@Pedaldad if you insist on dealing with PERCENTAGES, you must understand that about half of the population is not going to listen to you. That MIGHT change after the election. If you want the other half of the population to listen to you, you’ll have to speak in NUMBERS. Sadly, one can easily tell a lot about a person based on which of those two designations they use. The narrative goes something like this... use percentages and you don’t care about about the death of Mrs. Sally Jensen from Woodford, IA. Use numbers and you don’t care about forcing roughly 328 million people to give up the things that make their lives worth living. Of course, both are asinine.
The solution lies in the middle. A mix of safety protocols and accepting that Covid, like so much else, is going to take large numbers of lives. The US lost approx 60,000 lives last year to influenza. 60,000 wonderful lives that no one said jack stuff about. We didn’t wear masks to save their precious lives nor did we social distance or even wash our hands more often for them. Why? Because we have a vaccine that is semi-effective? No. The fact is, we’ve made peace with our balance of influenza safety protocols and the massive number of deaths that it causes each and every year. Just like we do with every other thing that plagues us. Balance. The roadmap is there and we absolutely will end up there. But it’s an election year and we’ve convinced ourselves that this is the most important election in the history of the country, so the inevitable has to wait until after it to even be discussed. Spoiler Alert! We all know how this story ends because we’ve seen it a hundred times already.