Trump's sheep may NOT safely graze!

We've known for several weeks that "up to" a quarter of the people who have contracted COVID-19 and are contagious have no symptoms at all. That's the reason why the CDC reversed itself and began advising people to wear masks in public- not for their protection, but for the protection of others.

Well, guess what? Reuters is reporting that an exhaustive study of the crew of the COVID-stricken carrier USS Roosevelt has revealed that fully 60% of the young, previously healthy crew who tested positive for the virus had absolutely no symptoms. But that didn't make them any the less contagious. 

Yet as the evidence mounts of how absolutely vital it is for everyone to wear a mask and how catastrophic it would be to re-open the economy before the virus is contained, extreme right-wing publications and commentators and, increasingly, an ill-informed libertarian/populist resistance movement are joining President Trump in creating pressure on the state governors whose responsibility is to make any such decision (no matter what Mr. Trump says) to relax restrictions prematurely, a step which would almost certainly result in the virus coming back with a vengeance, require that the economy immediately be locked down, renew the threat to the capacity of our healthcare system, and almost certainly deepen and lengthen the very recession they foolishly think it will mitigate.

President Trump and the far-right have minimized the danger this virus poses from the beginning, and are largely responsible for the fact that the pandemic in the United States has reached the dimensions it has.

There is virtually no chance that prematurely re-opening the economy would mitigate the recession, and it's a virtual certainty that doing so would actually deepen and lengthen it. That shouldn't be a difficult concept to grasp. Yet a shocking percentage of Americans who claim to be "pro-life" are willing to come right out and say that they would be in favor of trading a certain number of human lives for the vanishingly small chance that an early end to the lockdown would do anything other than worsening and lengthening the financial crisis.