Deliberately inflating the Covid count - why?

Consider this FB post, which I have personally verified (I deleted the person's name).

Now, why is that the rule? Having been a federal bureaucrat, I will say (in my view, authoritatively) that the reason is simple: money.

Understand that this listing decision was not originated by physicians or nurses, but by administrators. And the overwhelming desire of every bureaucratic administrator everywhere is this: Increase his/her department's budget.  Because bureaucrats get promoted by showing they can manage ever-larger budgets, not for managing programs or people.

Medical bureaucrats know very well that C19-related, enormous streams of money are already flowing from federal spigots and will continue to do so for months or even years to come. And the amount any operation or agency will get will relate very directly to the number of C19 cases they report, especially the fatalities.

If you think this sounds cynical, I assure you: It is far from cynical enough.

And the beat goes on:

The Big Apple’s new death toll is 10,367. That figures combines the 6,589 victims who tested positive for the virus plus another 3,778  who were never tested, but whose death certificates list the cause of death as “COVID-19 or an equivalent,” according to city Health Department data from March 11 through April 13.

Italics mine, to illuminate what is being done here. What exactly is an "equivalent" cause of death to C19? Why, something that killed them, duh. You know, like lung cancer.

I said on my FB page, "First, let’s kill the children."

 Serious question: How many people are we willing to kill to stop people from dying of Covid-19?  

More specifically: How many children are we willing to kill to do it? Read this and weep:

"Hundreds of thousands of children could die this year due to the global economic downturn sparked by the coronavirus pandemic and tens of millions more could fall into extreme poverty as a result of the crisis, the United Nations warned on Thursday. ...

But the U.N. report warned that “economic hardship experienced by families as a result of the global economic downturn could result in an hundreds of thousands of additional child deaths in 2020, reversing the last 2 to 3 years of progress in reducing infant mortality within a single year.”

The full report is here, including the shocking nugget that 368 million children across 143 countries rely on school lunches as a source of nutrition, and,

"Hastily implemented lockdown measures risk disrupting food supply chains and local food markets,” which “pose potentially grave consequences for food security.”

Do you remember when, "Let's do it for the children!" was a rallying cry? Yeah, me, neither.

However, the sanguinary calculus is real: If we do not do lockdown/distancing by shutting down the economy, people will die. And if we do lockdown/distancing by shutting down the economy, people will still die - and the UN says that "hundreds of thousands" of them will be children. But as Roger Kimball explains,

We have often been presented with a false dichotomy between saving the economy and saving lives. This is a false dichotomy because, as Geach points out, “the state of our economy is not just a monetary risk, it is a health risk.” For one thing, “when people lose their jobs, they typically lose their health insurance.” He notes that there were more than 10,000 “economic suicides” as a result of the 2008 recession. There is also a spike in cancer deaths, drug abuse, domestic violence, and other pathologies.

This is not a guess, it is fact:

Every 1% hike in the unemployment rate will likely produce a 3.3% increase in drug overdose deaths and a 0.99% increase in suicides according to data provided by the National Bureau of Economic Research and the medical journal Lancet. These are facts based on experience, not models. If unemployment hits 32%, some 77,000 Americans are likely to die from suicide and drug overdoses as a result of layoffs. Scientists call these fatalities deaths of despair.

There are protests around the country against long-continuing the restrictions from now. I frankly would be far more impressed with the protesters if they would leave their guns and flags at home and at least substantively acknowledge that the C19 threat is real.

But lockdown absolutists need to under stand this: More than 22 million Americans have become unemployed in the last month. The longer we are told to stay "safe at home" instead of going back to work, the less safe homes will become because of the despair and depressions that unavoidably will manifest. More people will kill themselves or a family member, more spouses and children will suffer abuse and injury, more alcoholics will be made, more people will suffer fatal non-Covid illnesses, more drug addicts will be made - that list goes on and on.

To be clear: 

I am not saying that the lockdown and distancing measures should not have been imposed. I am saying as clearly as I can that the time will come when continuing them will become more costly and lethal than lifting them. 

It is long past the time when we must stop having a false debate about the lockdown.

"At some point," [Princeton bioethicist] Peter Singer says, "we are willing to trade off loss of life against loss of quality of life. No government puts every dollar it spends into saving lives. And we can't really keep everything locked down until there won't be any more deaths.

We need to think about this in the context of the well-being of the community as a whole….We are currently impoverishing the economy, which means we are reducing our capacity in the long term to provide exactly those things that people are talking about that we need—better health care services, better social-security arrangements to make sure that people aren't in poverty. There are victims in the future, after the pandemic, who will bear these costs. The economic costs we incur now will spill over, in terms of loss of lives, loss of quality of life, and loss of well-being.

I think that we're losing sight of the extent to which that's already happening. And we need to really consider that tradeoff.

 The "false debate," in other words, is not the discussion that considers the enormous human cost of suppressing economic activity. It's the discussion that pretends there is no such tradeoff. 

If lockdowns are not substantially lifted much past the middle of May, I predict very large numbers of the American people will start concluding that the real point of these restrictions is not the health of Americans at all, but something politically sinister. And no podium appearances by Dr. Fauci or Dr. Birx is going to persuade them otherwise.