COVID-19 is a more significant threat to our economy than to our health. The financial consequence stemming from shutting down most US domestic businesses is and will continue to destroy our living standard, our ability to pay essential bills and limit our sustenance. Because of the Shutdown, you can forget about a healthy growing economy for the near future. The best we could hope for is to lessen the downturn and maybe keep our heads above water. Ultimately, an extended Shutdown will lead to more death from an increased poverty rate. Stress and fear will also increase across class-lines - two things that lead to more sickness, strife, abuse in all forms, and, sadly, suicides. The pressure on children will likely be the most brutal.

The Shutdown is because COVID-19 is supposedly a lot deadlier than the seasonal flu. The apparent reasoning behind this thinking is a comparison of seasonal flu statistics to COVID-19. The problem is they are not using the same method for comparison. They're comparing completely different sets of numbers. Look at the annual flu statistics tracked by the CDC. For the 2019-2020 flu season, we've had 22,000 deaths and 222,552 flu cases confirmed by testing. If those were the only numbers we had to go on, the CDC would be telling us that seasonal flu has a kill rate of 10%. But they don't calculate the percentage of flu fatalities based on actual tested-and-confirmed patients. They based it off of the total number of estimated flu cases. (They have to take an educated guess to determine the total number of cases because most people don't even go to the doctor when they catch the flu.)

Also, consider COVID-19 numbers are likely inflated, especially when you learn of situations like in Italy where the Italian Health Ministry needed to clarify 3% of coronavirus fatalities in their study did not have other serious health complications. That means 97% of the fatalities were individuals that had health complications. The high Italian fatality rate was not directly connected to COVID-19. In New York, another hot zone for COVID-19, the fatality rate for coronavirus has risen while the pneumonia rate has mysteriously dropped.  It appears that many mainstream media reports overlooked or fudged these facts to fear monger.

The estimated number of flu cases for this flu season is more than 36 million. Not confirmed – estimated. The fatality rate for seasonal flu is calculated based on the number of confirmed deaths divided by estimated cases, which results in a fatality rate of 0.1%. Unfortunately, we have many serious problems with the current testing and death rate evaluation for COVID 19.

With a supposedly awful disease such as COVID19, you want a test that is as close to 100% sensitive as possible. That means that when you test a person, the test should be true-positive almost 100% of the time, even if individuals tested have no symptoms. Ideally, a very sensitive test will have no false-negative test results; after all, you do not want to send someone out into the community spreading an awful disease because your test result was flawed.

The present test being used was found to be 71% sensitive in a study that was published in February 2020 in the Journal Radiology. Almost 30% of the test results gave a false-negative result. That is far from being a quality test. Also, consider there are too few test kits available to meet our current and growing demand for testing. It comes down to this. We don't have a substantial number of test results for a reasonable estimate of the COVID-19 fatality rate. Even if we had a perfect screening test, we'd need to test so many more people if we expect to come up with a more accurate fatality rate.

In short, the present fatality rate for corona-virus is frightening — but only if you don't calculate the fatality rate the same way as you do with the seasonal flu.

So, what is the estimated number of corona-virus cases? No one can answer that question honestly. We don't know what percentage of the population is infected or has been infected. But we do know that many people have died, and that is heartbreaking. We also know the majority of cases only suffer mild symptoms (if any) from coronavirus.

The virus has been circulating among us for four months now. For most of that time, there was no systematic attempt to quarantine the population. How many Americans were infected over that period? As said before, there is no way to know. A village in Lombardy, Italy, has been on lockdown since March 9th. 70% of those residents tested positive, most showed no symptoms at all, and that was under severe lockdown. It appears that the virus is more transmissible than initially believed, but it is also now known to be far less lethal than how mainstream media dramatically insinuates. People are dying, and it is terrifying to learn. But as the data comes in, so many infected people are not severely sick. Iceland has carried out the most substantial tests on their population, and they've discovered that more than half that tested positive are asymptomatic.

So, what is the rational response to this pandemic? Historically, the sick were separated from the population, and then we did anything possible to protect the elderly, health compromised, and the immune-suppressed. Targeted quarantines work well. Sadly, that is not what we are doing now. Much of the world is experiencing mass-quarantine, in which governments shutdown nations for extended periods; this has never happened before. Mass quarantine is proving to be ineffective. Italy imposed one of the toughest lockdowns in Europe, and they are a hot zone of the infection spreading.

Perhaps a mass quarantine could work if everyone was forced to remain separate from one another, no interactions, period. But how is that possible? Without interactions, people would literarily starve to death in a short time. The directive we are living with is to stay at home except to buy food. The supermarket is the place where everyone goes. It is also ground zero for viral transmission. Open supermarkets don't make sense if you are hoping to stop the spread of a virus. Authorities must know it doesn't make sense. But instead of changing course and fine-tuning a different targeted quarantine approach, they are doing the opposite. They are starting Snitch programs to turn in people that dare to go to work. As if going to the store, jogging hanging with friends in the park are cool, but try to go to work – the firing squad for you! For some unexplainable reason, authorities want us to believe offices and job sites are more dangerous than supermarkets. Why not let people choose to wear masks and wash their hands a lot, and let everyone go back to work. No one can explain the reasoning behind the Stay-at-Home directive.

The result of this irrational ordinance is devastating; over 17 million Americans are unemployed, the highest number in the history of our country. Can anyone sincerely believe the coronavirus itself will hurt more people in the end than the long-term damage we are causing by using the present mass quarantine response to it? Mass unemployment will cause far more harm, including physical harm. Losing a job is a high-ranking stress inducer, well above the death of a close friend. Domestic abuse is skyrocketing. Drug and alcohol abuse is on the rise. We can only imagine the trouble the coronavirus shutdown is creating for children. This grim picture of the world is what our policymakers do not understand. Their jobs, investment portfolios, pensions, and premium healthcare are guaranteed. We cannot count on them to make the smart decision for us. We cannot rely on the professional-class either; they don't have much interest in middle-class job loss or its consequences.  

It's time to reevaluate the Shutdown. The deliberate and irrational suppression of economic activity must end. America, the time has come: Open for Business!