Late on Sunday night, Donald Trump decided he'd had about enough of this whole sheltering in place thing and tweeted out, in all caps, "WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF. AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO!"

And that that is now the line that is being repeated by his supporters and by other rich people who would very much like to get back to business as usual, even if that means that several million more people die. His supporters aren't worried, because they just believe anything he says without question, and the rich people are fine with it, because they really don't have to worry if they're gonna get a ventilator if shit hits the fan.

National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow repeated the line on Fox News on Monday, noting that "we're going to have to make some difficult trade-offs."

Via The Daily Beast:

"The president tweeted at midnight that we can't let the cure be worse than the problem," Fox News anchor Ed Henry declared. "He seemed to be talking about, in another week or so, making a decision to try to get the economy back open… How do you do that?"

Kudlow responded that "we'll have to try to do that" because the "economic cost to individuals is just too great," adding that the administration will need to see how everything plays out after more Americans are tested for the virus.

"But the president is right," he exclaimed. "The cure can't be worse than the disease and we're gonna have to make some difficult tradeoffs. I'm not disposed—I don't want to get ahead of the story."

What is it that he's saying here? That we're gonna just have to let a whole bunch of people drop dead so that we can get the economy back on track? How many people? Like, how many human lives is Larry Kudlow willing to sacrifice in order to make sure rich people get to stay rich?

A whole lot, if we're going to ask these jerks about it.

Wild guess what their opinions on abortion are.

Noted Twitter epidemiologist (not an epidemiologist) Steph93065 said that Trump was correct and that 15 days from ... whenever ... was enough time to get everything settled so that everyone can go back to work.

Then there was Scott4670 who claims to be a lawyer and is totally fine with 2.5% of the entire country dying.

How many millions of people is 2.5 percent of the population? It's almost nine million people. This Dickensian twatwaffle is perfectly chill with nine million people dying because he feels they are "expensive to maintain" and "not productive." That is straight up evil.

Of course, the thing is, if we don't take care of this now, it will be a whole lot more than 2.5 percent. Because not only will we have deaths from those affected, we will have deaths because other people with other illnesses will not be able to get the care they need. It will be really, really bad. And if it keeps growing and people keep dying, that's going to hurt the economy. Not to mention that even if the economy were good, there might not be a lot of people around to appreciate it. Because of how they will be dead.

It will probably not come as a shock to anyone that Dr. Anthony Fauci is pretty much begging the Trump administration to slow their roll on this so that we can contain the virus and not overwhelm the medical system.

Via Washington Post:

Fauci, a member of the president's coronavirus task force, and other leading public health experts have told administration officials and Republican lawmakers that prematurely scaling back social distancing measures would hamper efforts to mitigate the virus and devastate U.S. hospitals, according to the people with knowledge of the conversations who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private deliberations. More than 30,000 people in the United States have tested positive for coronavirus, a number expected to dramatically increase in the coming days and potentially overwhelm America's health care infrastructure.

But the push to reopen parts of the economy has gained traction among Republican lawmakers, including Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Patrick Toomey (R-Pa.), according to two people with knowledge of the matter. Spokespeople for the senators declined to comment.

Since that was published yesterday, by the way, we actually now have over 46,000 people testing positive for coronavirus.

And those are the people who could get tests.

The cure is not worse than the disease. It's just not. You die from the disease. Millions of people die from the disease. It's not worth risking millions of lives to save fucking cruise line companies, especially since dead people rarely take cruises.

Trump and his rich buddies think that if they can just keep repeating this "We don't want the cure to be worse than the disease" line, people will gladly risk their lives so that this pandemic doesn't hurt rich people and corporations too much. And hey! A lot of people will. Many people in this country are only too happy to sacrifice their own economic well-being in order to ensure that rich people and "job creators" are never inconvenienced. And still others just really, really want to believe that it's not as bad or as scary as they're being told it is so that they can get back to their lives.

It's a few weeks. It's a few weeks of sacrifice to get over this so that millions of people do not die. So that we have ventilators for those who need them. We have fewer than 100,000 ventilators in this country! If we have fewer ventilators than we need, doctors are going to have to start making decisions about who gets one. Remember the death panels these people were so worried about? Yeah. That's what's gonna happen.

Yes, it's not fun. Yes, it's fucking with our economy and a lot of people are freaked the hell out. When this is over (and it will be over faster if we all just stay the hell home for a bit), we will all need the same things we did before — and the economy will likely even get a pretty big boost from all of the people wanting to make up for the time they lost.

But not if we are all dead.

[Washington Post]

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