Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire How many will be enough?

Over the last few weeks, folks here at the campfire have pretty much divided into two camps:

1-this disease is really bad, and we must do everything in our power to slow it down or stop it.

B- this disease is over blown,, and we are overreacting.

So I ask, at what number will you change your mind? We're at under 10,000 as I type this. There undoubtedly will be more. When it's all said and done, what number will you say either it wasn't as bad as I thought, we shouldn't have shut down like we did? Or, that was worse than I thought, it's a good thing we shut everything down?

Most of the folks saying it's no big deal are trolling, and the rest aren't smart enough to understand the concept of exponential growth as it pertains to an infectious disease.

I think it will be hard to know. Some people are comparing it to the annual flu situation and its attendant death rates. However, in a normal year there has not been the self isolation, social distancing etc. that is now underway. This is the classic "but for" case. It is impossible to actually know how many deaths would happen but for the extraordinary efforts that are currently underway.

Math will provide the answer you seek........

3.4% percent projected mortality by the WHO. 2 million deaths projected worldwide.... they have been adjusting the numbers down daily... "exponentially" down,
Maybe if we trusted the number crunchers

My state is at around 1.2% mortality.
The "projections" are mostly BS.

In the late 1940s, polio outbreaks in the U.S. increased in frequency and size, crippling an average of more than 35,000 people each year.

Let us get some perspective on this relative to other infectious diseases we have dealt with in the USA...

POLIO
https://www.cdc.gov/polio/what-is-polio/polio-us.html
https://u-s-history.com/pages/h980.html

1. Polio hammered mostly children.
2. Population in 1940 was 142million, roughly half today's.
3. So, think of a disease that crippled _another_ 70,000 children every year like clockwork.
4. Yet leadership of the USA did not crater our economy due to polio and start Great Depression II: Electric Boogaloo.

TUBERCULOSIS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tuberculosis_in_the_USA_1861-2014.png
https://u-s-history.com/pages/h980.html
1. Tuberculosis mortality rate for USA in 1870 was ~375/100k/ year.
2. That is an annual death rate of 0.00375.
3. In 1870 that means 144,594 deaths a year and a similar rate for decades before that.
4. In 2020 America that would be roughly 1,275,000 folks dying _each year_ of TB.
5. Yet the leadership of the USA did not try to halt our economy and society (with what will be horrifying consequences) due to TB.

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I would need to see some multiple greater than one of 1,275,000 deaths _of_ Kung Flu, not just _with_ Kung Flu in the USA alone to justify the economy & society-destroying measures our leadership has imposed.




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Yes, yes, that all requires numeracy and common sense to digest. I do not doubt many will regurgitate it and instead quaff the Kung Flu Koolaid to show they are members in good standing of the Korona Kult.

But the rest of ya'll can take some comfort that at some time in the past the USA was ruled and populated by men and women with some courage in the face of mortality.