A Matter of Livelihoods and Death
"Listen, dumb****s! I am a professional on the front lines intubating these patients and years of education to understand this, but I will attempt to relate to the lowest common denominator mentality of this society and the financial segment in particular (notoriously self-involved)...I will make this simple."Have you seen anything cause bodies to be piled into refrigerator trucks or mass graves in your lifetime?!! Quit arguing just what the fucking death rate percentage is! It's obviously high! Shut the [expletive] up and listen to people who obviously know more than you!"
"It's like using a Ferrari to go to the shop next door – you press on the accelerator and you smash the window."
"It's not just about running out of ventilators, it's running out of expertise...We intensivists don't ventilate by protocol. We may choose initial settings, but we adjust those settings. It's complicated."
"When people sensed the worst was over, they slowly came out of their homes."There was no grand reopening of the economy like some department store suddenly under new management. People remained highly mistrustful of one another, continuing to avoid even the most basic interactions with friends, family and professional colleagues."Commerce was slow and the economy remained depressed for years...and just when it seemed that the situation was finally starting to improve, the plague struck again in 1360. And again in 1374."If there was just a single rat left on the planet carrying the disease, then another wave of the pandemic could begin anew."And that made it next to impossible for anything to return to normal...Commercial trade dwindled. Italy's woolen textile industry practically ceased to exist. Many prominent banks in Europe collapsed. And there were even government debt defaults."Right now most people are barricaded in their homes while policymakers wait for this virus to die off."But that's not how biology works."Just like in the 1300s, if there's even a single carrier of the coronavirus remaining, then the whole thing starts over."That person transmits the virus to two-three people, those people transmit the virus to two-three other people and the exponential growth curve begins again."Lockdowns don't kill off the virus. They just reset the clock."