People: It’s not an either/or choice between social isolation and the economy. That’s a fake choice Trump and his followers are conning you into. 

If you go back to work now, you don’t save the economy at the expense of a “few” lives. You potentially kill hundreds of thousands and “There will be no normally functioning economy if our hospitals are overwhelmed and thousands of Americans of all ages, including our doctors and nurses, lay dying because we have failed to do what’s necessary to stop the virus.” That quote is, by the by, not from some Democrat. but Republican Rep. Liz Cheney.

We still don’t even know how many people actually have the disease. Here, in Buncombe county, North Carolina, I hear every day from folks who think they may have coronavirus, but still can’t get tested. Indeed, testing rates for COVID-19  have fallen by 30% in the last week.

Why? Because, under VP Pence US testing remains fouled up.  Until we know how many people actually have the virus, we can’t possibly make intelligent decisions about reopening the economy. 

Even sensible Republicans who want to reopen the economy, like Sen. John Kennedy, say, “If I were king for a day … I would concentrate on three things: testing, testing and testing. There are tens of thousands, maybe millions of people walking around with the virus without symptoms, they may never have symptoms. Unfortunately they’re contagious as hell.”

Exactly.

If you go back to work, the beach, your church now, you don’t win the economy. You lose lives and jobs. You’re playing a lose-lose game

So, let’s play this game. Let’s say we LIBERATE the country and one in two people get the virus in the next six months. Herd immunity here we come the hard way. Of those, one in five people get sick enough they must go to the hospital. In the States, 4.3% of virus victims die. Let’s throw in all the people who will die of other conditions because they can’t get the care they need because there’s literally no room left for them in the hospital to round it up to 5%. 

Now, go to your Facebook friends page and start playing. My Facebook page has my friends in columns of two, which makes it easy. Everyone on the right gets it. Lucky them. Then I count down the column and every fifth person gets a no-expenses paid trip to the hospital. Sorry about that Mike, Kathy, Dick, Larry, and so on. Finally, I get to the 20th person, they get the grand prize: They’re dead. Sorry about that Sherrianne, George, Joe, and on and on. 

I know lots of people. I have 829 Facebook friends. People I knew in high school; people I met thanks to science-fiction fandom, gaming, the Society for Creative Anachronism, people from church; and lots of people I know from work. I’ll lose 41 of them. 

Of course I might very well lose my life as well. Or, you yours. 

Oh, and the economy? It still goes straight to hell. 

In this scenario, tens of millions are out of work, not because of government dictates but because of sickness and death. It’s not just the people in the hospital. There’s the people out taking care of sick family and friends, those burying the dead, and the people who realized there’s no way in hell they’re taking a chance of getting sick, and so on.

Either way the economy’s awful and it’s going to stay that way. There is no fast bounce back. Anyone who tells you otherwise doesn’t know better, is lying to you, or trying to sell you something. If we reopen prematurely, without accurate infection data and tracking, the only difference is we have a lot more sick and dead people. 

So, thank you. I’m not playing this game. You shouldn’t either. No matter what Trump or his sock puppets tell you Stay Home if you possibly can. If you must be out, then take precautions.