i dont know about a magic formula.
i just know the economic cost wasnt worth it, and i;m lucky enough not to be impacted.
and all for what end? unless we keep our borders closed for what im guessing is several years, we cant keep it out.
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i dont know about a magic formula.
i just know the economic cost wasnt worth it, and i;m lucky enough not to be impacted.
and all for what end? unless we keep our borders closed for what im guessing is several years, we cant keep it out.
You are, I think, looking at things the wrong way in comparing to the road toll. The major difference is that action to limit the death toll from covid-19 is temporary. Action to limit road toll is ongoing. We could drop the road toll by around 50%, for example, by taking effective action against alcohol. But it would have to be permanent.
And it is not correct to say that the disease is less deadly than roads - it is in Australia, but that is because we are taking effective action. In the USA, in less than three months, the USA has manage about twice their annual number of road deaths (80,000 vs 38,000). So your example is flawed.
It is like those who claim that expenditure on Y2K was a waste because not much happened - the reason not much happened is because a lot of people spent a lot of effort and money to make sure it did not. (And as an aside, apparently a lot of issues currently arising in the US with government systems for relief come from ancient Cobol systems the are now being used in ways that were never envisioned - and most Cobol programmers are retired!)
You do realise don't you that the reason you appear to believe that is because the response has done the job it was intended to do.
In the same way that some people mistakenly believe that we don't need vaccines because very few people die from measles now and some people think the precautions for Y2K were unnecessary. It only seems that way because the precautions or preventative measures were both necessary and effective.
Those who understand how exponential growth works and who actually know something about epidemiology and people who understand the differences between this issue and other problems have always known that if their precautions were appropriate that a lot of people would label them an overreaction.
People who compare this to the road toll or the flu or suicides are simply demonstrating that they don't understand the differences between those issues.
The erudite Brookings Institute in the US has confirmed a relationship between successful disease minimisation and economic harm minimisation.
Reported here at the end:
Australia, NZ have '''world'''s best''' COVID health and economic response
The two aspects of this crisis are related in outcome, but not diametrically.
cheers, DL