He'll get roasted for using "coronavirus" and "flu" in the same tweet, but note that he's not saying Covid-19 is "just the flu." He is correctly noting that we need a coping strategy that doesn't involve perpetual lockdowns, because the Rona isn't going away any time soon.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1313449844413992961
There's some weird new version of Godwin's Law that says if you mention the coronavirus and any lesser disease in the same sentence, you're minimizing the threat of the Rona and dismissing it as "just the flu." We've had more than enough illogical hysteria during this pandemic.
Discussing long-term strategies for dealing with a persistent health issue does not require minimizing the threat of the disease. Nor does observing that it's not as lethal as early projections claimed. Minimizing its threat is wrong, but so is dramatically overstating it.
This isn't some kind of contest where we have to rank diseases on some kind of Top 10 list, firmly establishing beyond all argument which is Number One before we start talking about how to deal with them. We have to deal with ALL of them, at the same time, in a reasonable manner.
We need strategies that are sustainable. (Funny, that used to be the Left's favorite word, but you never hear it these days.) Lockdowns are not sustainable, and there's little evidence they ever did anything more than slow the spread, if that.
At this point, the cost of imposing more lockdowns would clearly be far greater than any benefit derived from them - including the health and psychological costs. Trump is absolutely correct to stress that we can't do that any more.
Very few health experts would quibble with Trump's assertion that the coronavirus is here for the long term, barring the development of very effective vaccines. That could happen, all possible efforts are being made, but we can't make plans assuming it's right around the corner.
Other diseases spread rapidly across large populations and kill many people. We don't go into a lockdown cringe every time there's an outbreak. We must take them all seriously in a sustainable way. The Rona isn't "just the flu," but the flu isn't just a sneeze, either. /end
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