China and then Italy have given Americans a 50 day lead to prepare for COVID-19. The vitality of the disease is high so crowds spread it easily and quickly. I highly recommend you watch epidemiologist Michael Osterholm on Joe Rogan. It’s airborne and durable so it doesn’t die off quickly. During the Chinese New Year, 40,000 families gathered for a pot luck dinner and it was the gas on this fire.
The disease is obviously bad, but playing a central roll in deaths in China and Italy were the total overwhelming of local healthcare systems. A lack of staff, ventilatiors, beds and other resources led to a lot of casualties. The best way to cut the spread of a disease is through “social distancing.” Diseases in kids drop massively during a Christmas break. It’s not panic or mass hysteria. It has a precedent in past pandemics. It’s partly why the Spanish Flu killed 100 million and the next deadliest pandemic killed 3 million.
While America has a good healthcare system compared to China and Italy, we obviously have problems or Bernie wouldn’t be as popular as he is. Public health officials have warned for decades that our hospitals are not prepared for a pandemic.
Anyone that organizes an event is now faced with a choice: Keep the revenue and risk making attendees and staff sick. This leads to potential liability issues knowing the information we have from the past two months. Mainly, it’s an ethical choice: can the organizer live with the consequences of losing lives to keep their revenue?
The answer is overwhelmingly no. For the NCAA and the NBA, they’re willing to sacrifice millions for the good of their communities and employees. No one in the government ordered these greedy capitalists to take this action.
To anyone that believes government is necessary to function in a crisis, look into the fiasco of testing kits. At every level, government has been unable to distribute the tests. That’s not even complicated biology. That’s logistics, and it should have been done long before this month. Meanwhile, the Cleveland Clinic developed a new test in nine days that cuts the test time from 2 days to 8 hours.
Having researched this for days now, I’ve changed my mind. I think COVID-19 is a pandemic that poses a serious threat to the lives of a lot of people. Through social distancing, voluntary sacrifices by individuals and corporations, and free market solutions, we can avoid the disasters of China and Italy and save a lot of lives.
