posted by QuakerOats
I didn’t say it was cut and dry; people need to make decisions based on their health and good guidance.
We lose 40,000 people per year in traffic fatalities because we do not mandate a speed limit of 5 mph. We accept the cost of the 40,000 lives in return for higher speed limits and permitting vehicle traffic.
None of this is easy, but it can be approached rationally.
Since this is a talking point your leader introduced (as opposed to you thinking it up), let's recall what else he said about it. The first time he brought it up, there were a few hundred deaths from coronavirus. He pointed out the number of car accident deaths (40,000) per year was far in excess of the number of virus deaths. At the time, early in the pandemic, this was true. Now it is not. And has been pointed out on here, we've reached 46,000 dead in a little over a month. If we lost 40,000 people in a month to car accidents, you can be assured that major steps would be taken to change that.
On top of all this, the number of dead from coronavirus is a byproduct of the steps we've been taking as a society. If we had not been social distancing for the last 5 weeks, we could be dealing with a number far higher.