How many people died from influenza A and influenza B last year? I'm betting you don't know.

In the US, somewhere between 35,000 and 65,000. Even though it is a highly studied viral infection that we have been living with for many, many decades, and the death toll is regularly multiple tens of thousands, you don't shut down local businesses every year when flu season comes in. You protect the most vulnerable while recognizing that you need everybody else going about their business in order to be able to afford to do it next year. On top of that, and this is the part that might disturb people, you accept that some people are going to die that maybe you could have saved if you had done more intrusive, more destructive, more aggressive intervention.

You can't cure influenza, either. You can vaccinate for it, and we do every year, but it's been a bad series of years for the flu shot and they've only bet the right way in about 40% of the tested cases. Is that better than 0%? Sure. Did we shut down entire economies about it?

That would be stupid.

Doing it now is also stupid.

If you really wanted to save lives and didn't care about the economic cost, you'd be advocating for the shutdown of the interstate highway system in the US. Millions of people are injured and tens of thousands die every year in entirely preventable accidents. If only they couldn't get on the highway and drive to somewhere else. Entirely preventable. Maybe we should just take away the ownership of vehicles altogether and save even more lives!

You see, this line of reasoning is idiocy because there's no end to it. There is no acceptable place to stop.

I like to stop when you start talking about government intervention into directly limiting what has been touted as essential, elemental freedoms not just in the US but in the Western world since the Enlightenment. I know, I'm a dreamer. Crazy.

But at least I'm not an idiot.