Maggie's Farm

Well, yes and no. There was some value in trying to flatten the curve early on because our hospitals were not ready and if hospitals become overwhelmed many more people will die who could have been saved.

One counter argument to this is that people die anyway so why harm the economy? But it misses the real point of overwhelmed hospitals. Doctors and nurses are human and if they had to face that choice literally where they push a sick person into the hallway to die slow and agonizingly while they choose someone else to live that a the end of their shift or the end of their week it would harm them, change them perhaps forever. AND maybe even more significantly everyone would lose faith in the hospitals, doctors and government.

To some extent this happened in NY City. For some reason it is not getting a full hearing by the press but the city sent people to die in nursing homes AND they knew it would kill others in the nursing homes who did not yet have the disease AND now they are making it their plan to go after the nursing homes and the care givers as though somehow it was their fault. Before this is over there will be lawyers getting rich and people going to jail and most likely it will be all the wrong people. And that is just a tiny sample of what overwhelming the system does. It could be (and may well have been) worse.

When we open up the country there will be a second wave of deaths and I do expect that other cities, other hospitals will be overwhelmed and more unnecessary deaths will occur. Followed by more lawsuits, more finger pointing and scapegoats. We are still not really ready for a pandemic.

Or common sense and science.

The simple explanation is certain places like NY were heavily "invaded" by people who had Covid-19. Most of the U.S. was not. The quarantine/shutdown kinda froze that situation and thus the deaths were mostly where the sick people were walking around and mingling with the locals. Once the country is opened up people will travel more and mingle again and eventually the virus will get everywhere and kill .1-.3% of those infected. We have to wait a year to 18 months to know the full effect of this virus.