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I lived through the Polio age and remember when the vaccine was discovered and perfected. Took them nearly four years to perfect a vaccine. A horrible experience your family member went through probably for the rest of his/her life. My condolences, truly. As kids we shuddered at the thought of getting Polio. Covid-19 is of the SARS-CoV family type virus. It's classified as SARS-CoV2 but is structurally somewhat different than SARS-CoV. According to the Lancet Medical Journal Covid-19 is way below the SARS-CoV fatality rate and also very far below the fatality rate for the MERS family of viruses. The US, over the years, has been hit by both SARS and MERS viruses and we survived all of them without shutting things down. By the way, we also survived Poliomyelitis and all of the childhood diseases, most of them viruses, without shutting things down. And there were no vaccines for those childhood diseases until many years later. This is the first time in my lifetime, and I'm an old timer, that any disease has even attempted to cause the country to shutdown. Many many doctors, some of them ICU, emergency room, and specialist type doctors disagree totally with the CDC and believe they are the problem. There are 5 countries that never shutdown and they all survived in better shape than the countries that did shut down. None of them destroyed their economy and locked their people away like POW's. Just saying.

Yes, polio was very bad. I don't think we can easily compare the approaches of other countries to ours, or even the approaches of past US generations. Certain other countries and arguably past generations in the US seem to have an easier time with the concept of doing what is best for the greater good. Am sure those countries that did not shut down made assumptions about their people's willingness to voluntarily self-distance and behave themselves. Knowing we in the US are such an independent bunch and that today, more than ever, people go out of their way to prove a point that they can do their own thing, it forces us into a conservative approach.