And yet Salt lake county has been under mask mandate since June 25th. I know, I live here and you can't walk into any business without a mask on. If masks work, shouldn't SL county be controlling the spread.

LOL. The one-note wonder strikes again. Again, I reject the legitimacy of that ignorant oversimplification. You can keep banging that key on your piano, but hitting it more and harder won't bring it into tune.

You talk about numbers of what the death rate would be extrapolated over the entire population because of some .0006 number you came up with (I'm assuming that is the number of deaths to date per the current population), maybe that number would be less if governors back east hadn't mandated covid-19 positive patients be sent to nursing homes and long term care facilities earlier this year.

You can find the mortality rate of 0.6% for Utah under the Hospitalizations and Mortality Tab on Utah's official case-counts tab here:

https://coronavirus.utah.gov/case-counts/

This only includes Utah illnesses and Utah deaths, so don't worry about it being impacted by those "back east". Utah has the 6th lowest mortality rate, so in all but five other states (and the nation as a whole) the number is higher than that 0.6%.

I get that you don't trust the reported numbers, the media, or your government--there's nothing I can do to persuade anyone to trust numbers they believe to be politically motivated, so I won't waste my breath.

But I will ask if you trust your distrust enough to put millions of lives at risk if you are wrong and the reported numbers are right?

I am beating this key on the piano because you have not answered my question. If masks stop, or slow the spread of the virus, why then is Salt Lake county, where masks have been mandatory since June 25th still have the highest infection rate in the state? Shouldn't we have the spread under control here by now? If you go to the dr and he prescribes a medication and you keep getting sicker, wouldn't it be logical to assume that the medicine wasn't working? You are denying this logic and and telling me that I am the ignorant one.

And yet Salt lake county has been under mask mandate since June 25th. I know, I live here and you can't walk into any business without a mask on. If masks work, shouldn't SL county be controlling the spread.

LOL. The one-note wonder strikes again. Again, I reject the legitimacy of that ignorant oversimplification. You can keep banging that key on your piano, but hitting it more and harder won't bring it into tune.

You talk about numbers of what the death rate would be extrapolated over the entire population because of some .0006 number you came up with (I'm assuming that is the number of deaths to date per the current population), maybe that number would be less if governors back east hadn't mandated covid-19 positive patients be sent to nursing homes and long term care facilities earlier this year.

You can find the mortality rate of 0.6% for Utah under the Hospitalizations and Mortality Tab on Utah's official case-counts tab here:

https://coronavirus.utah.gov/case-counts/

This only includes Utah illnesses and Utah deaths, so don't worry about it being impacted by those "back east". Utah has the 6th lowest mortality rate, so in all but five other states (and the nation as a whole) the number is higher than that 0.6%.

I get that you don't trust the reported numbers, the media, or your government--there's nothing I can do to persuade anyone to trust numbers they believe to be politically motivated, so I won't waste my breath.

But I will ask if you trust your distrust enough to put millions of lives at risk if you are wrong and the reported numbers are right?

The bottom line is, there is no way to stop the spread of this thing. We aren't even really slowing it, the infection rate has risen from around 8% since summer to around 13% now. New Zealand was bragging that they had stopped the virus by shutting down their entire country and then a couple of days later they found infections that they had no idea where they had come from. Herd immunity is the only way that this virus eventually fizzles out. We need to protect the most vulnerable (people over 73 especially in long term care facilities) and let everyone else live their lives. Dehumanizing everyone by forcing a mask on them, stopping all recreation and social gathering isn't saving lives, it is just giving the government power that it should not have and was never constitutionally legal.

If Masks really work, why do we have to play in empty stadiums? If social distancing really works, why are we playing in empty stadiums, outdoors I might add?

I get really tired of these types of ignorant arguments. Like REALLY tired. The "If X works, why Y?" stuff just exposes either real or pretended ignorance.

Maybe nothing works perfectly to STOP spread, but there are a number of things that help SLOW the spread that, when combined, work even better to SLOW it?

Nothing ELIMINATES risk, but there are quite a few things we can do to REDUCE risk.

Exactly, so I guess it is the governments job to tell people what they can and can't do.

How else do you define a "law"?

Your statement actually confirms my entire point. If masks help, why not let people wear their masks and go watch football.

I don't honestly believe you are this dense -- this is what I referred to as pretended ignorance. There's a wide chasm between "helping" and "eliminating". Making the "if X works, why Y?" arguments only make you look irrational and insincere.

I get that you and other people want to be able to attend BYU games, but as a parent who didn't get to attend two of my son's football games that were played over the last two+ weeks in Provo/Orem because spectators are prohibited from attending any sporting events in those two communities, I would be pretty upset if BYU got a carve-out or special treatment. If the restrictions are science-driven, then either the rules change for the whole community or they stay the same for the whole community.

There is a 99+% chance that people will recover from this virus, which was recently proven when our 74 year old president recovered from it in 2 days.

I'm certain you've never done the math on what the number of deaths look like from a virus where 99+% survive infection--you wouldn't be so cavalier about things if you had.

Citing the survival rate generally comes from one of two camps--those who think we just need to go back to normal, or those arguing for herd immunity. I'll pretend that you are looking for herd immunity, because of those two camps, that one actually gives the best-case scenario for mortality numbers.

Herd immunity requires 50%-90% of the population to contract and survive a virus for herd immunity to offer protection. Even with the current mortality rate of 0.006%, those infection rates translate to between 9,600 and 17,312 deaths in the state of Utah alone. That's the same number of deaths as three to six 9/11's, and that's just in Utah.

Go nationwide and the "herd immunity plan" at current mortality rates means you are talking between 984,000 and 1,772,280 deaths.

By comparison, the US lost 655,000 lives in the Civil War (Union and Confederate combined). We lost 116,000 in WWI, and 405,000 in WWII. In our three worst wars, we saw a combined 1,176,000 deaths, not "casualties", or "wounded, dead, and missing", but actual deaths--and folks are calling for us to see that many or more from this virus here because they want to watch football and don't want to wear a mask.

Yeah, a percentage sounds small when you look at 0.006%. But when you take time to do the math and see what that looks like across the population, you understand that there is very good reason that our government officials are worried.

I think Utah has been pretty damn smart in how they have been reacting to the virus. They have targeted enhanced restrictions to the communities experiencing the greatest surge rather than coming down on communities that are not seeing increases. I expect Salt Lake County will see orange-level status in the next week if things don't turn around there.

If the ICU numbers don't turn around (COVID ICU bed usage rate is up 89% since September 1, and is now over 70% capacity), I wouldn't be surprised to see the entire state go back to orange before Halloween.

I think Utah is doing a pretty damn good job trying to strike a balance between keeping the economy afloat and slowing spread while we wait for a vaccine by targeting the communities seeing higher contagion rates.