With prudential precaution to protect our most vulnerable populations, moderate steps to increase our medical capacity, and an appropriate minimizing of social interaction, we can put a pretty quick ending to this dangerous epidemic.


![image.png](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmebaBjs1vcGReqBBiEhpMHUims83xT8FWRR7pi7VSHZi3/image.png)



I don't doubt for a moment that many democratic leaders and the media are doing all they can to stoke the irrational hysteria and employ tyrannically overreaching methods to shut down the economy and make it tank so that Trump cannot take credit for the robust boom we've had since he was elected, and I don't doubt republicans like Ohio's Dewine are following suit because he wants to cover his ass from all the fallout if it spreads widely in the Buckeye state, but, let's try to look at this prudently by disregarding the extremes of overreacting with Martial Law or underreacting with sanguine disregard.

The CDC is predicting between 200,000 and 1.7 million American fatalities. Now, not only is that a wide ranging prediction, it is also a government agency, so I don't trust it for spit (especially because under Obama they were working harder on eliminating racism and obesity than infectious diseases), but it's the best estimate we've got right now. What would be the economic cost of loosing that many people? Sure, you might say, the majority of those fatalities will be unproductive retired and elderly people who will no longer put a burden on our entitlement programs, but that is to take a death panels approach to this epidemic. That's how they do it in countries with socialized health care (Socialized medicine is great at increasing overall health statistics by simply letting all the sick people die) but that's not how we do it in America. We care for our elderly to extend life.

The people who have those vulnerabilities (or the people whose responsibility it is to care for them) know they have them. Not only do those at-risk people need to be quarantined, but so also do the people who fall within the protective sphere of those who are among our population's most vulnerable! Their caretakers must be extra vigilant to keep the virus out of that protective sphere. When they cross that threshold, they must be extra careful not to bring it in with you. The average person's calculations are different. They don't need to quarantine themselves, but rather they just need to wash their hands more regularly and clean the things they touch when they are out (shopping carts, etc) and do their part to prudently practice social distancing in order to "flatten the curve" so that we don't overrun our medical system which has only 4800 hospitals in the USA, and less than 45,000 ICU beds. "It won't take much to crush that capacity," a friend with a degree in epidemiology has warned.

So what this means is that the majority of us should continue to go to work just as we have before because workers are usually working with people who are also not among our most vulnerable. Surely, if you can work from home, do. We just need to reduce the time we spend in the large social petri dishes like restaurants and theaters.

But here's the rub; we are beginning to learn about how easily it is transmitted to vulnerable people by asymptomatic carriers who don't know and will never know that they have it. In this way it becomes a terribly sneaky and sinister virus because the kid who just got sent home from college might be carrying it and yet may never feel anything but a little hungover from the big party at which he got it, but then he gives it to granny when he goes home and boom, she's soon dead. So we all must behave as if we already have it and are one of those asymptomatic carriers, and take precaution to protect our most vulnerable at-risk populations.


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Let me conclude by restating that I believe that, instead of having the Fed pump another trillion into the economy through big banks and investment firms, we should have the treasury monetize a trillion of debt and use the new money to cross-train dislocated workers in the service industry to convert empty dorms and cheap hotels into hospitals and to help to increase our medical capacity not if, but when, our caseload mushrooms.
If we take these modest steps, perhaps we can halve the CDC's lowball estimate and that this will be no worse than the Swine Flu of 2009-2010 which most of us had already forgotten.