St. Patrick's Day Silence And Have We Overreacted?

For Natasha's Birthday we ordered out from Smoke Street BBQ up in Milford. A decent drive from home, but we were told the BBQ is well worth it.

Downtown Milford, which should have been hopping at 7pm on St. Patrick's Day was dead. Parking, which normally is hard, was not a problem.

Smoke Street BBQ had all their chairs up on their tables and had all of two take-out orders waiting for pickup with our being one of them.

We gave them a 33% tip on the order but you can tell they were hurting badly due to this closure. It was indeed good BBQ and if you're in the area, they are doing takeout.

A client of mine with a restaurant is losing $1,000 per day as this closure goes on. Yet, his Landlord will still expect the rent come April 1.

Anyone think if Congress passes this pork-laded "all businesses must give employees 14 days sick pay law" that any restaurants will be able to afford to do so? Even if they get reimbursed or credited for it next year at tax time it will be too late.

I think we've overreacted, and badly. Had this been Ebola or similar this may have made sense. But its essentially shaping up to be slightly deadlier than the normal influenza where 30,000 Americans have died from it this year, or the Swine Flu epidemic where over 13,000 Americans died in that one, and we didn't have the economic disruption with those that we're having now.

China's health care and hygiene is subpar as is Iran's, which explains their larger losses to the COVID virus, that and they're likely knocking off dissidents under the cover of COVID.

What about Italy you ask?

Well, it turns out that Italy has always been an outlier for excessive influenza deaths compared to other first world nations and the excessive death rate has been noted to be occurring since 2013, due to a high number of elderly people living there and quality socialized medicine. In short, more Italians die from flu and more would logically be expected to die from a virus that attacks in a similar modality to the flu, and they are indeed doing so.

Given the results of the Diamond Princess cruise ship infection, I think we've done gone panicked and wrecked our economy over what appears to be not more than a highly contagious flu-like disease. We're panicking and not thinking through the damage including the deaths that will be caused by this overreaction.