Huddling inside for how long?

Australia, 1937: young polio victims

It’s been pointed out by many people, (including here, several weeks go, and with increasing frequency, that the world did not shut down during the polio epidemic, and that was a good thing because the epidemic kept appearing and killing and crippling people from 1930 into the ‘50s. And polio was an equal opportunity scourge, striking people of all ages, with horrible, crippling effect.

We have no idea when a cure for Coronavirus will be developed, if it ever is at all, yet governors like California’s Newsom vow to keep their states shut down until such a cure is found. Not much may be left for us to come back to.

For whom are we destroying the world? By far, mostly those who weren’t going to be with us long anyway: “Of the 5,141 virus deaths in Massachusetts, 3,095 have occurred in the state’s nursing homes — more than 60%, double the percentage even in New York.”

Yet Gov. Charlie Baker, the scold and scourge of all golf carts, gun shops, nail salons and churches, none of which have recorded any fatalities, seems strangely oblivious to the ever-escalating toll in the state’s “long-term care facilities,” which are both heavily regulated and subsidized by the commonwealth.

Ditto, the Legislature, where no one seems to be demanding hearings into the nursing-home death tolls, which dwarf those of neighboring states.

Of the 5,108 deaths, only 246 were of people under the age of 60. Yet they remain locked up, more than a million have lost their jobs, and yet they are daily lectured and threatened by politicians who say next to nothing about the nursing homes where residents are actually at risk.

In Maine, “To date, at least 69 people with COVID-19 have died in Maine. The majority of those deaths have occurred in nursing homes or other long-term care facilities”. Maine’s governor has ordered the entire state closed in order to prevent those 69 deaths, destroying tens of thousands of businesses and throwing several-hundred-thousand Mainers out of work and onto the welfare rolls. And those are figures pre-Memorial day, when the tourism season, accounting for 1/3 of the state’s economy, was supposed to open, but won’t.

Rescinding these measures tomorrow won’t help much, now that the world’s been saturated in a whipped-up panic, but if normalcy is ever restored and people look back at what happened and how we responded, it’s going to be clear that we couldn’t have chosen a more destructive “remedy”.

So what to do? Perhaps use some of the trillions of dollars we’re spending trying to mitigate the effects of this madness and open up quarantine shelters instead. Thousands of now-shuttered hotels and motels are available (even some Trump properties are on the market). Rent or buy them and offer rooms to the fearful of all ages. Free food and streaming services, filtered air, and free medical care on-call, while the rest of the country can go about its business. The alternative, proposed by our enemies on the left, is the creation of a socialist economy, with a nationalized industry and a populace on a permanent dole. that would please many people, especially the products of our modern educational system, but it will be the end of freedom.