This is one of the reasons I don’t understand most liberals. Most people in general are terrible at risk analysis, so this isn’t unique to libs, but they seem particularly bad at it.

If you’re healthy, young-ish, you have no symptoms, and no one you know is sick or has been sick, the risk of contracting/spreading Covid-19 is small, and the risk of the worst of the sickness is also small.

Thus, hanging out with someone one-on-one is a prety fucking low-risk. Especially balanced against the risk of psychological harm and trauma from isolation. Also, we know that most people contract the virus in close-quarters superspreader events indoors in poorly-ventilated areas.

So, as usual, liberals with their deontological orientation worry about the wrong things.

If you meet a friend in a well-ventilated area, where both of you have no symptoms, and haven’t been around anyone who has been sick, and outdoors, not around lots of other people, your chances of contracting anything are vanishingly small. Probably around a 0.001% chance or so. Maybe less. And far less if you both wear masks (I think this is unnecessary outdoors).

But no! Libs have to show their moral rectitude at all times, like some 16th-Century Puritan.

This cancel culture "debate" is devastatingly boring. Literally no-one has ever been cancelled for doing anything that isn't obviously beyond the pale. Even if they leave the limelight for a while they just come back. The most powerful men in the world right now are open bigots.

— Anthony We Need a Green Recovery Simpson-Pike (@SimpsonPike) July 9, 2020

Absurdly moronic take that misunderstands what is happening completely.

“Cancel culture” has nothing at all to do with the most powerful, but rather with skirmishes over disappearing good jobs. The goal of it is to knock the most capable and/or the most vulnerable out of the roles that the cancelers covet. There really isn’t any other way to explain what is going on without this framework being applied.

It’s still exceedingly strange to me that when the predicted and predictable occurs, so many people squirm forth to say, “Oh, no one could have possibly known.”

There is no 'learning to live with' the virus. There is only 'learning to ignore who we kill'.

— Maria Farrell (@mariafarrell) July 2, 2020

Well, no.

Covid-19 is more lethal than the flu, but we live with 20,000+ deaths from that every year in the US alone. And we’ve lived for years with a medical system that kills 40,000+ a year more than it would if we had a better system. And we’ve lived with 50,000 opioid deaths every year for a long time now and done little to nothing about that.

So what she said is prima facie incorrect. However, we should’ve done more about Covid-19 and we didn’t. Now, in many ways, it’s too late. I suspect that “living with it” is what we’ll do mostly in the US, as devastating as that will be socially and economically.

Unless, that is, there is a vaccine.