Steph, I am not “completely assured of [my] own rightness”; I just look at the graphs and the timing of social restrictions. What they indicate is obvious, and entirely in accordance with common sense – social restrictions slow the spread of infection. This has been known for centuries eg. leper colonies, and it’s part of common etiquette, “keep your distance / don’t visit me this week; you don’t want to catch my cold”.
But as soon as it got serious enough to affect the economy, suddenly it was up for “debate”, and our “news” media rapidly became saturated by the tiny minority of “experts” who claim that social restrictions are inappropriate. The fact that the media makes money from advertising whereas sales fall during social restrictions is just a coincidence, of course. Where have I seen such cherry-picking before? Oh yes; three decades of global warming denial, eventually conceded when the North Pole had nearly melted, the advance warning from science squandered. The next chapter has already begun; “human activity isn’t really starting Earth’s sixth mass extinction event; hear our fearless right-wing journalists interview a handful of people with all these following letters after their names explaining why the obvious signs, painstakingly quantified by thousands of field scientist and reviewed and summarised by the IPBES, is actually a conspiracy by the UN to incite public fear and justify yet more taxes on you, our unfairly exploited audience whose opinions ought to count”.
If you hadn’t been fighting Steph you wouldn’t have felt the need to “submit”. I’m just the messenger; the mortality graphs speak for themselves. I won’t apologise for your feelings of being patronised because I didn’t intend to do so, but I’ll apologise for not apologising if you like, since not apologising is at least my own decision rather than your interpretation.
Yours, torture apologist and child exploiter Clark 🙂