There is one thing I know for certain: What is going on in our country is unsustainable.
For all practical purposes, we have shut our nation down, and this, unfortunately, includes our economy.
In some areas of the country, Americans are being threatened with stiff fines or even jail time if they go outside or if they leave their homes. How long will it be before we have riots in the streets? When will the American people demand a new way of dealing with the coronavirus? Is what we are doing the best way to handle this emergency?
Sometime in February, when the coronavirus was just taking hold in China and Italy, Fox News interviewed a physician who supposedly had expertise in treating infectious diseases.
One of the reporters asked him if quarantining everyone was a good idea. “I don’t think so,” he replied. “From what I know about this virus, it won’t do much good to quarantine the population. This disease will just have to run its course.”
Naturally, this doctor was banned from Fox News and other media outlets because he was assumed to be an idiot. Well, along comes Sweden.
How are they handling the coronavirus? First, they have not shut their country’s economic engine down. People are still going to work.
Coronavirus is in the population, and many Swedes are dying, just like in other countries, but the death rate, so far, is no higher than countries that are implementing more stringent policies.
Then there is California. One might think that California would have as many problems as New York or Chicago. Before the President curtailed the travel between China and America, from 5,000 to 7,000 Chinese landed in California every day.
Yet, as of this writing, only 167 people have died. Contrast this with New York City where 1,096 people have died already, and the death toll is rising rapidly.
I do not claim to be any kind of infectious disease expert, but I can ask questions. Why is the death toll so much higher in New York than in California?
Could it be that the disease swept through California before we knew it was in America, and did the citizens of California build up an immunity?
I don’t have the slightest idea, but when the post mortem of this pandemic is written, it will be interesting to see how Sweden did. Did more people die because the Swiss government did practically nothing, or were Sweden’s numbers about what one would expect from a regular flu season?
According to the National Center for Health Statistics, 2, 813, 503 people die each year in the United States. Of that number, approximately 49,000 deaths are attributed to the flu. The leading killer, of course, is heart disease which claims 647,000 lives each year.
What is happening in our great country today is unsustainable. How long this can go on may be open to some debate, but we have literally shut our country down economically. People are losing their jobs, small businesses are closing their doors, and we are being told to “shelter in place” or face a fine or jail time.
Radical measures have been taken to give every American some financial assistance which may be good for the short run, but how in the world do we pay this money back?
The President, who is doing everything that he possibly can to get us through this crisis, has extended the “Coronavirus Guidelines for America” through April 30. His goal today is to save lives. However, the cure may be worse than the disease. How long can we keep the country’s economic engine shut down without doing permanent damage to our economy?
In my judgment, a crashed economy will cause a lot more deaths than the coronavirus. Let’s all pray that we can get back to work soon.
The word “depression” cannot be in our vocabulary.
