RE: **Covid-19 Discussion Thread** - unmoderated - ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK!
A lot of this stuff is Public Health 101, attempting to control the spread of a pandemic. I understand where you're coming from and don't particularly want to argue about it, but if Trump had stepped out and asked for cooperation from the nation in taking some basic safety measures we wouldn't be where we are now, with another 9/11's worth of dead every day and a half. Remember when 9/11 was a national tragedy, a horrendous loss of life? How long does it take to read 260,000 names?
You want to hear draconian measures? Say someone carrying Ebola gets off of a plane and out into the population, or smallpox jumps out of a lab somewhere, something like that. First, you find Patient Zero. You grab him and isolate him hardcore, and there's nothing voluntary about it. You then debrief him about his movements. You take his phone and check the GPS to be sure you know *everywhere* he has been. You find every single person that he interacted with, and who interacted with them, and you isolate them all, every single blessed one of them, forcibly if you have to. You also set up ring barriers around the hot spot, probably three layers of them, and *everyone* in those areas is forced to stay in those areas, period, NO exceptions. At All. You surround the outer ring with the Army and make it clear that as a matter of National Security, anyone who thinks that the rules don't apply to them and tries to sneak out will be SHOT. Period. If you missed some of Patient Zero's contacts and they are out of the zone and another outbreak starts, you do exactly the same thing again. Find them, isolate, trace contacts, and set up another set of rings, same terms.
That's what you do if it's a really no-s--- serious pandemic germ loose. There are other steps, and that's the pretty high end of it - but you can bet that the Pentagon has contingency plans on file for exactly that. You do this so that if you have a wildfire epidemic only the people in the inner circle die, or the second ring, or the third. You fight like unholy hell to prevent the outbreak from getting out into the population at large, because every single leaker has the potential to kill thousands of people. You stamp it out on the front end, because if you screw around and let things slide you wind up where we are now, setting new records day by day for the number infected in a day, hospitalized in a day, dead in a single day.
I'm not saying that sort of thing is needed here, but what I am saying is that asking people to stay home, wash their hands often, and wear a mask isn't creeping fascism, it's doing what it takes to get the rate of infection down to where the hospitals are not completely overrun. Those temporary Covid wards that they built in parks and hospital parking decks are not viable during winter in the Dakotas, and the entire Midwest is rapidly approaching the point where there is no room in the hospitals, and if you have a heart attack or a car wreck it's gonna be tough cheese. There are going to be family Thanksgiving and Christmases that kill their own family members because they refused to listen, probably thousands of them. Watch how the numbers start to spike a couple of weeks after Thanksgiving, just like they did in the Dakotas after they insisted on going ahead with the Sturgis motorcycle rally, which is the root of the infection spike happening there right now, as well as in surrounding states.
No one involved in running the fight against Covid-19 is making a power grab. Freedom and independence are wonderful things, but "You can't tell me what to do! I know my rights!" isn't an appropriate answer to "Don't stick your hand in the blender, you'll get hurt really badly" - or to "Please don't travel and have big family gatherings while an infectious disease is spreading". Don't screw around and infect your Dad or Granny because you miss them and want to see them, 'cause if they die you won't see them again, period.
(This post was last modified: 11-20-2020 11:47 PM by UAB Band Dad.)
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