Re: Don't break my laws but I can break your laws
I'm completely serious, and not a dick. The UN says 58.4 million people died in 2019, practically zero of them from COVID-19. You can have your choice of figures for individual diseases contributing to that figure, but you might find the WHO figure of 646,000 for "plain old" seasonal flu to be a useful measuring stick. The simple fact is that there are a lot of humans, which means there are a lot of humans dying. If you wanted to start from a demography-neutral point of view, there are 8 billion humans and we live 80 years; pop quiz: how many die each year of all causes? (Answer: 100 million -- the actual figure is lower because recent and ongoing population growth means the population is relatively younger than a steady-state one would be). Citing seemingly horrifying figures is pure propaganda; if 2.5 million newborns were dying of COVID-19 every year, that would represent a very alarming 4% contribution to infant mortality. The truth is nothing like that.
COVID-19 kills almost exclusively those who are reaching or have reached the end of their natural lives. There are a lot of ways to die at age 80 that are negligible hazards at age 10 or age 40. The flu, for one. Slip on a patch of ice and land on your arse; break your hip and never recover. Shovel the snow off your lane and work just a bit too hard; drop dead of a heart attack. I could go on. Pneumonia has been a common killer of the elderly since we lived in the trees, and the addition of one more pathogen capable of causing it will have no long-term effect on our life expectancy.
Fact: Sars-CoV2 is a negligible hazard that does not warrant disruptive policies. Fact: Those policies have been as ineffective as they have been destructive, just as they were when tried against H1N1 a century earlier. Fact: You, like every other living human, carry antibodies against H1N1 precisely because those measures do not work. Fact: You and your offspring will one day carry antibodies against Sars-CoV2 for the same reason.
But go ahead, you've already ruined hundreds of millions of lives, lives of people who have no statistically meaningful likelihood of dying of COVID-19. You may as well double down on your insane propaganda. Admitting that you were wrong would not only force you to accept the heavy burden of guilt, it would open the floodgates to countless lawsuits. Best to just wait until it feels "safe" (i.e., you won't be shamed by your fellow propagandists) to resume business as usual and silently agree never again to speak of this disgraceful episode. Just like everyone did in 1921.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
