If it werent for Andrew Cuomo and Phil Murphy, our deaths would be cut almost in half

In a statistical view point then no, but in a view of something that's uncommon to our country then yes. A virus isn't something new in sense of relevancy. An attack on America has quite the periodical stand point. Covid is in the same bases as swine flu or Ebola. Wouldn't even be a thing if it wasn't politicized.

Swine Flu and Ebola are both significantly less dangerous. Ebola because if you have it, you have symptoms, and there's really no hiding it so it can be contained.

Covid has far more ability to cause death and damage than both of those combined, and the evidence is that it's killed far more and we aren't even close to stopping it.

Just no. Ebola has close to 50% mortality rate. Covid will be lucky to have a 2% mortality rate when everything is said and done.


So would you rather have covid or Ebola?

Ebola has a 50% mortality rate but is trivial for a modern medical system to contain. The thing that makes Covid dangerous is it's propensity to spread, and it can do that because it can be silent for a period of time before showing symptoms.

Ebola has a high mortality rate, but it will never be a significant threat to the industrialized world.

So you don't believe that herd immunity (which is happening) and the high possibility of a vaccine in the near future is going to slow the virus?

I believe both of those things will likely happen, herd immunity either through a vaccine or because we never made one and it naturally spread.

Notice how we needed neither of those things for Ebola to be stopped. Notice how we needed neither of those things for Swine Flu to be stopped. The reason is there is a tradeoff between lethality and ability to spread. The more lethal a virus is the less likely it is to be able to be asymptomatic, and therefore impossible to contain. Ebola is way on the lethal side of the spectrum, where if you are contagious, you have very obvious symptoms. The common cold and swine flu is on the other side, where it's super easy to spread and the symptoms are either non-existent or mild, but it's virtually never deadly. Covid is right in the sweet spot where it can be asymptomatic but still get bad enough to be deadly in a not-insignificant portion of the population. That is why Covid was treated far more harshly than Swine Flu or Ebola, because for a nation Covid is far more deadly.

I agree with the point you're making, but to nitpick a little bit: the danger of covid lies in its ability for pre-symptomatic spread, not in the (as studies show*) very rare asymptomatic spread. At least in theory, it would be possible for a virus to be more deadly (say an IFR of 10-15% instead of covid's 0.6%) while possessing the same transmissbility and presymptomatic spread. Now that would be the stuff of nightmares.

Assume I was grouping presymptomatic into asymptomatic.

I know, it wasnt intended as a knock, I just wanted to clarify this important distinction. Once the findings from this study are substantiated by similar or follow-up studies, the relative irrelevance of genuine asymptomatic spread should lead to a big change in our testing and quarantining approach.