Mick Staton thinks it’s time to apply some “common sense” to Virginia’s coronavirus response. From the Bull Elephant:
In just over four months the number of confirmed covid-19 cases in Virginia has reached nearly 89,000. Of those confirmed cases, a little over 2,100 people have died [over 2200 now]. We can argue about inflated death numbers or under-counted people who have the virus but have never been tested all we want, but all of that is pure speculation, and cannot be quantified or counted. People who feel sick are getting tested. If you don’t feel sick and you test positive for the antibodies, do you really qualify as a victim of a disease you never knew you had? For now, let’s just deal with confirmed numbers.
Virginia has a population of about 8.536 million people. Based on the confirmed numbers listed above, only about 1% of the population of Virginia has contracted this virus, and 0.024% of the population of Virginia has died from it.
Virginia hit its highest number of daily reported cases on May 25th of this year at 1,439. When we once again compare that to our population of 8.536 million people, that means the greatest chance anyone had of contracting this disease on any given day is about 0.01%.
Mr. Staton thinks that a lockdown needed to happen based on what we knew four months ago, but now thinks it was not necessary then – and certainly not now – on the grounds that COVID isn’t really that much worse than the flu at the end of the day. After all, only 90K Virginians have gotten this deadly disease, and only 2100 2215 have died from COVID since the pandemic started.