Coronavirus: Thread

[grarpamp]

https://CovidChartsQuiz.com/


An Open Letter To The Person Who Gave Me COVID

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/an-open-letter-to-the-person-who-gave-me-covid/
by Thomas E. Woods via The Libertarian Institue / TomWoods.com

To the Person Who Gave Me the Virus:

    I have no idea who you are, but our paths almost surely crossed
last month in Las Vegas.

Even now I wouldn’t change a thing about that trip, by the way, which
was a blast.

The existence of the virus, it’s true, made my life a fraction of one
percent more dangerous than it was before.

But since I don’t have any mental disorders, I hadn’t calibrated my
risk tolerance so precisely that such a tiny change would make me
radically alter my life.

Naturally if you knew you were sick, you should have stayed home.

Of all the advice they’ve given—mask wearing, social distancing, and
all the rest—staying home when you're sick would do by far the most
good, yet we hear it urged upon us the least.

At the same time, The Hill reports that you can easily confuse the
symptoms of the virus for allergies, so it’s entirely possible not to
be aware that you’re contagious. I see no reason to assume bad will on
your part.
Tom Woods, Libertarian author and host of "The Tom Woods Show"

Every time I leave my house I am taking a risk. We all are. I don’t
blame you for the constraints imposed by reality.

If the chance of being struck by lightning increased tenfold tomorrow,
this would not affect my behavior in any way. Not being neurotic, I
don’t live my life as if the present rate of lightning strikes is
precisely as high as I can tolerate.

It has become almost impossible to have a rational conversation about
any of this.

For one thing, most people are shockingly misinformed. Ask the average
person what the likelihood is of someone in his age cohort needing to
be hospitalized for COVID, and his answer will be off by a factor of
10, if not 100. Guaranteed.

For that matter, I cannot believe how many people think masks are
accomplishing anything. The laughable "studies" on masks generally
assume what they set out to prove, and/or confine themselves to
strangely arbitrary timeframes, before explosions in COVID spread.

Dozens of countries have seen their COVID charts go almost vertical
after (not necessarily immediately after, but after) introducing
large-scale masking, which is what the charts would look like if masks
accomplished absolutely nothing. These places are ignored, because
nobody is told about them.

Meanwhile, there have been essentially zero COVID deaths in Sweden
over the past month, and the rest of Scandinavia is also doing very
well despite very little masking or other restrictions.

The world acts as if these countries do not exist. As usual with the
"you’re to blame for the virus" people, success stories like these are
of no interest, because there’s nobody they can demonize—and
demonizing people is their favorite pastime.

    My God. They’re just cancelling life. https://t.co/s7gRepVqxD
    — Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) August 10, 2021

The case of Nepal is interesting, too. After a lockdown that ended in
July 2020, they decided essentially to proceed as normal. They’re a
poor country, and they chose the radical, unheard-of approach of
overturning a policy that would have had them starving to death.

And guess what?

They’re doing fine.

"Public health officials" were stumped, but at this point who can be
surprised by that? What we laughingly call our "public health"
establishment has made fools of themselves during this entire fiasco.
Nepal is at 340 deaths per million. Compare that to locked-down
countries like the UK (1909), Spain (1756), Belgium (2170), or Peru
(5883).

Back in the United States, the Sun Belt spike of 2020 came down with
zero behavioral changes of any kind. The "COVID is your fault" people
are too determined to blame someone to show any curiosity about this,
even though it absolutely should evoke curiosity.

COVID comes and goes seasonally and regionally, and blows its way past
our silly masks and six-foot floor stickers.

With my friend Tim Scott, I created a website where people can test
their ability to determine which alleged mitigation measures
accomplished what. If they work, it should be easy and obvious to
choose which line on a graph represents a state or country that
implemented it and which line represents one that did not. So go
ahead. Try your hand at it. If any of the insanity accomplished
anything, it’ll be a breeze: CovidChartsQuiz.com

We have uncensored discussions of all this inside the Tom Woods Show
Elite, my increasingly indispensable private group.

Now it’s true: I was definitely laid up in bed for a while. But not a
single kid should have missed a single basketball practice to keep me
from getting sick. Imagine the selfishness involved in that kind of
demand.

Screw that.

And nor should you, mysterious Las Vegas person, feel sorry for me. I
don’t want you staying in your house! I don’t want you refusing to
live! I’m glad you were out living your life, enjoying things that
make life worth living. Merely preserving your biological existence is
unworthy of a human being.

This is especially so when we’ve been given no indication of precisely
what would constitute an all-clear. It’s all arbitrariness piled upon
more anti-scientific arbitrariness. We should all be inspired by the
words of Lord Sumption in the UK:

    "What sort of life do we think we are protecting? There is more to
life than the avoidance of death. Life is a drink with friends. Life
is a crowded football match or a live concert. Life is a family
celebration with children and grandchildren. Life is companionship, an
arm around one’s back, laughter or tears shared at less than two
meters. These things are not just optional extras. They are life
itself. They are fundamental to our humanity, to our existence as
social beings. Of course death is permanent, whereas joy may be
temporarily suspended. But the force of that point depends on how
temporary it really is."

Thank you, Las Vegas person, for refusing to be inhuman, for refusing
to be an automaton, and for saying yes to those things that bring us
joy and make our lives meaningful.