SHUTDOWN: It’s a killer

The governor’s statewide, one-size-fits-all shutdown — treating the north the same as the distant south — is wrong. Losing your job or business also kills — through depression, substance abuse and suicide.

As of Thursday morning, the five north Idaho counties have 52 cases — with zero hospitalizations in Kootenai County and one in Bonner, and zero deaths. Idaho’s cases are concentrated in Boise and Sun Valley — 375 miles away and no easy way from there to here.

Nationally, the models on which the shutdown was based are turning out to have been badly wrong. Their estimates of hospitalizations, ventilator need, deaths and cases were absurdly high. That’s not because we’ve done a great job of “mitigation” — all this mitigation was factored into the models from the start.

The point of shutting things down was to spread cases out over time to avoid a peak that overwhelmed the health system. But with one hospitalization in the north that was never a factor. Across the country many of the emergency-built hospital facilities are under-occupied or empty, and some are being packed up.

The numbers in California, Oregon and Washington (except the Seattle nursing home) are suspiciously low — suggesting the virus was there earlier, people had it and didn’t know it, and there’s some “herd immunity.” Except for the elderly and unhealthy, symptoms are usually mild or nonexistent.

Why is the feckless Governor needlessly killing our community?

DAVID LYONS

Coeur d’Alene