The scientific person looks at data from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and notes that the deaths from respiratory disease in 2020 are no higher than in 2019 and 2018 and, in fact, they're slightly lower. (I didn't do this myself, but a mathematically-astute Python-programmer friend went through several states and made this observation.) We have made giant strides in reducing the big, bad diseases like smallpox and polio, but people still get sick. They still get diseases like colds and flu. "It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity. It is ecological balance."

The skeptical person does the basic arithmetic. COVID-19 is claimed to have a one-percent mortality rate for those who are actually, visibly sick from it. (I'm not counting people who tested positive but weren't really sick. That one percent applies to people who really got sick like the three people in my office who took a week off from the regular flu in early 2020.) If 150 thousand Americans died of a disease with a one-percent mortality rate, then 15 million Americans were really sick from it. That's one person in twenty-three, more than what any of us have observed by a factor of about one hundred. That means the COVID-19 death count is actually closer to 2000.

The practical person asks the practical question. Three million Americans have died so far in 2020, figuring a population of 330 million in equalibrium with a life expectancy of seventy-five years. As a sixty-three year old asthmatic in otherwise pretty-good health, I face a two-percent (2%) chance of dying in the next year. Even if I believe that 200 thousand people are dying of COVID-19, should I get into a snit because that 2% might go up to 2.1%? More importantly, is it worth sacrificing liberty, livelihoods, and lives in the hope of mitigating that difference by a small amount?

The politically-astute person asks several questions: Given that washing hands, staying home, and avoiding sex with strangers makes the chance of getting this disease nearly zero, why the lockdowns? We're told that's because masks that worked for bacteria and regular flu (including the Spanish flu of 1918 and 1919) don't work filtering a dry corona virus. Why did these economically-terrible lockdowns happen just after Democratic-party leaders said it was important to bring the economy down to Obama levels to discredit President Trump's claim of economic gains? After all that, why are they promoting cloth masks after basing an entire national and worldwide lockdown policy on the ineffectiveness of those same masks?