Addressing the Bad Arguments About COVID

This is probably a fruitless exercise since this really addresses the incurably ignorant more than the rest of us, but I thought I would address a few of the arguments aimed at diminishing the seriousness of the pandemic.

• This is just another flu.  We didn't shut down during seasonal flus so why now?  No, it is not just another flu.  

• More Americans have been killed the last month by COVID than by any other cause of death.  That ain't the flu, well, not since epidemics in 1918 and 1957 or so.  
• The whole idea of shutting things down is not just to prevent mass deaths but to save the health care system.  The flattening the curve bit is to keep the number of sick below the threshold at which the hospitals will be maxxed out.  The shortage of personal protective equipment [PPE] and the possibility of not having enough ventilators, ICU spaces, hospital beds raises the risks of a collapse of the system.  This would not only lead to more deaths now but make recovery incredibly hard.
• Which gets to a fundamental reality in this pandemic--doctors, nurses, other caregivers are dying.  This does not happen in a big way in a regular flu cycle.  
• Hey, you folks are counting people who died at home--we have no idea if they died from COVID.  There are direct and indirect effects.  People die from the disease itself, people die from how the disease interacts with pre-existing conditions, and people die from other conditions because they can't/won't get treatment in the middle of a pandemic.  These are all deaths that would not have happened otherwise.  So, dead is dead, whether it is direct or indirect.  
• Hey, I am ok with taking the risks, it is none of your business a.k.a. FREEDOM.  While there is a heap of moral philosophy pondering individual versus collective responsibility, the point here is simply that one's behavior does reverberate.  That if a person takes more risks, one not only risks one's own health but those they interact, those that interact with those people, and so on AND one endangers the doctors/nurses by creating more work for them, filling beds, using ventilators, stressing out everyone.  
• Update: one more: hey, it is only 45,000 or so... not so bad.  Well, that is essentially one month and it would have been far worst had we not shut things down (even if it was done inconsistently).  What we are seeing now is in some ways the best case scenario given where things were on April 1st.  But this best case scenario sucks.  And if folks had moved faster, far fewer people would be dead.  

Of course, the reality is that much of this "opposition" to stay-at-home stuff is performative--funded by Betty DeVos and others seeking to undermine Democrats, seeking to open markets up even as it risks the lives of others.  Polls show that much more Americans support stay-at-home rules than those who are opposed, despite how much the media is exaggerating the opposition. 

So, why argue against these specious arguments?  Mostly because we have plenty of time to rail against the actors of Bad Faith and the party of Bad Faith.  And I can't help myself.