Comment To A Libertarian Who Assumes Himself To Not Be "At High Risk" And Is Whining About Social Distancing

Modified from a comment made on another website. 

There is no way of knowing who is "at high risk" and who someone who is "not at high risk" would kill if they acted selfishly and irresponsibly, the very character traits championed by "libertarians".

In 1918, among others, the Surgeon General urged that the military institute social distancing as a means of fighting the outbreak of influenza and the pneumonia resulting from it, only to be rebuffed by the military authorities, which led to more deaths among not only those "at risk" in the general population but for many young, healthy people, as well. This far into that pandemic the actual nature of those who would die in the pandemic,which far exceed the numbers of war-dead, was not known, then. We don't know what more weeks or months into this pandemic will show, the conventional wisdom of a month ago has in some cases been superseded by more information.   We do know that right now we don't even know how many people in the population have died from it now or how many have been infected due to insufficient data collection and testing.

In short, your libertarian conclusions are based on insufficient information for them to be safely assumed. One thing we do know is that previous viral outbreaks from animal that entered into to human transmission have been a result of a libertarian view of the factory farming of animals for meat and eggs. That is a hard fact that is a result of libertarian ideology, right now.