[Byte1]

Originally Posted by OrangeBlossomBaby

If you really and truly want "perspective" then you'll stop using death as the only criteria of whether or not a virus is a problem.

There are a bunch of things:

1. deaths
2. hospitalizations and the costs associated with that
3. families affected by the deaths of people who fit category #1
4. employers who now have to hire and spend time, money, and resources to train new people to fill the jobs that the people in category #1 can no longer fill because they're a little too busy being dead to do it now.
5. people who get sick and recover from the sickness, but now have life-long permanent lung and/or heart damage, and all the expense that goes with it.
6. people who were working, being productive members of society, who are now in category #5 and are now on medicaid, food stamps, and housing subsidies, courtesy of the taxpayers.
7. families of people in category #5, who have to spend the next "x" number of years attending to their sick relative for the rest of his/her life, which might be a long time. They don't know, because this thing has only existed for a year or so.
8. the burden on employers who now have to accommodate those family caretakers via family leave of absence.
9. the stress of being told that your husband is about to die, but sorry you can't be with him to hold his hand while he quite literally suffocates to death.
10. the stress of the families that have to live with a woman whose husband died, and she wasn't allowed to be with him, but was allowed to watch him die, live and in color, on a Zoom video.

and the list goes on, and on, and on. Death is just one of many issues resulting from this virus. It is the final issue, but I would think death is the least of the bad things that happen. Because once you're dead, being sick is not a problem for you anymore. It's all the rest of the world that has to deal with you being dead, that continues to be a problem. And recovering with permanent lung and/or heart damage, might end up being a fate worse than death for some.

Those are traits of ALL serious illnesses. Death is the most effective stat when it comes to a virus that there is no idea how many are truly infected. Hospitalizations and death stats are more informative than how many times a test comes back positive, when some of the same folks are tested multiple times and most of the population is not even tested. The only way testing would be valid would to test everyone in the U.S. at one time and document the results. Impossible feat.