Staff writer Isabelle Dijols parses through some of the gaslighting being pushed by the dogmatic and reactionary Libertarians in the context of last weekend’s skeletal “anti- lockdown “ protests completely blown out of proportion by the mainstream media. She addresses the ‘suicide’ argument regarding economic hardship and the the very insidious ‘it’s just the flu’ argument.
Isabelle will not waste your time, gaslight you, or throw you a fake bone. She gets to the point right away, with sources, so dear readers, here is today’s scoop!
About suicide (from an Oxford U study I will quote my source below): “A dramatic spike in suicides between 2008 and 2010 can be linked with the economic crisis, according to a study published today in the British Journal of Psychiatry.
Researchers from the University of Oxford compared suicide data from before 2007 with the years of the crisis and found more than 10,000 “economic suicides†associated with the recession across the U.S., Canada and Europe.â€
This is tragic and we need to be prepared for the worse here. And that’s the tip of the iceberg in terms of mental health. But as of today, in just a few weeks, there have been about 50,000 deaths in the US alone from covid-19, so if we look at the statistics, Covid19 will be the source of a much greater carnage if we don’t flatten the curve until we find a remedy and a vaccine. When possible, we need to hunker down as a nation to stabilize the situation. I agree the economical repercussions will be devastating, and no one is sheltered from a very scary turn of job loss and financial crisis. But the longer we delay the stabilization of the curve, the greater the consequences will be. In my opinion we need to find strength and resilience and look at past generations that went through the Great Depression, WII – it’s our turn to rise to the occasion. Hunker down and do what you can to stay healthy and be able to help our country. Covid19 is a vicious circle – the more people don’t stay home, the more people get contaminated, the more people die, the more devastating it is for towns to manage hospital beds, morgues, and the sheer ability to stay on top of public health services that we take for granted.
Here’s my source on the suicides associated to the Greater Depression of 2008. https://www.forbes.com/sites/melaniehaiken/2014/06/12/more-than-10000-suicides-tied-to-economic-crisis-study-says/amp/
About the flu – we need to be careful to compare it to Covid19. We know a lot about the flu, we’ve been dealing with it for ever and have a lot of information about its behavior. We have access to drugs that have been specifically developed and tested to treat a flu patient (Tamiflu); we also have developed vaccination and are able to anticipate each flu season with more or less success. Even with vaccination and Tamiflu available, the number of deaths from the flu is quite high (but still trailing behind deaths from heart diseases, cancer and accidents). With Covid19 we have data that’s about 5-months old, we have no confirmed treatment, we have no vaccine and even test kits are not 100% reliable from what I understand.
So let’s hit the pause button for a few more weeks…by staying healthy and alive you will be the agent of change you want to see in our society, you will be the person that will engineer new ways to preserve rights and liberties…humans have been extremely inventive and resourceful through each global crisis…there will be new tools to communicate, be it in the legal sector, medical sector, education, commerce…just be patient for a few weeks. I’m an optimist, can’t help it.