"about externalities" hence asking if (you now) support socialized medicine. Again, I dont need to make the connection. It's obvious isnt it? "pointing a gun a

"about externalities" hence asking if (you now) support socialized medicine. Again, I dont need to make the connection. It's obvious isnt it? "pointing a gun at people is an apt parallel" parallel to what? Not wearing a fake face mask? The face masks are giving the people that need a real mask[1] a false sense of safety. It's entirely possible, even likely that the effect is negative. Comparing virus transmission to a direct threat to life shows frankly that you are not making a serious argument. Think I'm wrong about that? Why not attach some numbers to your example? "there were 131,858 pneumonia deaths in 2014-2015 as a way to make it seem like the COVID-19 death count is in line with that?" Yes. Ignoring the over-counting, it's roughly 2x a normal flu. Note you dont even try to get a # for non-covid flu/pneumonia for the pandemic part of 2019/2020. It's a glaring omission, I pointed it out in my first comment (and many before that) because, nobody will do it. Why is that? "With that, the disease would have a fatality rate of 133K/15M, which is 0.89%." Yep. But it's even lower. The error bars on your estimate are easily >20%[2]. People have pre-exising antibodies. Why ignore that video I posted? Or my comment that "The only real measure is excess deaths"? Why are we not talking about excess deaths? Are you going to argue that all COVID-19 deaths are because of the virus? It's clearly not true, and that is officially acked. I posed that explanation, it's common knowledge. "how insanely infectious this disease is (where any reasonable estimate would have this thing going through virtually the entire population without extreme social distancing)." We flattened the curve. I assume agree. Germany is the only country that comes close to our death stats. Now you are going to claim that the virus isnt going to infect most people? 1.78M deaths! Seriously, someone should make a list of forum COVID-19 death predictions. These predictions of millions dead are 100% incorrect, but some people keep making them. It's not established that anything we did significantly changed the outcome, certainly not using fake masks. There is even a country where the masks were banned. "no offense" None taken, it's pretty common to try and label people. If the socialists get their way, we can label everything a negative externality, cant we? ----Why not use the masks forever?---- [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23730633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23730633 [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/05/cdc-and-states-are-misreporting-covid-19-test-data-pennsylvania-georgia-texas/611935/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/05/cdc-and-s...