TL:DR - I'm apparently a heartless, uncaring, and completely insensitive bastard. I'm also tired of a threat actually being overblown. Is the Wuhan Flu Virus potentially something that can cause serious health issues, if you catch it? Yep, can't argue with that. Has this whole thing turned into a completely overblown response to evolution in action? (Or what actually was an investigation into a real virus that got out of control, and they won't admit it.)
Well ... that's for you to personally decide. I'm just going to throw a few things out here. Real, honest to goodness, hard data. Just the numbers. You draw your own conclusions.
The US had 3.75 million births in 2019.
The US had 2.85 million deaths in 2019.
The US had a population of 329.6 million in 2019.
Based upon sheer numbers, every person in the country had a 0.86% chance of dying. Yes, I know individual factors matter regarding your entire risk factor, some higher, some lower. That's irrelevant to this.
As per the CDC, on Dec 31, 2020, there were 350,616 deaths in the US due to Covid.
As per the CDC, on Dec 31, 2020, there had been 20,040,828 cases reported.
That's a 98.3% SURVIVAL rate, with it's 1.7% death rate if you got it, and a total increase in the death rate to 0.97%.
Things peaked in the middle of January. In a NORMAL year, 7,800 people die EVERY SINGLE DAY. We're right now adding 700 to that total, so 8,500 people die every day.
Now, I'm seeing huge numbers being reported from India. Holy crap, they're reporting more than 5,000 people per day are dying there from Covid. That's a number people can relate to.
India had 26,900,000 births in 2019.
India had 9,780,000 deaths in 2019.
India had a population of 1,350,000,000 in 2019. For those of you in Rio Linda, that's four times the number of people that live in the United States.
If an additional 5,000 people in India die per day, that puts them from 0.72% to 0.85%. Meaning that they'll STILL have 15 MILLION more people born every year than die, while here in the US, we'll have half a million more people born every year than die.
When exactly do we get to decide for ourselves that it's an acceptable risk and live our lives like we really don't give two shits?