Slow the spread. Flatten the curve. Stay home to save lives.

What a bunch of unmitigated horse shit — dangerous horse shit at that. It's one thing to have been initially alarmed over an unknown virus. It's another thing entirely to ignore the science and data about the disease in order to cover one's own ass, doubling down to avoid being wrong. The problem is, doubling down on bad data in order to push the goalposts and encourage the continued shutdown, is costing lives. According to this new study, the government's COVID-19 shutdown, and Americans dutiful compliance with it, will cost Americans millions of "life years."

Remember how those of us who were critical of the shutdown were told we "hated old people and wanted them to die"? Well congratulations. The shutdown fully supported my mask-wearing morons will cost people lives and years OFF their lives. Feel good about that custom-designed mask now?

From The Hill:

The policies have created the greatest global economic disruption in history, with trillions of dollars of lost economic output. These financial losses have been falsely portrayed as purely economic. To the contrary, using numerous National Institutes of Health Public Access publications, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Bureau of Labor Statistics data, and various actuarial tables, we calculate that these policies will cause devastating non-economic consequences that will total millions of accumulated years of life lost in the United States, far beyond what the virus itself has caused.

How devastating, you might ask? According to these professors, statistically, "every $10 million to $24 million lost in U.S. incomes results in one additional death." Unemployment, they tell us, leads to an average increase in mortality of at least, not at most, but at least, 60 percent. Which translates into about 7,200 lives lost, PER MONTH, among the now 36 million unemployed Americans.

In addition, many small business owners are near financial collapse, creating lost wealth that results in mortality increases of 50 percent. With an average estimate of one additional lost life per $17 million income loss, that would translate to 65,000 lives lost in the U.S. for each month because of the economic shutdown.

Now I'm more of a wordz person. Typo on purpose. But if I were to do the math using nothing but the noggin the Lord gave me, 65k deaths a month, with us closing in on three months shutdown, that's close to 200,000 Americans who'll lose their lives through the shutdown. In three months.

Depression, substance abuse, and suicide make up much of these numbers, but there are also missed health care that's going to cost people their lives, or years off their lives. You know, because of "stay safe, stay home, save lives." Have I already said what utter horse shit that entire line was? Maddening.

Emergency stroke evaluations are down 40 percent. Of the 650,000 cancer patients receiving chemotherapy in the United States, an estimated half are missing their treatments. Of the 150,000 new cancer cases typically discovered each month in the U.S., most - as elsewhere in the world - are not being diagnosed, and two-thirds to three-fourths of routine cancer screenings are not happening because of shutdown policies and fear among the population. Nearly 85 percent fewer living-donor transplants are occurring now, compared to the same period last year. In addition, more than half of childhood vaccinations are not being performed, setting up the potential of a massive future health disaster.

This is a nightmare. A nightmare way too many Americans willingly allowed into their lives, believing they were actually helping people. Wrong.

The shutdown was a disaster and continues to be a disaster every day it continues. If your'e reading this right now, and you were a proponent of the shutdown, best reverse course now. If you're reading this right now, and you were a proponent of the shutdown, and you still are, you are an utter moron and you want people to die. I'm not just saying that because karma is a cruel harlot, but because this shutdown is killing people.

Compare that to people dying of COVID-19. Much of the COVID fatalities are among the very old. But fatalities from the shutdown are much younger. Middle-aged or below. Because of that, the life years lost due to the shutdown surpass those life years lost from COVID-19.

...COVID-19 fatalities have fallen disproportionately on the elderly, particularly in nursing homes, and those with co-morbidities. Based on the expected remaining lifetimes of these COVID-19 patients, and given that 40 percent of deaths are in nursing homes, the disease has been responsible for 800,000 lost years of life so far. Considering only the losses of life from missed health care and unemployment due solely to the lockdown policy, we conservatively estimate that the national lockdown is responsible for at least 700,000 lost years of life every month, or about 1.5 million so far - already far surpassing the COVID-19 total.

Again I say, this shutdown is costing lives. If all lives matter, then the lives of the middle-aged, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, husbands, wives, and children, whose lives have been upended in order to spare granny, also matter. Which is exactly what the authors of the study concluded.

When the next pandemic inevitably arises, we need to remember these lessons and follow policies that consider the lives of all Americans from the outset.

The shutdown was a mistake. COVID-19 isn't as bad as early models predicted. Don't continue with the shutdown to save face. Get out into society, get back to work, go about your lives. And remember this bullshit the next time government tries to scare you into submission. Don't submit. Don't let a pandemic allow socialism to creep into your life. Don't allow government officials to tell you how to live. Don't allow a cough to ruin not just your life, but possibly cost years off of it or someone you know.

The study was authored by Scott W. Atlas, a physician and senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution; John R. Birge, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business; Ralph L Keeney, a professor emeritus in business at Duke University and in engineering at the University of Southern California; and Alexander Lipton is a visiting professor and dean's fellow at the Jerusalem Business School of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.