COVID-19: after 'flatten the curve'

Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) - respirator mask

MEDIA CREDIT: 3M.com

The Great Suppression

(Excerpt) "The lockdowns were presented to us under the need to 'flatten the curve' for hospital capacity, but there isn’t one curve and we didn’t have enough information even to say where one city was on any curve. There were some days of difficulty in hot spots but many hospitals in the country, due to the order that they not do elective surgeries, started furloughing workers. The reality of many empty hospitals in the middle of a pandemic was too much to process. So we spent the next two weeks searching for new justifications to keep the lockdown in place. Those started to sound affected and even fraudulent very quickly.

What’s important about the three-phase process that [President] Trump enumerated with no set time timetable is that it flips the burden of proof. We have suddenly gone from a world in which governors have presumed that cracking down, forbidding, suppressing, denouncing, shutting down, arresting, and jailing are presumed to be good medicine, to a world in which we treat a virus as a disease to mitigate and the suppressors have to justify their actions else face the wrath of the tens of millions of victims. In many ways, it was a brilliant move. In short, the hounds have been called off. Let us not underestimate what this could mean.

Another important point about the three-phase plan: it is focused on the facts of the case. Not model-based predictions. Not someone’s ideology. Not political posturing. Not the fallacy of authority. The opening is based on the on-the-ground realities. The facts have never justified the suppression. Nor do they justify continued suppression for one hour more. The facts will set us free....

Business confidence has been shattered. It will be a long time before trust returns, to say nothing of confidence. We need an ironclad promise from our political leaders that this will not and cannot ever happen again. We won’t get that, so as a proxy we need public opinion to rage and for every voice of suppression to experience the fallout. Meanwhile, we are rediscovering what disease mitigation looks like in a free society. The vulnerable isolate voluntarily. Medical professionals get to work. We do our best not to destroy life functioning. The politicians bow out (emphasis added.)

The main point is that there is a tomorrow, and tomorrow can be and will be better than today. Let us learn. Let us speak. Let us act. Let us remember our values – we are brave and free – and never permit society and the economy... to be attacked this way again."

We have survived the Great Suppression."

MEDIA CREDIT: Jeffery A. Tucker, 4.16.2020

..

GIVE ME A MOMENT a lifestyle

Subscribe FREE (see: upper right column) for new posts. Reader-referred topics are welcomed and considered. Comments here are disabled. Readers may contact the blogger by email: givemeamomentblog@gmail.com

Post No. 308

..