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I don't really know what you mean, but I'm assuming it's something along the lines of a recent tweet I saw by Cuomo: "My mother is not expendable. Your mother i
by rgifford 7y ago
I don't really know what you mean, but I'm assuming it's something along the lines of a recent tweet I saw by Cuomo:
"My mother is not expendable. Your mother is not expendable.
We will not put a dollar figure on human life.
We can have a public health strategy that is consistent with an economic one.
No one should be talking about social darwinism for the sake of the stock market."
The statistical value of human life is a figure somewhere between $6 - $10M used to weigh social and economic policy. Using it to write off a percentage of the population dying as the "cost of doing business" is standard practice in social and economic policymaking.
Non-existent testing infrastructure and late/poorly enforced lockdowns have me convinced the approach to covid-19 being taken by the states completely ignores our reality. We don't have China's population control, South Korea's testing infrastructure, or Italy's population density.
- altoidaltoid 7y agoSo your suggestion is...
- rgifford 7y agoSelectively quarantine at risk populations, segment the population and share non-overlapping access to public spaces and workspaces, work with large employers (esp. state run) to define new workplace procedures that limit transmission, run government programs to collect used N95 masks for sterilization and re-distribution, install checkpoints to prevent personal vehicles from traveling between cities... There's lots of nuanced strategies we could've taken. We settled on the simplest, most hysterical, least sustainable one.
- totony 7y agoVery much agreed with your stance. As far as I understand the hysteria surrounding the covid, people seem to forget that saving people is a cost analysis. Ideally the virus could be annihilated in a authoritarian regime with very heavy lock-downs. We should aim for a policy that fits with our society and not try to imitate regimes where other courses of actions are more viable (e.g. China has very good population control and thus can afford lock-downs, whereas Western nations have more emphasis on personal and civic responsibility and may have better ways of dealing with it). I would love to say I trust our government and the decision they made, but I'm afraid I don't. Imo we should prioritize helping at-risk population and allowing them to quarantine if needed, and let each person assess their own risk (with help) w/r to that virus and act accordingly, while making sure they have access to the resources they need. As a side note, this follows a trend I notice in society to treat people as sheep that cannot think for themselves and must be protected (which is warranted for some people in view of the latest hysteria).