All I want for Christmas is for the leaders of Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan to put 1/10th of the effort into fighting a deadly, contagious virus that they did into fighting the carbon tax.
— Pat Dubois (@patdubois) November 23, 2020
All I want for Christmas is for Pat Dubois to stop being a Viro Fascist.
After all, our "deadly" virus doesn't seriously impact anybody straight white and born after 1965. Nursing homes have remained the largest (and in many places almost sole) source of COVID deaths: if you're spry enough to be up and kicking and not fucking men up the ass, things will go pretty well for you.
Meanwhile our "contagious" virus is so virulent and unstoppable that Sweden has been trounced for "failing" in their Wuhan Flu response because it turns out that even without mass lockdowns the virus has failed to spread to enough of the population.
The analyzes for week 18 (a total of 1,104 analyzed samples) show, as expected, the largest proportion of positive antibody tests in Stockholm. A total of 7.3 percent of the blood samples collected from people in Stockholm were positive in the antibody test, which can be compared with a total of 4.2 percent in Skåne and 3.7 percent in Västra Götaland.
Viro Fascists like Dubois don't like convenient facts though. Here's another one, and it's actually a big one that deserves to be said loudly and often:
The economy is people.
The belief that Kenney is prioritizing "the economy" over "the lives of people" is a common refrain from retarded leftists online. It is, of course, a silly distinction. Take it away Dr. Samuelson and Dr. William D. Nordhaus:
Economics is the study of how societies use scarce resources to produce valuable commodities and distribute them among different people.
By extension of course an economy is just people producing and distributing goods and services. What's wrong with "prioritizing" that? We need goods and services. They are things we use to make our lives better: indeed if they didn't we wouldn't produce and distribute them.
Lockdowns, like carbon taxes, are government activities that reduce our abilities to produce and distribute the commodities we want and need to improve our lives. Do minor pandemics like the Wuhan Flu also reduce our ability to do this? Of course.
The problem, and this is where Viro Fascists like Dubois show either their idiocy or their evil (or both?), is that if we're going to take government action to minimize the impact on the economy of COVID then we need to make sure the cure isn't worse than the disease: namely that the cost of the measure doesn't exceed the cost of the measure combined with the cost of the concern leftover after the measure is applied.
If that last sentence confused you, it's of the formula:
Where a is the total cost to the economy, b is the cost of the measure (or cure) you are undertaking, c is the cost caused by the actual problem, and x is a descriptor of the measure being undertaken. For different actions x you take the value of b and c change: if you do nothing at all (no carbon tax, no lockdowns) the value of b will be zero. If your measure is 100% successful then the value of c will be zero. Helpful hint: your measure will never be 100% successful.
The goal is to minimize the value of a which means if the value of c is already low with no action taken, you'll be hard-pressed to find a measure that produces a small b and an even smaller c.
Which is where the carbon tax, of course, fails. The cost of "doing nothing to combat global warming" is itself small, and even worse the cost of carbon taxes are very high. They also don't actually reduce by much the costs incurred by global warming in a world with carbon taxes. So the way to minimize a is to do nothing. Here's a quick summary of that problem: b reduces c but not by enough that the sum is at all helped by the action:
Even before the most recent lockdowns, ATB predicted the Alberta economy to shrink by 7% in 2020 alone and not recovering until 2023. That means that the Alberta economy lost $23.39B in 2020 as a result of the (first) Wuhan Flu shutdown. Presuming an economic flatline, the economy will lose another $15.68B in 2021 and 2002. That means we're talking $39.07B loss to the economy caused by the first lockdown. Please remember we aren't counting the next 4 months of "2 weeks to flatten the curve" lockdowns in this.
But, as Viro Fascists like Pat Dubois will probably proclaim, what about the loss of life? He did talk about "fighting a deadly, contagious virus" after all. When the online retards who go nuts about "protecting people's lives", the assumption is a life is always more important than an economy (even though as we established the economy is life). It's not, though. And economics has figured this out.
In economics, the "Value of Life" is a way to evaluate public policies to see if the lives saved are "worth it". There's no clear answer about what this value of life is: the EPA in the United States calls the value $10M. In other words, if a program that costs the economy $30M (say $3M in administration and $27M in impact) saves 4 lives it's "worth" it but if it only saves 2 lives it's not "worth" it.
Similarly there's a Quality-adjusted life-year (QALY) that specifically is used for medical issues to factor in the number of years affected. Life-years-lost is another metric, to factor in that economic benefit to protect people with only a few years of life left already isn't a good use of limited resources. If you only have $100M dollars to spend and you can save 50 people in their 80s or 40 people in their 20s, spending your money on the latter is more effective (and Value of Life doesn't show this for example).
Let's just dumbly (and keep on Dubois's mental level) apply Value of Life to the Wuhan Flu. US$10M is CDN$12.8M. 39.07 billion divided by 12.8 million is 3052 people. Did Alberta's first shutdown save 3052 lives? Based on the fact that Kenney has already apologized for the models and projections from March being wrong, the answer is almost certainly no. Remember when they claimed 800,000 cases in their "most likely" scenario?
"From the beginning of the outbreak to the end of summer we could see as many as 800,000 infections, and between 400 and 3,100 deaths," Kenney said.
The early models claimed 3100 deaths, which still doesn't match a rough value-of-life calculation, and early models were complete garbage. More importantly, we can't even add total deaths, we can only add preventable deaths. As was previously discussed here in May, every COVID death you save in April is just somebody who can die from COVID in 2021. Delaying a death isn't preventing a death.
Let's not forget too who is dying from this. The current average age of Wuhan Flu deaths in Alberta is 83, which means that Value of Life (which requires all the people saved to be of median age) for each life isn't $12.8M and indeed might even be under $1M. In that case we require over 400,000 lives to be saved by the (first) lockdown which is of course nonsense.
All I want for Christmas is for Pat Dubois to acknowledge how the first lockdown didn't achieve anything of value. Just like a carbon tax would.
