Obi-Wan Nihilo wrote: Both of you bought into the panic, got scared by the word, "pandemic", and refuse to consider that this isn't a very fatal bug, no matter how contagious it is.
No, I keep telling you that I didn't buy into any panic or get scared. I originally thought that this was overblown just like you. I compared it to the flu and dismissed it, just like Trump. But then a friend of mine who is a surgeon informed me of dangers that go well beyond the death rate. As I've said over and over, I'm not as concerned about the deaths as I as with overwhelming the health care system.
I am going to work every day, 50 hours a week, and interacting with the public. I haven't changed my life one bit. I'm not wearing a mask. I'm not scared or panicking. You can continue to use these words if you wish, but they are your own fantasies, disconnected from reality, I assure you. It's a caricature of your own making.
Obi-Wan Nihilo wrote: It's only absurd when you make up my position. I said upthread that it wasn't a binary choice between "less fatal" and "flatten the curve". I've repeatedly said that both things can be true, and that it's quite clear that both are.
Jesus christ . . . then why do you insist that my position has been "totally proven wrong" when you still allow for my position as one possibility?? And not merely a possibility, but "quite clear" that it's true??
You have not said this "repeatedly." You haven't said this until just now. You accuse us of getting your position wrong, when you've been downplaying the success in flattening the curve in order to emphasize that the virus was less fatal.
Lethality has never been the issue. People can require hospitalization even for things that aren't lethal. You are conflating two issues with this "it's not a binary choice" business. Even if this disease didn't kill a single person, it would still require the measures that have been taken if it had the potential to overwhelm the health care system. Health care is finite. Surpassing that limit is the same as taking health care away from everyone else--which is intolerable.
So it doesn't matter if you think the threat was overblown, because your assessment is based on a metric that is irrelevant to the goal of the actions taken. You're right: it wasn't to save lives (at least not directly; that's a corollary benefit). Therefore, you can't prove it was overblown by asserting that it wasn't as lethal as advertised--an assertion which you can't prove anyway, regardless of its logical worth or lack thereof.
And the reason you can't prove this assertion: if (as you admit) both factors could be in play, then you have no idea how much each contributes to the reduced projections. Indeed, what evidence do you have that it was "less lethal"
at all, if that assertion is entirely dependent upon numbers of infections that are lower than expected? It's entirely possible that the virus was every bit as lethal as we thought, but the social distancing worked
better than projected. You keep saying that social distancing was already cooked into the numbers, as if that shields you from this counter point, but
this was a projection, too.
That could have been the factor that was underestimated, instead of the lethality. Indeed, lethality doesn't even factor into the projections of how many people were going to get it in the first place. (Bringing us full circle with the points above.)
Your argument is a circular reasoning, logical fallacy. Pure feels.
Joe Biden … putting the Dem in dementia since (at least) 2020.