"I try to get more cynical every day . . .

" ... but I can't keep up." So observed Gerard Vanderleun a few years ago on the state of American politics. But it is not just politics any more. Consider this FB post, which I have personally verified (I deleted the person's name).

Now, why is that the rule? Having been a federal bureaucrat, I will say (in my view, authoritatively) that there is one and only one reason: money.

Understand that this listing decision was not originated by physicians, but by administrators. And the overwhelming desire of every bureaucratic administrator everywhere is this: get more money. Increase his/her department's budget.  Because that is the way that bureaucrats get promoted - not for managing programs or people, but by managing ever-larger budgets.

And the medical bureaucrats know very well that the amount of money they get from  the federal spigots turned on for the C19 epidemic will relate very directly to the number of C19 cases they report, especially the fatalities.

If you think this sounds cynical, I assure you: It is far from cynical enough.

Update: And the beat goes on:

The Big Apple’s new death toll is 10,367. That figures combines the 6,589 victims who tested positive for the virus plus another 3,778  who were never tested, but whose death certificates list the cause of death as “COVID-19 or an equivalent,” according to city Health Department data from March 11 through April 13.

Italics mine, to illuminate what is being done here. What exactly is an "equivalent" cause of death to C19? Why, something that killed them, duh. You know, like lung cancer.

I said on my FB page, "First, let’s kill the children."

 Serious question: How many people are we willing to kill to stop people from dying of Covid-19?  

More specifically: How many children are we willing to kill to do it? Read this and weep:

"Hundreds of thousands of children could die this year due to the global economic downturn sparked by the coronavirus pandemic and tens of millions more could fall into extreme poverty as a result of the crisis, the United Nations warned on Thursday. ...

But the U.N. report warned that “economic hardship experienced by families as a result of the global economic downturn could result in an hundreds of thousands of additional child deaths in 2020, reversing the last 2 to 3 years of progress in reducing infant mortality within a single year.”

The full UN report is here.

Our sanguinary calculus is real: If we do not do lockdown/distancing by shutting down the economy, people will die. And if we do lockdown/distancing by shutting down the economy, people will still die - and the UN says that "hundreds of thousands" of them will be children. But as Roger Kimball explains,

We have often been presented with a false dichotomy between saving the economy and saving lives. This is a false dichotomy because, as Geach points out, “the state of our economy is not just a monetary risk, it is a health risk.” For one thing, “when people lose their jobs, they typically lose their health insurance.” He notes that there were more than 10,000 “economic suicides” as a result of the 2008 recession. There is also a spike in cancer deaths, drug abuse, domestic violence, and other pathologies.

This is not a guess, it is fact:

Every 1% hike in the unemployment rate will likely produce a 3.3% increase in drug overdose deaths and a 0.99% increase in suicides according to data provided by the National Bureau of Economic Research and the medical journal Lancet. These are facts based on experience, not models. If unemployment hits 32%, some 77,000 Americans are likely to die from suicide and drug overdoses as a result of layoffs. Scientists call these fatalities deaths of despair.

There are protests around the country against long continuing the restrictions from this day on. The longer we are told to stay "safe at home" instead of going back to work, or finding a new job for the 22 million-plus Americans who have lost theirs in the last month, the more people will kill themselves or a family member, the more spouses and children will suffer abuse and injury, the more alcoholics will be made, the more people will suffer fatal non-Covid illnesses, the more drug addicts will be made - the list continues.

"At some point," [Princeton bioethicist] Peter Singer says, "we are willing to trade off loss of life against loss of quality of life. No government puts every dollar it spends into saving lives. And we can't really keep everything locked down until there won't be any more deaths.

We need to think about this in the context of the well-being of the community as a whole….We are currently impoverishing the economy, which means we are reducing our capacity in the long term to provide exactly those things that people are talking about that we need—better health care services, better social-security arrangements to make sure that people aren't in poverty. There are victims in the future, after the pandemic, who will bear these costs. The economic costs we incur now will spill over, in terms of loss of lives, loss of quality of life, and loss of well-being.

I think that we're losing sight of the extent to which that's already happening. And we need to really consider that tradeoff.

 The "false debate," in other words, is not the discussion that considers the enormous human cost of suppressing economic activity. It's the discussion that pretends there is no such tradeoff. (The 'False Debate' About Reopening the Economy Is the One That Ignores the Enormous Human Cost of Sweeping COVID-19 Control Measures)

And it will not take long for the American people justifiably to decide that the real point of these restrictions is not the health of Americans at all, but something politically sinister. And no podium appearances by Dr. Fauci or Dr. Birx is going to persuade them otherwise.