On: Secret gyms and the economics of prohibition

[TheGrim-888]

You could make the same argument about the normal flu, pre-covid, which kills many tens of thousands of people in the US every year. The normal flu has killed many multiples the number of people that WWII did. And we never completely locked down the country for the flu. We never explicitly destroyed the economy for the flu.

What about how many people other infectious diseases kill? What about how many people other sources of preventable deaths kill? Why haven't we thrown away our civil liberties in the past, or destroyed our economy, to tackle those problems?

[ameister14 → TheGrim-888]

The flu, in a normal year, kills 35,000 people. Coronavirus, with all the steps we've already taken to stop it, has killed 5 times that.

If we had not taken steps to stop it, the projection was millions dead. That is why.