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According to the Centers for Disease Control, approximately 2,810,000 Americans died in 2017, for an average of 7708 people per day, or one every 11.2 seconds.

Statistics for 2017 show that 647,457 people died of heart disease, making it the #1 killer of Americans.

Cancer of all kinds ran a close second, causing 599,108 deaths that year.

The Top Ten list for 2017 continues:

3. Accidental Injuries – 169,936
4. Respiratory Diseases – 160,201
5. Cerebrovascular Diseases (primarily strokes) – 146,383
6. Alzheimer’s Disease – 121,404
7. Diabetes – 83,564
8. Influenza and pneumonia – 55,672
9. Kidney Disease – 50,633
10. Suicide – 47,173

Let’s face it folks, we are dropping like flies!

We’ve heard estimates of over 100,000 COVID-19 deaths this year in the United States. Of course that is 100,000 more than we would prefer, but in the grand scheme of things that is a number roughly double the normal death count for flu and pneumonia.

I don’t mean to offend anyone or sound cold-hearted. It is heartbreaking anytime someone close to us dies. It is always hard to say goodbye.

We’ve all heard terrible sad stories of people dying alone in nursing homes, and families unable to gather to grieve. My heart goes out to these families, and I know some of them.

But the fact remains that this life is filled with peril. No one should take tomorrow for granted. There are no guarantees except death and taxes.

And sooner or later, every one of us will be taken out by something.

I personally hope for the “dying peacefully in bed after a good meal while spooning with Mrs. Smith” scenario, but who knows?  I might get hit by a bus instead. We don’t get to choose our exit.

News Flash: Life has a 100% mortality rate.

If this fear of death is truly overwhelming you, please see How to Cure Your Coronavirus Anxiety.

My point is we have to stop freaking out about COVID-19.

Most of us understand the rationale behind the original orders to stay in place. This pandemic caught us all off guard. Our governors decided to err on the side of caution, making decisions based on the best information they had.

But after two months of this program, we’ve had time to sift through the data and it is becoming apparent that the cure is worse than the disease. The unintended consequences of shutting down society could end up costing more lives than COVID-19 does.

We are destroying businesses and lives with draconian lock-down measures that may not be making much difference. How much gain are we getting for all this unprecedented pain?

How much of their future should my grandchildren forfeit for an uncertain potential amount of extra longevity for me? Just how selfish am I?

While we have put our economy on “Auto-Destruct” and added extra TRILLIONS of dollars of debt to our grandchildren, have we really accomplished so much? How much has all this chaos really contributed to “flattening the curve?”

We should take notice of the strategy deployed by Sweden which seems to have effectively controlled the spread of COVID-19 without shredding its social fabric.

As John Fund and Joel Hay reported recently in National Review:

Sweden is developing herd immunity by refusing to panic. By not requiring social isolation, Sweden’s young people spread the virus, mostly asymptomatically, as is supposed to happen in a normal flu season. They will generate protective antibodies that make it harder and harder for the Wuhan virus to reach and infect the frail and elderly who have serious underlying conditions. For perspective, the current COVID-19 death rate in Sweden (40 deaths per million of population) is substantially lower than the Swedish death rate in a normal flu season (in 2018, for instance, about 80 per million of population).

Of course we all should practice good hygiene. Of course we all should maintain a safe distance from strangers and keep our germs to ourselves. It’s a good idea to sanitize surfaces.

All of these reasonable precautions are important.

If you are elderly or otherwise at high risk, by all means isolate and protect yourself until you feel it is safe to venture out. Let us older folks take the precautions of our choice.

But let the younger folks live their lives and keep the country running for the rest of us.

I am done with living in a bubble. I am done with viewing every person who gets too close to me as a potential angel of death.

God has not given us a spirit of fear. I don’t want to live in a sterile, paranoid world.

When my time comes, I will be gone. Until then, I’ve got stuff to do, and I can’t get it done sitting around the house all day.

Some of us will get sick. Some will recover. Some will die.

Some of us will survive COVID-19 and then die of something else. Some of us will never even know we had it. Some of us may already be immune.

I will even hazard a guess that COVID-19 has spread much further throughout our population than we realize, but so many people are asymptomatic that it just goes undetected.

So I’m going to be careful, and I’m going to take reasonable precautions.

But we can’t continue hunkering down in fear and isolation. People are getting restless, and people are going to be people.

People need to work. They need to feed their families. They need to pay their bills.

They’re going to hug their grand-kids, smooch on dates, and gather for meals.

Good luck trying to stop humans from being human.

For those of you able to work from home, with a well-stocked refrigerator, who can’t understand why so many “greedy” Americans think it is more important to care for their families than endure a quarantine of dubious effectiveness, I have a suggestion.

Agree to give half your income to a distraught father facing bankruptcy, with hungry kids to feed, who is watching his future evaporate because our government has declared his livelihood “non-essential.”

Then I’ll be willing to discuss with you the moral superiority of your opinion.