Among those who’ve watched the tragic and needless lockdowns unfold over the last 11 months, a frequent question has come up: what if the coronavirus had spread, but had never been diagnosed or detected? Would life have been any different absent the discovery of what has caused a massive global panic among politicians?
It’s not an unreasonable question. Really, ask yourself what politicians and nail-biting media members would have done 100 years ago if the virus had revealed itself. Since work was a destination for realistically everyone, there’s no way there could have been lockdowns. People would have revolted.
As for deaths, life expectancy was already relatively low in the 1920s. This is relevant when it’s remembered that the coronavirus in a death sense has largely been associated with nursing homes. These homes weren’t very common one hundred years ago, and they weren’t mainly because pneumonia, tuberculosis and other major killers had a tendency to get to us long before we reached old age. Translated, there likely weren’t enough old people in the 1920s for the virus to have had any kind of lethal impact. Due to a lack of old people, the virus perhaps wouldn’t have been discovered in the first place. Think about it.
As this column has long stated, the coronavirus is a rich man’s virus. It’s not just that the rich and generally well-to-do had portable jobs that mostly survived the mindless lockdowns., it’s not just that the break from reality we were forced to endure could have only happened in a rich country, it’s also the case that only in a country and world in which the elderly are truly old would the virus have any notable association with death. People live longer today, and they do because major healthcare advances born of wealth creation made living longer possible. We wouldn’t have noticed this virus 100 years ago. We weren’t rich enough.
Which brings us to a recent article by Leah Rosenbaum at Forbes. She wrote about a NIH paper indicating that almost 17 million coronavirus cases went uncounted last summer. In Rosenbaum’s words, this discovery “suggests the pandemic was much more widespread in the U.S. than previously thought.” Well, of course. – READ MORE
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