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Is San Luis Obispo County willing to kill us?

April 25, 2020

Jerry Bunin

OPINION by JERRY BUNIN

No matter how hard I try, I can’t stop being extremely angry that local government is trying to assign some economic value to my life.

My life is priceless. So is yours. Government shouldn’t be willing to kill me. Yet it is now the official position of local government that public health is no longer the top priority in fighting COVID-19. It is now being balanced with reopening the economy.

Official documents regularly admit that that position will cause more people to get infected and die.

When you voted, did you agree to give local officials the power of life and death over you, your family, friends, co-workers and everyone else? I didn’t and won’t.

It is stupid, dangerous and completely wrong for San Luis Obispo County officials to be working so hard to jeopardize our lives in order to restart the local economy prematurely. Of course, it is wildly premature – no vaccine, woefully inadequate testing, continuing shortage of medical equipment and thousands of people dying every day.

Mary Shaffer and I have tried to buy face masks for a month. Our orders never get filled or mailed to us. We wear bandanas as if something I used to sneeze into is my chief line of defense against a global killer. How dumb is that?

Here is my plan. Every government official who approves reopening the economy in the next few months should be required to volunteer that their entire family and everyone who works for them will serve as guinea pigs to see if their plan works. If they get sick, too bad! Whose fault is that?

I am going to read the county plan when it is released, allegedly early next week. However, my efforts will be useless. It will only make me angrier. No elected official cares. They already made a decision.

County supervisors and mayors have already asked Governor Newsom to allow them to ease restrictions before the plan is finished or approved or publicly released so we could comment on it. In other words, my opinion and yours and regardless what is in the plan, a decision has already been made.

That is offensive – bad decision-making, bad government, idiotic and grounds to recall them.

Every poll you see shows that 70 to 80 percent of the public opposes loosening the restrictions. An AP poll released today reported that 95 percent of Democrats and 78 percent of Republicans believe the restrictions in place are about right or don’t go far enough.

Who do our elected officials represent? How do they know what the majority of us want?

Everyone one who goes out while restrictions are still in place is seeing dozens of people who are not wearing face masks, are not following social distancing guidelines, and are so selfish that they have willfully chosen to kill people.

I am also going a keep a list of every local business that opens when it should not, and I will never go to that store ever again. If if doesn’t value my life, I don’t value that business.

PS: I don’t respond to Trump supporters or people who think objective news reporting or polls they don’t like are fake.

Jerry Bunin is a long-time Oceano resident, former journalist and also the former goverment affairs director for the Home Builders Association of the Central Coast.


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The government IS willing to kill us. this is evidenced by their refusal to close our highways and not ban cars. Oh the humanity!


49

Correction: Drop the “not” prior to “ban”.


1

You’re right. Government keeps overstepping. That’s why we need to get out and protest to remove speed limits and cease police traffic stops. This is an outrageous infringement upon our personal liberty.


-16

If you are waiting for Government to protect your sniveling ass you’re as good as dead. Self isolate pumpkin you’ll be alright.


60

I respect people who are worried for their safety. I don’t want to see anyone taking any risks that they don’t need to take for themselves. When this all started 6 weeks ago, were told numbers of expected death on an order of magnitude higher than it ended up. That is why we all laid down in fear and accepted this total lock down. As it happened, nothing like the projections ever happened. As of today, I think a handful of folks have lost their lives and not many more than that have been in ICU. Instead hospitals are cutting back hours and furloughing people. Real people’s lives are being irrecoverably destroyed right now by a fully man caused problem: the shutdown. This gross reaction has put our lives at risk for the next few years. Homes will be foreclosed. People will have to make choices that are devastating as to how to dig themselves out of financial disaster. Many people will take up drugs and alcohol to get through the next couple years of great suffering and depression. We now have unemployment higher than the Great Depression of the 1930s. There are real lives destroyed. Anyone at special risk or worried can simply self-quarantine. We have no scientific data at this point that this lock down has rally even helped the numbers that much. The later countries and the two that did not lock down are not devastated. This is a big city problem more than anything. That is why it is in big cities in great numbers. Space is healthy. SLO would never have numbers like Italy or New York. We make economic trade off decisions every day of our lives. We drive. Cars (not to mention motorcycles) are extremely dangerous. 38,800 people died in cars in 2019. That does not count injuries. The seasonal Flu took about 50,000. Somewhere around 80,000 people died last year of heart disease. We all make choices in a free society. I don’t want to live in China. I don’t want to have my government dictate what I eat or how much exercise I have to get daily. This would clearly save lives! We had, until all this started, a Constitutional Republic where we were given by Our Maker inalienable rights. Those have been suspended by our leaders under the rubric of keeping us safe. This is not America I grew up in any more. It is time that we stand up and buckle up our boots and get back to work. We can handle illness as we always have. We can be safe. I trust my fellow citizens to care about my welfare. I hope that somehow in all your anger and political frustration you can find some trust also in your neighbors. If not maybe you might consider China as a good safe place to settle. They have an excellent Chinese Communist Party government that knows what is best for all, and that government is very efficient at controlling the populace for the communal good.


62

Corona isn’t all that lethal. they were saying a short time ago that the number of people infected is likely 85x higher than the known number of cases. this was due, they said, to the asymptomatic and minor symptoms people had and therefore didn’t get tested. Using that 85x number with the number of known infections and the death rate is miniscule. Jerry, you are paranoid. Think about this…should the government relax restrictions if people start suiciding themselves? And then there is this pesky little thing called the constitution…darn!


30

The 85x number is based on a study that is not peer reviewed and has already been criticized by statisticians and scientists. One of the problems consisted of their selection process where they selected their sample by volunteers requested from facebook advertising that people could find out if they have covid19. Of course by doing that they were more likely to get people who would be concerned they have it.


-18

Then the number of infections would be even higher if we tested people who were NOT concerned, making the death rate even lower. Thanks more making my point even better than I did.


5

What you said doesn’t make sense. The study was not properly randomized. If you have people who think they have the virus because they’re probably showing symptoms, you’re going to have a higher rate of positive results. Reversing that relationship does not prove your point; it’s more likely that a properly randomized study would show a far lower infection rate than 85x (but obviously still higher than the “confirmed” cases–but it’s been know to be higher since the get go). If the study were properly randomized, it would have made it a better study, but this was just one flaw with it.


https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/23/coronavirus-antibody-studies-california-stanford


https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/04/19/fatal-flaws-in-stanford-study-of-coronavirus-prevalence/


-3

The Chinese Communist Party has won this war.


21

Jerry, since 1946 until now, over 30,000 people in the USA have died due to traffic accidents, that’s deaths per annum. Every year, over 30,000 dead. We know that at some point the virus will go dormant or vaccination will keep it at bay, yes we can wait it out. We can go bankrupt waiting it out.

By your thinking, you would want the government to ban autos until there is no risk of accidents that end in death. Is that about right?


And why stop with autos? Lets let the government ban every part of life that causes or is at least connected to causes of death.


35

You have to know Jerry. He has always been in favor of cradle to grave government.


0

No one is saying you need to go anywhere. Stay home and let the rest of us take our chances and get up off our knees. We don’t all have a nice place to shelter, a sink and hot water to wash our hands 92 times a day and the money to do so. You stay inside and be safe. You don’t even need a mask at home, so no worries. Oh and those people out there working their tails off in essential businesses so you can keep your castle running, thank them while you’re whining.


54

This highlights the real disparity: that people who are poor will leave their homes to earn a living and be more likely to get sick (and potentially die, especially if they don’t have healthcare coverage), and people who can afford to be cautious and stay home will be more likely to survive (even if they get sick, they have better access to healthcare). I wish we could see this pandemic as an opportunity to come together and fix the things in our society that continue to harm the worst off people the most, feeding the disparities between rich and poor. That is the true plague on our country and has been for decades.


3

Well, here goes. Bunin, you’re right. Violent_Felon, a bold but correct stance. Looks like lots of Fake Docs out there. With little knowledge and a GFY attitude, most commenters here have never faced anything like this particular pandemic, yet they pontificate. My suggestion to them: shut the f**k up, and we’ll talk in five or six months. Good health.


-50

So at this point there are at least 11 of you out there.


-16

Comical that you do not understand you can stay home self isolated and not visit businesses you don’t like until you die..of natural causes at home.


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