I had someone asked me recently why I feel the way I do about the ‘Rona (The Corona Virus). Here’s what I told them:
The corona-virus is very real and a lot of people I know have been sick and people I know have died. It is very sad and it’s obviously awful. Death sucks. Period. Let me repeat for those in the back, I do not question if this is a real virus.
My issue is how the government is handling this.
To date there have been 6.55 million people in the US that have tested positive, and 194k total deaths in the US from COVID. That is 1.995% of the total population that have tested positive and total death rate to total population of .0591% (if in fact all the data is 100% accurate). And of those who have tested positive, 2.961% of those people have died (I won’t get into age groups or pre-existing here).
The first response from this person was… Well how many deaths are acceptable? That is a fair question, but obviously a question only a moron asks when it comes to a global pandemic like this. (Like any normal human being would put an actual number to it. It is a pandemic ya turd… people are going to die.) But… here was my response:
Last year the CDC defined that there were 16 million+ people in the US that we’re diagnosed with a disease caused by smoking which resulted in 480,000+ deaths in the United States alone. (And 7 million deaths per year worldwide.)
For fun let’s look at those numbers…
Annual diseases caused by smoking to the entire US population 4.875%
Annual deaths caused by smoking, .1462% of the total US population
**More than double that of COVID**
And to be fair in our comparisons the number of people that got a disease from smoking and died who died is 3%
Here’s the kicker…
The government not only does nothing to stop this… They actually tax these products and make around $12.46 billion per year on the sales of these products. Let that sink in. Our government knowingly makes over $12 billion a year on a product that infects and kills at more than twice the rate of the corona virus. Yet they do nothing to stop the sale of these consumer products.
For those of you who want to keep score… for the ‘Rona they make laws that make masks mandatory, define essential businesses, shut down schools, put thousands out of work and and put us trillions in debt. For tobacco products they raise taxes each year and make companies put a decal on their product letting people know that their product kills you.
While that is bad enough… Now consider this. If they eliminated tobacco products (saving hundreds of thousands of lives per year) the govt would lose out on a potential of $12 billion per year in tax revenue. Sucks right? Instead… The government has chosen to spend over $2.2 trillion (and will be up to $4T) on combating the effects of the corona virus to our country that they themselves inflicted. …and we the people are going to have to pay for that.
So to be blunt, no I don’t trust them when they tell me what I should do and how I should be following their orders. No I don’t think it’s right to shut down schools, make mandatory rules or to define essential jobs for one thing and not for something proven to be worse. Could some of these things for the ‘Rona prevent deaths, possibly. But my question doesn’t change, why is the ‘Rona their only focus? Why are they not looking at other areas that have had higher death rates annually for the last century? Why now? Why this?
Nothing. Adds. Up.
It is nonsensical to put this much of an effort towards something that we cannot control and to put negative effort towards something we can control.
They have had the power to stop millions of deaths over the past hundred years (cigarettes) but have chosen not to because they make money on it. So I guess we will just wait until they have a vaccine for the ‘Rona that we will have to pay for as well. Then things will start changing in the right direction… because they will have found a way to make money off of it.
Now maybe you can see why I have a hard time trusting the government and don’t understand why we are shutting down the world for this.
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