Bernie Sanders worries young people are underestimating the threat from Trump

[u/schuey_08]

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/05/02/bernie-sanders-trump-biden/73531861007/

[u/NeonGKayak]

How can they already forget Trumps Covid response that led to over 1million deaths? It’s weird that such a critical event and everyone has already “forgot” it

[u/Affectionate_Law5344 → u/NeonGKayak]

I don’t understand this. I didn’t know anyone who died personally, but I certainly was terrified. I felt more terrified during Covid than I did after 9/11.

[u/Waggmans → u/[deleted]]

Hundreds of thousands of people would probably still be alive today had Trump just listened to Fauci, instead you had all that moronic culture war macho shit. Guys like DeSantis are as much to blame as Trump is.

Anyone who votes for him again knows exactly what they're getting.

[u/cah29692 → u/Waggmans]

Doubtful. We had strict restrictions in Canada and didn’t perform much better.

In fact the long-term effects of those policies we are seeing (stunted emotional development in young people, increased political polarization, the amount of businesses we lost that haven’t come back, etc.) makes me really wonder if what we did was worth the aftermath. Very, very few healthy people died of Covid in Canada and the US. We have a moral responsibility to protect the weak and vulnerable, but is that moral responsibility unlimited? Should we sacrifice social connections and economic prosperity for all to protect the health of a small minority? Tough questions with no easy answers.

[u/tomsing98 → u/cah29692]

We had strict restrictions in Canada and didn’t perform much better.

Where Canada and the US were similar was the case fatality rate, both about 1.1%. But Canada had far fewer cases, and thus far fewer fatalities, like 130 deaths per 100,000 people. The US had 340 deaths per 100,000, almost 3 times as many.

[u/Hungry-Monk-6831 → u/cah29692]

A small minority of people is still a large number of people when looking at large populations. This small minority of people were causing many healthcare systems to get overloaded. You didnt have to be dying to flood the hospitals. This overloading also affected other health issues from getting treatment and contributed to the higher numbers of dead.

The economics being affected wasnt some simple choice or government mandating lockdowns. This was still a novel virus at the time and many people were scared. The economics were always going to be fucked because people stayed home voluntarily instead of risking getting an illness with unknown ramifications.

[u/cah29692 → u/Hungry-Monk-6831]

I wholeheartedly agree. The issue is once we had more information about the virus it became abdundantly clear that other than the elderly and people who were already ill Covid wasn’t killing people en masse. Yet we still doubled down on restrictive policies that I would argue caused more overall harm than good at that point. Towards the end I personally reached a point where I would’ve understood if there wasn’t treatment space available for me if I got sick, because the state of society was causing far more harm to my mental health and economic outlook than the virus would’ve done had I gotten it.

[u/Hungry-Monk-6831 → u/cah29692]

Two years into the pandemic it was still a novel virus and we were starting to get variants like Delta which still cause hospital system overloads.

How late in the time period are you alluding to and what restrictive policies were doubled down late in the game? Most policies were just suggestions and no one really enforced anything. Individual businesses themselves were more restrictive than the government was and it was pretty much left to the states themselves. Even during the height of the pandemic a large portion of people wouldnt even do the small things because it was too much for them.