COVID19 Update - Day 42

US Tests: 4,155178
US Cases: 799,717
US Deaths: 39,995
Worldwide Cases: 2,561,915
Worldwide Deaths: 177,200

Trump and his friends are dying to 're-open' the economy.  Well no, that's not quite accurate.  The truth is that they're eager to have OTHER PEOPLE die so we can re-open the economy.

This is not hyperbole:

The Texas leader [Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick] then doubled down on his grim argument for allowing people to be put at risk of death from COVID-19 to help the economy recover from the damage brought on by the outbreak – a proposal that was immediately met with a flood of criticism.

“What I said when I was with you that night is there are more important things than living,” Patrick told Fox News host Tucker Carlson, referring to when he first made the suggestion last month. “And that’s saving this country for my children and my grandchildren and saving this country for all of us.”

Just to make sure we all know the stakes, I want to call attention to this report from the Department of Health and Human services, which estimates that if we went out tomorrow and returned to life as usual (which is what the Cult of Trump seems to want), there would be 300,000 total deaths, and perhaps more:

A table accompanying the older planning document shows that based on HHS experts’ “best guess” calculations in early April, roughly a third of Americans could be infected and show symptoms and more than 300,000 could die over the duration of the pandemic if social distancing and other mitigation measures were to stop immediately. That is far below earlier estimates of 2.2 million deaths predicted by the influential Imperial College model and the 1.5 million to 2.2 million predicted by the White House had the virus gone unchecked. 

Three hundred thousand deaths without social distancing “would assume a very optimistic case fatality rate,” Jha said. “That’s not where the best estimates are today.”

I think most people are on the same page --- but just in case we're not, it seems obvious that if we can prevent ~300,000 deaths by shutting down the economy for a few months, we do it --- and we deal with the fallout by handing out money.

Aside from the moral imperative not to simply toss 300,000 lives out the window, there's also the fact that allowing those deaths (and many times more infections) is ALSO going to be a drag on the economy, so it's dubious to think that accepting those deaths is preferrable from an economic point of view.

No personal news today.