LETTER: Is lockdown worth collateral damage?
What do you think of the “land of the free” now? Our state’s economy has been forced to crash to a standstill and its people placed under lockdown (locked up?) because of COVID-19. The powers-that-be and their lackeys in the corporate media now tell us that this is the “new normal,” a world of austerity where medical science is routinely lied about and politicized.
Some facts: On April 26, this newspaper reported that a total of 1,537 people in the state had died so far with the COVID-19 virus. This number is deceptive for two reasons. First, it has been widely reported across the country that if there is doubt about the cause of death, the default option is the virus. Second, the vast majority of these deaths is of elderly people with several co-morbidities such as compromised immune systems, cancer, heart disease and obesity.
In the same article on April 26, the state’s Department of Health reported that 942 of those 1537 deaths were residents of nursing homes and personal care facilities. Do the math. This means that just 595 people outside of these facilities have died with the virus up to this point. Yes, every one of those deaths is painfully tragic, but are people in state government, in particular Gov. Tom Wolf and health Secretary Rachel Levine, seriously telling us that this justifies shutting down the entire state’s economy and locking up its citizens?
And who is going to be held responsible for the damage this does to people’s lives? A government-commissioned study on the impact of the lockdown in Britain estimated that seven times more people will die as a result of the lockdown there (suicide, strokes and heart attacks, failure to go to hospital for treatment of illnesses, alcohol and drug abuse, and on and on) than due to the virus. Even if it’s less than seven times in our state, do you seriously think it’s worth enforcing a lockdown to cause this “collateral” damage? And this doesn’t even take into account the damage it’ll do to small businesses, unemployed workers, municipal finances and services, family and mental health, employer-based health insurance, and a lot more debt for everyone.
According to data on the state Department of Health and Centers for Disease Control websites, the average number of people who die each year of flu/pneumonia in our state over the past several years is close to 3,000. That’s double the current number of deaths supposedly due to the COVID-19 virus. Sounds like a great excuse to lock down the state every flu season. Ridiculous.
Robert Hanham
Carmichaels