In the Santa Clarita Valley, (as of May 19) there have been 26,933 recorded cases of COVID-19, and 26,642 recoveries. (About 300) people out of a population of 300,000 have died. So let’s do the math. We had a recovery rate of at least 98.9%, and that’s assuming nobody got the germ untested (like most of my family) and that is also using the most liberal definition of COVID-19 deaths (counting “died with COVID” as “died from COVID”).
In other words, in Santa Clarita the official results were little worse than a bad flu, infecting less than 1 in 10 residents, and killing less than 1 in 1,000, at an average age of 80. Yet in the name of that threat, all of our lives were upended for over a year, and counting.
This is the real takeaway from COVID-19: Our state’s, county’s and city’s “cure” was far, far, FAR worse than the disease. As we have seen in comparison with non-lockdown states like Florida (with an even denser and older population than California), our regulatory measures did no good. Only immunity stops a virus.
Meanwhile, businesses were shuttered, jobs are gone forever, freedoms have been trampled, and trillions of dollars have been borrowed from the future and wasted in the past.
What’s more, this data is nothing new. The Princess Cruise line, based right here in Santa Clarita, showed the same sort of stats right from the very beginning. But almost everyone ignored the hard data in favor of panic.
So if you were frightened of the germ and backed any of those measures, at least own up to it with a big mea culpa and learn from this mistake so we never repeat it in any form. We owe nothing less than that to the younger generations we have impoverished in so many ways by our frightened foolishness.
Rob Kerchner
Valencia
