping millennial snowflakes), but those are the people who find themselves succumbing to the flu every year.
Odds are good that anti-social distancing, hand-washing, and sanitizing will actually reduce normal flu deaths in an effort to short-circuit Chinese flu deaths. But at what cost?
A huge economic cost. A reckoning we will not be able to measure for weeks or months but that will most assuredly not be blamed on the media upon whose partisan hands that blood belongs.
| RedState
