Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Corona Virus Panic

Here is a link to the best article i have seen related to the CV pandemic. No one knows if what we are doing is correct and even afterwards we will always wonder if we should have done more or less. I surely do not have an answer but I wonder if anyone does, this article seems to sum it up from the way I see it.


https://www.city-journal.org./1957-asian-flu-pandemic

The article -

Surrounded by amulets of the coronavirus crisis, I stare out my window at a city that may or may not be on the verge of disaster. To my right is a case of canned pasta. To my left are cartons of corned-beef hash from New Jersey and bottled water from Maine. I’m ready for whatever comes.

Except, I’m not ready. In fact, even at my advanced 80-something age, I find the whole Covid-19 panic to be strange and troubling. I’ve lived through epidemics before, but they didn’t crash the stock market, wreck a booming economy, and shut down international travel. They didn’t stop the St. Patrick’s Day parade or the NCAA basketball tournament, and they didn’t drop the curtain on Broadway shows. Will these extreme measures have any real effect on the spread of Covid-19 in New York, or America? We’re about to find out.

My first encounter with a global pandemic came in October 1957, when I spent a week in my college infirmary with a case of the H2N2 virus, known at the time by the politically incorrect name of “Asian flu.” My fever spiked to 105, and I was sicker than I’d ever been. The infirmary quickly filled with other cases, though some ailing students toughed it out in their dorm rooms with aspirin and orange juice. The college itself did not close, and the surrounding town did not impose restrictions on public gatherings. The day that I was discharged from the infirmary, I played in an intercollegiate soccer game, which drew a big crowd.

It’s not that Asian flu—the second influenza pandemic of the twentieth century—wasn’t a serious disease. Worldwide, this flu strain killed somewhere between 1 and 2 million people. More than 100,000 died in the U.S. alone. And yet, to the best of my knowledge, governors did not call out the National Guard, and political panic-mongers did not blame it all on President Eisenhower. College sports events were not cancelled, planes and trains continued to run, and Americans did not regard one another with fear and suspicion, touching elbows instead of hands. We took the Asian flu in stride. We said our prayers and took our chances.

Today, I look back and wonder if an oblivious America faced the 1957 plague with a kind of clueless folly. Why weren’t we more active in fighting this contagion? Could stricter quarantine procedures have reduced the rate of infection and lowered the death toll? In short, why weren’t we more afraid?

It’s hard to answer that question without explaining what it was like to grow up in an age of infectious illness. My mother once showed me a list of the contagious diseases she survived before the age of 20. On the list were the usual childhood illnesses, along with deadly afflictions like typhoid fever, pneumonia, diphtheria (it killed her older brother), scarlet fever, and the lethal 1918–19 Spanish flu, which took more than 50 million lives around the world.

For those who grew up in the 1930s and 1940s, there was nothing unusual about finding yourself threatened by contagious disease. Mumps, measles, chicken pox, and German measles swept through entire schools and towns; I had all four. Polio took a heavy annual toll, leaving thousands of people (mostly children) paralyzed or dead. There were no vaccines. Growing up meant running an unavoidable gauntlet of infectious disease. For college students in 1957, the Asian flu was a familiar hurdle on the road to adulthood. For everyone older, the flu was a familiar foe. There was no possibility of working at home. You had to go out and face the danger.

Today, thanks to vaccines, fewer and fewer people remember what it was like to survive a succession of childhood diseases. Is the unfamiliar threat of serious sickness making us more afraid of Covid-19 than we need to be? Does a society that relies more on politics than faith now find itself in an uncomfortable bind, unable to lecture, browbeat, intimidate, or evade the incorrect behavior of a dangerous microbe?

When the coronavirus finally runs its course, one of the most important tasks for health-care officials will be to determine whether the preventive measures we’re taking today were effective. Did deploying the National Guard save lives, or did it simply expose the soldiers to an infection that, in the end, could not be stopped? Did we pay too high a price for tanking our economy and disrupting our society?

Or did we get it right, acting quickly and decisively to slow the virus, shutting down possible pathways of infection? By comparing the 2020 data with information from 1957, we’ll also be able to find out if the strange people who lived in that distant year—and I remember them well—could have done more to reduce the death toll of the Asian flu. The more answers we get, and the sooner we get them, the better it will be for everyone. When the curtain goes up on Broadway again, somewhere in a faraway continent to be named later, we can be sure that new viruses will be waiting in the wings.

His suicide number comes from the World Health Organization website. After reading your post insulting his intelligence, I did a quick search. I can't vouch for the accuracy of the WHO number, but it is there if you care to look. I'd post the link, but, I'm a bit ashamed to admit, I don't know how. Perhaps you missed the part where he said "worldwide", not just America.

Some could make a case that the vulnerable asking the rest of the country to shut down and go broke so they can avoid it are the selfish greedy ones?

How about some personal responsibility? if you are vulnerable or scared stay home.

Freedom and personal responsibility, it's a thing this country used to believe in.

Self quarantine... I don't believe I am in the vulnerable category, but I don't go out, and I sure as hell have no business telling another man he can't work and feed his family!

You’re a better man than that irfubar.

Old Toot, thanks for the vote of confidence. The thing is I don't believe it is as bad as they say, simply because I believe they have an agenda.
I know people are dying and it is horrible for them and the families.
I simply believe the one size fits all solution is not the best way to go about this. The vulnerable should isolate and we should do all we can to help. Maybe turn empty hotels into quarantine centers.
To shut down everything makes no sense to me.
I live very rural and in a very sparsely populated state, yet we are shut down, we are low risk.
I also don't believe we shouldn't be driven by fear, I never make a good decision while afraid and most people don't either.
Also there is a reason I'm not in charge, I am a rip the band aid off rub dirt on it sorta guy....

I agree completely. The only thing that bothers me is maybe someone knows something and they are afraid to tell us right now. Guess who 'they' might be . Trump has obviously gotten the best information, hopefully. He wanted to fire it back up a few days ago but now he has backed off of that. But if his 'experts' are misleading him they have an out if it is not as bad as they predict. Rock and a hard place for sure.

Great point, and I have considered that also. The thing is we have lost trust. Damn hard to know the truth with the propaganda we have been fed

Old Toot, thanks for the vote of confidence. The thing is I don't believe it is as bad as they say, simply because I believe they have an agenda.
I know people are dying and it is horrible for them and the families.
I simply believe the one size fits all solution is not the best way to go about this. The vulnerable should isolate and we should do all we can to help. Maybe turn empty hotels into quarantine centers.
To shut down everything makes no sense to me.
I live very rural and in a very sparsely populated state, yet we are shut down, we are low risk.
I also don't believe we shouldn't be driven by fear, I never make a good decision while afraid and most people don't either.
Also there is a reason I'm not in charge, I am a rip the band aid off rub dirt on it sorta guy....

There is a lot of available data to support it. Google something along the lines of "how many workers live pay check to pay check". It doesn't take rocket science to find it.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfr...ycheck-government-shutdown/#6042056e4f10

It may not take rocket science to find, but you haven't found it. The article says 78% of people "live paycheck to paycheck." And you're saying people who live paycheck to paycheck will never recover.

Neither of which I believe. You're saying 78% of people will never recover, and at the same time calling others "alarmist?"

Understood. So you conclude that all those people "will never recover?"

Tell you what smokepole, it is obvious that you are in this for an argument so rather than arguing I will refer to the old saying " the proof is in the pudding". Time will tell if I am right or not.

drover