Most Annoying (and Ubiquitous) COVID-19 Arguments

The following arguments are almost exclusively found on Facebook and low brow meme sites as far as my online diet is concerned, but I've got a large stomach for being online these days, so they're annoying nonetheless. This isn't to say that the sentiment is wrong. Your position might be sound and you've just decided to use the worst argument available, it happens all the time.

And yes, I'm being a bit needlessly confrontational here, but honestly after seeing each of these a dozen times, I feel like I'm allowed to be a bit petty and pithy. I may turn each of these into a blog post themselves just to keep myself busy, so I'll start with the one I already did.

1. "You can't place a value on a human life"

I actually hear this one quite infrequently, just starting with it cause I've already covered it. Suffice it to say that anyone who says this is just wrong, and dangerously so.

2. "Something, something, celebrities are worthless and we need to pay janitors and grocers more"

Again, the position might be fine, but the argument displays fully zero understanding of economics. So many concepts that I consider obvious now: marginal utility, scarcity, product differentiation. It needs a blog post, but just compare water and gemstone diamonds. One is needed for life, the other is useless, and somehow voodoo magic makes the other more expensive... it must be capitalism's fault.

3. "Doctors aren't paid enough"

Caveat: danger pay is a real argument and I know much less about other medical positions. But this isn't a blank slate you can throw emojis at, there's a ton of research on this subject. Doctors tend to be overpaid and extremely high skilled because we strongly restrict the supply. Demand for med school in Canada is so mind-bogglingly high that we could easily cut the pay and have more demand for this job from the most highly qualified applicants than almost any other field in North America.

4. "It's racist to name a virus after the region it came from"

Bold faced lie. Tons of viruses named for where they came from. See Middle East Respiratory Virus (MERS).

5. "It's not racist for Trump to want this named after China"

Anything can be racist. It's always nice to assume the best intentions for public figures, unless those public figures have a detailed history of lying and having bad intentions.

6. LITERALLY ANY CONSPIRACY THEORY

This has to be the most annoying. I hate 9/11 conspiracy theories too (they're so bad!). What makes this even worse is that a novel coronavirus evolving out of a live food marketplace in China is the most predictable thing ever. There is nothing surprising about this virus or how it is being handled.

Again, these aren't problems with the news, people I talk to, or even twitter. This is only a problem with the worst of my Facebook friends who share things disproportionately and a few s#!7posters on 9gag. Anyway, rant over. That's more than enough... for now.