My opinion is that the article is misguided in many ways.<p>1. A viral pandemic is very different than a major fire.<p>Fires are visible and generally localized. To compare viral infections to fire catastrophes as equivalent is not understanding the exponential way infections spread -- in this era, it's global and cannot be localized. A better analogy is like if a city caught on fire, and anyone who tried to run away from that city carried the fire to where they went. The non-visible nature of it makes it hard for people to understand compared to a hot, visible flame.<p>2. A flawed comparing number of deaths and other cases of undesirables.<p>Take for example, the estimated number of deaths due to drug overdose, which a majority percentage are opioids: ~70k in 2018 [1], a whole year. The normal flu death estimates on the high end are 60k in 6 months[2]. Covid-19 deaths are estimated at ~90k as of today, starting April 14, 2020. That's ~90k deaths in 1 month. Let's be generous and say covid-19 in the US started in end of February; that's still less than 3 months.<p>We are living out 1 year worth of deaths due to a single cause in two-ish month. And it will continue for at least several months.<p>Is the current cure killing us? A lot slower than if we didn't act, inferring from the numbers above. What action would you take otherwise and not knowing the information we know in these short 2.5 months? If California didn't act early, if Washington state didn't act early, the rest of the country would've been infected far worse than it currently is due to all the travel and commerce that happens. Imagine a situation worse than it currently is!<p>Is it better to trade this covid curves for other curves? From an overall population standpoint, yes it is, the sheer quantity and magnitudes are completely different. Someone's carrying fire, and it's not always clear who's carrying that fire, ready to burn cities and towns down.<p>Is the blanket response SIP orders reasonable? This one is less clear, but on the whole, yes, it's reasonable - most people don't critically think to survive these days. If they did, a lot of things in our country would be different...<p>It would've been better had all of us been prepared with masks and having stock piles of supplies ready. It's a small lesson out of many the US and citizens should take out from this situation.<p>Take some time and ask oneself now -- if you went out, caught the coronavirus, then hung out with your parents, and one of them could die, how much money would you spend to get them out of the danger zone? Does money even mean much in that scenario?<p>[1] <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/statedeaths.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/statedeaths.html</a>
[2] <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-estimates.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-e...</a>
[3] <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/cases-in-us.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/case...</a>