Is this the flu?

There are some respects in which this current COVID-19 crisis does not seem like the flu to me.

1. I have never heard of them needing to bring refrigerator trucks to New York City hospitals because they have too many body bags to handle in the normal fashion. I have never known them to have to build temporary morgues. I have never known them to have to ship in ventilators.

No one in New York City thinks that this is the flu.

2. The number may end up being similar to the flu each year... after excruciating sequestration. Now the severity hasn't hit everywhere the same. We have yet to see how it will fully pan out in rural areas. It is possible that many people have been asymptomatic or that it has been here for months. My neighbors had an incredibly serious bout of pneumonia in late November/early December.

My question though is why New York City has been hit so hard now. This should have hit the city in this way much earlier, it seems, if the virus was sweeping through the population in December. It's of course possible that the strain in New York City is different from the initial strain. These things mutate and get worse sometimes. That's what happened in 1918-20.

3. I've never seen Facebook light up with people in the hospital and dying from the flu. We have no immunity to this disease. If we let it have free reign, we know a lot of older people will die who would not have. "It's only people who have diabetes." "That black person already had heart disease." "That woman was overweight."

Listen to what you're saying. My mother is in her 90s. Should I adopt the thinking, "She's had a good life. It's ok for her to die"? I have family with diabetes. My father had diabetes. Should I adopt the thinking, "They have diabetes. It's ok for them to die." If you can save lives on a significant scale, social distancing and not gathering together seems reasonable at least for a period.

4. Yes, there is the trade off of the economy. A depression is a bad thing. A balance needs to be found. We will look back and figure out whether we should have focused on big cities and not the countryside.

Utilitarianism asks the question, "What course of action will bring about the greatest good for the greatest number?" So we weigh the potential loss in human life against the potential loss of a depression, not just in human life but in human despair.

What about freedom? It's a good question. Whether you lean Republican or Democrat, you can now see a possible future where Americans no longer vote for their future. I personally don't think this has happened because of some conspiracy to that end. Of course it could give someone an idea.

But it is not our individual freedom that we should fight for. It is our corporate freedom. Our corporate freedom is held in place by the Constitution. Our corporate freedom is held in place by holding our leaders accountable by checks and balances. Our corporate freedom is held in place by free elections.

Freedom has never been absolute. I am not free to kill someone. I am not free to indiscriminately spread an illness I have. My freedom of religion should not be able to kill my child because I won't let them treat him or her. My freedom of the press should not be able to incite mass violence. The majority is not free to vote in sharia law.

The space of a democratic republic is a negotiated space. We try to maximize freedoms in the tension between individuals. Inevitably, this requires mutual limitation.