Time to reopen

The death rate from the coronavirus is nearly 2,000 per day, which is terrible, but that's a measure of mortality, not of infection rates. The purpose of soft quarantine was to mitigate the virus's spread so sick people don't overwhelm the hospitals (flatten the curve).

April 4th, about 3 weeks after we hit the panic button, and a week later than I predicted, daily new cases peaked. Since then we've tapered from a high of 34,000 new cases per day to 25,000. That's a slower dropoff than anyone wants, but it was never going to come down as fast as it rose. This bell curve will have a long tail.

We're beating this bug, and it's thanks to mitigation that the numbers aren't ten to a hundred times worse.

It's time to let businesses reopen. People want to work, and they don't want to stay cooped up all summer. It would take a massive redistribution of wealth, either through tax increases or currency devaluation, to sustain so many unemployed for an extended period of time. A crisis like this prove why fiscal responsibility is so important. Since the Great Recession, the national debt has risen $15 trillion. Keynesian economic policies have left us no fiscal flexibility to deal with a protracted crisis.

Ignore the noise about zealous cops, corrupt bureaucrats, and draconian governors. You knew of them already, and you know they're harder to get rid of than a tick in the nether regions. This virus is still real. The cases are real. The deaths are real.

An appropriate amount of fear has been cured into society. You can sense it when you're out in public, when you have to share the sidewalk with someone, that jitteriness. That being the case, I think we can return halfway to normal without creating a runaway outbreak. And if that works, we can drop restrictions entirely and let common sense govern the people.

The coronavirus took a lot of people by surprise. Even on March 13, when the president hit the panic button, it was difficult for me to see what the big deal was. At the time we had only 41 deaths. I thought it was an overreaction and I privately advocated doing nothing.

Good thing I wasn't setting policy. The sinister way this virus incubates in the body for up to 2 weeks without the host showing symptoms means once you first see it in the general population, it's already spread to thousands of other people. And those people are spreading it to others. If we had waited until the power of this virus was evident, a disaster would have been unavoidable.

Texas started reopening last Friday. If your state hasn't, it should at least be considering it. There will be local exceptions, like metro New York, but there's no city in America as dense or as reliant on public transportation as New York.

I want to know what you think. Leave a comment below and I'll reply as soon as I can.

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UPDATE (July 2021): If you're reading this after the worst of the pandemic has passed, I want to apologize for empowering the government against the people. I was wrong. Hopefully the bitter taste in my mouth will prevent me in the future from placing so much trust in those who manufacture and manipulate narratives to control others.