What planet does Joe Biden live on?

In his campaign for president, he's promised more lockdowns if the "experts" tell him to do it, maybe permanent lockdown, lockdown as a lifestyle, which means shutting down the entire country.  It's bizarre stuff, given that it's already been done, with plenty of unintended consequences.  It's a supposed leadership redo of President Trump's supposedly bad leadership on COVID.  This, according to Joe, is how one really does it, so rewind the reel to March 2020 and let him start the lockdowns from there as if nothing had at all changed.

"I would shut it down; I would listen to the scientists," Biden, a former vice president, said in an interview with ABC News.

"I will be prepared to do whatever it takes to save lives because we cannot get the country moving, until we control the virus," Biden added. "That is the fundamental flaw of this administration's thinking to begin with. In order to keep the country running and moving and the economy growing, and people employed, you have to fix the virus, you have to deal with the virus."

One problem: It has.

The latest data show that the U.S. is winning its coronavirus war.

John Merline's Issues & Insights has five tremendously indicative graphs showing that the COVID crisis is peaking.  The crisis fading, the conversation now should be on how to exit the extended lockdowns and prevent them from ever happening again.

But not for Joe.

His calls for more lockdown are pretty weird in conditions like these.

I&I says to share the graphs, so we will share a couple:

The call for more lockdowns in light of what's clearly a peaking crisis is the call of someone still living in March 2020, embedded in amber.

What's more, the U.S. is winning on the COVID fatality front, too.  Catching COVID is no longer a death sentence because President Trump has stepped up treatment options, and suggested cheap, plentiful HCQ as one, which is a very good one.

Here's another I&I chart of the five:

But Joe just sees numbers without context.  According to I&I:

In his acceptance speech, Joe Biden said "Just judge this president on the facts. Five million Americans infected by COVID-19. More than 170,000 Americans have died. By far the worst performance of any nation on Earth." Later he said, "We lead the world in confirmed cases. We lead the world in deaths."

The chart shows that the U.S. is actually doing better than pretty much anyone on a per capita basis, so Biden's claim to a high death count misses the fact that the U.S. is actually a big country and the odds of dying from COVID, especially now, are very low. 

Even more damning are the already well known reasons for why the death count had any heft at all: there were deaths, all right, concentrated in blue cities and states run by Democrat governors.  And those deaths were disproportionately in nursing homes, and those nursing homes had been ordered by those governors to accept COVID patients despite the risk to the vulnerable elderly also residing in them and the protests of the homes themselves.  The unwilling nursing homes were dumping grounds for COVID patients while President Trump had sent these states massive floating Navy hospitals that went unused.  That's a Democrat problem Democrats refuse to talk about, so their next course is to blame Trump.

What we have here is a nation that should be talking about how to dig out of the COVID rubble and find a way to restore the economy to its previous glory.  We already know that the public knows this, given its nonchalance about social distancing and absence of fear about catching the illness.  The shutdown small businesses should be first and foremost in the conversation about exiting COVID and enacting recovery, given the tremendous losses there as a result of the lockdowns.

But for Biden, it's all about extending the lockdown, a prison term, by the way, making recovery from COVID a lockdown lifestyle, a feature, not a bug, of American existence.  Just call him Lockdown Joe, from the man who likes living in his basement.  Based on these charts, the crisis is over, but Biden has a stake in making it continue forever.

Photo illustration by Monica Showalter with use of photo by Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0; PxFuel public domain image; and Pixabay public domain image.