Lives vs the Economy: The Toxic and Unnecessary Choice of Coronavirus By Theo E.J.Wilson
The Roman philosopher Seneca stated, “More things will scare us than crush us; we suffer more often in the imagination than reality.” Were we cowed and terrorized into a false choice? The narratives around the decision to either save lives or save the economy to stop the
Coronavirus, feel kind of Orwellian when you look at the consequences. Fear mongering and catastrophism, not seen since the days of the Y2K scare, blanket the major networks’ coverage of the war to stop the Coronavirus. I got to admit that the whole Y2K fiasco made me a skeptic, and I think healthily. The same insti-
tutions that told us the world’s computers would melt down once the clock struck midnight on January 1, 2000 are now telling us something even scarier 20 years later; that to stop the spread of a flu-like pandemic, we must send the world into economic freefall. I’m thinking, no! Of course, I don’t want a single person to die because of our lack of care, but lack of context can be deadly as well. The problem is that to defend the economic angle is to be seen as an ignorant, Trump-supporting troglodyte who thinks money means more than human life. That scared me for a while, until I realized that the two are interconnected. It’s not an either-or, it’s a both-and. Lives uprooted will be lives lost in due time. To prove that the modern world can survive a similar pandemic, I don’t have to go back that far: just one president ago. Under the Obama administration, from April 2009 to April 2010, the H1N1 virus ravaged the planet without nearly the same shock and awe. According to the CDC, the “Swine Flu” infected between 43.3 and 89.3 million Americans and caused an average of 274,304 hospitalizations and 12,469 deaths in this country. Some counts put it as high as 18,000. The global death tally could have been as high as 575,400 people, 151k on the low estimate. I don’t remember the world stopping, stay-at-home orders, and massive unemployment.
Denver Urban Spectrum — www.denverurbanspectrum.com – May 2020
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People would rebut with, “The mortality percentage for COVID-19 is exponentially higher than the Swine Flu.” That is until you realize that they’re not counting the cases the same way. COVID-19 relies on a hard count of positive cases, whereas H1N1 was extrapolated through the surveillance of positive lab confirmed cases, and multiplied via this method. If COVID-19 were extrapolated the same way, you’d have a much larger sample size to compare against the mortality rate, making this Coronavirus far less lethal. Perhaps the death rates would increase a little, but not the way people are rushing to the E.R. for the slightest cough. And then, you have the fact that the federal government is counting everyone who dies while infected with COVID-19 as a Coronavirus death. This makes the U.S. unique in this respect. For example, if your dad is hospitalized and dies because of a heart attack, but tested positive for asymptomatic COVID-19, it’s a Coronavirus death, not death by heart attack. Knowing this doesn’t change the fact that the TV scares the pants off of me every time I turn it on. I get the fear, especially when the virus strikes close to home. I knocked on my parents’ door, and found my father bedridden with body aches, a mild fever, and a mild dry cough. A chill ran through my body as
