> In the United States, our death count is skewed by a handful of cities, some of which represent some of the top destinations in the world. New York City gets

> In the United States, our death count is skewed by a handful of cities, some of which represent some of the top destinations in the world. New York City gets 65 million visitors a year. Los Angeles get something like 50 million. All of South Korea — never mind Seoul — gets just under 18 million. And let's not even talk about New Zealand. Other than the hobbits, who's going there. Ridiculous and unfounded claim. Global travel has basically been shut down since the pandemic started, people aren’t going to New York for vacation right now.. The continued spread is not from mass tourism, but from our own failures. > In the United States our numbers are skewed by places like NYC and LA. The rest of the country is doing much, much better, overall. Sure, overall the dense cities suffer the most and rural places are doing better relative to US average. However, extremely dense cities in other countries (Taipei, Hong Kong, Seoul) have handled it order of magnitude better. So your point here is moot, even in NYC and LA were the only focal points they are still way worse than the global average. > Moreover, we're a free country. Yes, I realize that, on paper, South Korea, Thailand, New Zealand are also. But the kind of contact tracing and other measures that has gone on in some of these countries is simply unacceptable here, and rightly so. Contact tracing is your bounds for freedom? There are plenty of ways in which most people in the US are not free. Saying that we're much freer than other countries who are "free on paper" seems like American exceptionalism at it's finest. > I stand by what I've said. We are destroying this country in an effort to "save lives." Your suggestion is what? More destruction? You can beat this virus without destroying everything, it's simple really you just pay people to stay home. You put the economy on ice, beat the virus hard and fast and then open again. This is what New Zealand did and it worked. Doing half measures will only prolong the hurt and make the damage worse. If we had taken this more seriously and done better contact tracing and lock-downs earlier we wouldn't have a binary choice of "destroy your economy or let hundreds of thousands of people die". The problem is that now in the US it's too late, so all we're left with are terrible options. > So, when you say that the idea of death being inevitable is simply wrong, what exactly are you basing that on? Can you answer that? Where do you come up with your assertion? We have empirical evidence that death is avoidable: South Korea COVID deaths: <1000 Vietnam COVID deaths: <50 NZ COVID deaths: <50 Taiwan COVID deaths: <25 Hong Kong COVID deaths: <150 If you don't let the virus spread, people don't die. Simple as that. We're the richest nation in the history of the world (and supposedly the greatest) and we've let >300,000 people die of this virus, how's that for American exceptionalism.