The dataset on Covid is so wildly incomplete to invalidate the objectivity of your entire argument.
> competing against such beacons of healthcare and wealth as the Congo
The Democratic Republic of the Congo has had 1.23 deaths per 100k population from Covid [1]. Why do you think the US has 200x deaths per population than the DRC ?
> Unless you're suggesting that U.S. Americans are somehow inherently inferior to people in other countries
Yes people are not all the same, and those different factors effect outcomes. The US has a large populations that are elderly, chronically sick, urban, highly mobile etc, were tested for covid, etc.
Saying hundreds of thousands of people could have been saved in the US is highly speculative.
> Funny how the "safety-ism" after 9/11 was pushed by the Republicans and now the Republicans are complaining about Democrats pushing safety measures against Covid.
So your answer is to go sophist ad-hominem, by putting me in a group you find unfavorable rather than addressing the content of what I said. Am I letting the terrorist win or am I killing grandmas ? therefore you can justify x.
> Except y'know most of these measures actually drastically reduce transmission
This is very un-specific, but aside from vaccinations & living in a country with island like borders, very little has been definitely shown to reduce spread.
> maybe this should be considered a national defense emergency and the US should invest a few more billions
I'm not especially against that, even though I do think that unfortunately in practice these things risk end up just being vehicles for cronyism rather than tackling the core issue.
> Several hundred thousand people could have been saved in the US if these measures had been taken seriously
That is baseless speculation.
> Social distancing, closing schools, etc. were proven methods that showed the difference between cities with horrible losses and much better outcomes for the Spanish Flu.
Where is the source? And that was a completely different disease, which had the worst outcomes for young people, so maybe taking pre-cautions for them made sense.
> Because of people like you, who call proven measures against COVID ‘safety-isms’ we lose that many people every other day.
You should take your dogmatism & personal attacks to another forum, where it is welcome.
> we lose that many people every other day.
Tragic, but they are elderly, chronically sick and had a life expectancy of less than 5 years. Also tragically under accepted normal & non idealogical circumstances, we loose around 8,000 people a day in the US.
> The ludicrous and horrible price - of wearing masks?
Of shutting down schools? of closing borders and separating families, which since you want to trivialize things I didn't bring up, a 3 year old in my family was separated from
her mother for a year and a half.
I didn't specify wearing masks.. but no one knows what the effect will be of kids wearing masks all day. They are at a time of critical development & learning to read faces, non verbally communicate etc. It may turn out to have a terrible price.