You first, Senator Johnson. You go open up “parts of the economy” first, since you’re so open to death.

Yes, today Senator Johnson bemoaned the sickened economy and worried about its fate since an economy’s death is catastrophic, your colleague’s death is simply a part of life, as he wrote in USA Today:

What more people are saying is that as we learn more about COVID-19, we should evaluate the total societal cost of this awful disease and try to put things into perspective.

Each year, approximately 48,000 Americans commit suicide and an estimated 67,000 die of a drug overdose. That level of individual despair has occurred in a strong economy with near-record low levels of unemployment in virtually every demographic.

We absolutely should evaluate the societal costs, just as soon as we know the human costs, so we can weigh the dangers on each side. Johnson believes he’s already seen enough and is talking about 48,000 committing suicide and 67,000 drug overdoses – which, added together, is getting closer to the approximations that doctors are making now as to the total number of dead, somewhere between 100k and 200k, unless it gets much worse and is 2 million.

That is the point, we don’t know what “human cost” we’re dealing with yet, so it is not the point to evaluate the economic cost, either.

Every premature death is a tragedy, but death is an unavoidable part of life. More than 2.8 million die each year — nearly 7,700 a day. The 2017-18 flu season was exceptionally bad, with 61,000 deaths attributed to it. Can you imagine the panic if those mortality statistics were attributed to a new virus and reported nonstop?

Senator? Because we don’t know the human costs, we can’t know that the virus won’t kill one million people. We just don’t know. But we cannot start opening up the economy now. We know you fear the economy’s death, but no matter how sick the economy gets, it is immortal and there is a science full of treatments for it when it’s sick, none of which can be said about families or communities that get this virus.

It is always the conservatives.

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Peace, y’all

Jason

[email protected] and on Twitter @MiciakZoom