[HoosierinFL]

Originally Posted by Ironshaft

- Non-serious medical issue for the rest of the population. Like having the flu.

This is not true. Some % of otherwise healthy people die anyway. Even more have long term health complications that can include heart arrhythmia, clotting disorder, autoimmune disease, brain damage, lung damage, and more. Some of these long-term complications, esp the auto-immune response, are the strongest in children.

- Very conflicting medical advice being given out about the effectiveness of: masks use, social distancing, length of time it is viable outside of a body, amount of virus in a cough viral load or effectiveness of disinfecting surfaces. For every study that concludes one way, I can find one that concludes another way.

the short answer: if masks did not help prevent the wearer from spreading infectious disease, the surgeons would not have started wearing them during surgery. Its a simple as that. Surgeons wearing masks and gloves is to protect the patient from the surgeon, and the same holds true for spreading infectious disease in the general population.
You have to learn to deal with the ambiguities of science, different studies with different methods, samples, measures, etc will give varying results. Its the inherent nature of science. Scientists are not alarmed by this variance, and still see the trend and understand why the studies vary, and they did not waver in their recommendations for mask wearing and social distancing.

- While the virus is a concern, the fear mongering around the virus is WAY over the top. It has purpose.

despite your hinting at some politicization, which vague nonsense, the reality is that 162,000 americans have died since this started. That is triple the numbers of "bad" flu year, and we're not even a full 6 months into this yet. It could be a lot worse if we don't follow protocols, (and it could have been so *less* worse if we'd done what most other civilized countries do, but somehow that's not "freedom"?)
And don't start with suspicions about the counting of deaths (in terms of supposed mislabeled causes of death). When you have something on this scale happening so quickly, data collection is bound to be inconsistent, but that is still a real body count above. An error rate of 10% (which is unrealistically high) still means 145,000+ dead.

- Study out of the UK this past weekend over their summer term: Apr - Jun, 110,000 school aged children, over 200 school districts. Almost zero reported cases of either student to student transmission or student to teacher transmission. The fear mongering about our kids going back to school is over the top.

You got a link? I can't find any such paper and everything I've found suggested that in England they have keep kids out of school all summer.

- If this were 2019 or 2021, I think the fear mongering would be significantly less than what we have seen this year. I think the fear mongering is attempting to effect an election.

again, the deaths are real and dwarf all the "whatabouttas". And is it really fear that drives the mask and social distancing mandates?

- I predict that the fear mongering about COVID will almost disappear on 04 November 2020. The media will start fear mongering about something else (Trump the Dictator or Biden the Savior) but I don't think it will be COVID anymore.
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Your predictions will be wrong. People will not suddenly stop dying. Its not fake. All these sports are not voluntarily losing millions to push some political agenda. You believe in nonsense from fox news.