See, what you should aim for is complex insanity. Then you can come here and entertain us with a long thread about how Einstein was wrong about everything or ducks built the pyramids or Rick Astley predicted 9/11.
Of course we shouldn’t ignore the coronavirus. But we should consider the negative effects of the lockdown as part of the cost-benefit analysis to decide how much of a lockdown to implement. Calculating these things out is part of the CDC’s job, but nobody has been following their recommendations.
After the fact isn’t the time to debate it. The time to debate it is before. Which the CDC did.
The CDC made these calculations and recommended a level of shutdown that has never been reached in this country. They made specific recommendations for reopeneing – yet none of the places that are reopening are anywhere close to meeting CDC guidelines for number of new cases or availability of testing.
-
I think everyone agrees with that in principle, it’s the details involving
a) severe lack of relevant information, for everybody including experts, as of now and certainly weeks or months ago
b) left/right, partisan, the culture gap etc. politics which IMO obviously greatly affect the take of many politicize people on these questions, left politicized people being more typical on this forum -
I’m not sure there have been constant and exact recommendations from national experts, or exactly who has/hasn’t been following them. The fact remains the experts (not to ignore the CDC but they are not the only public experts opining) don’t seem to know, for example, how more cases do you get opening retail stores generally with the same precautions supermarkets are supposed to be following now. It could be quite minimal. You don’t know until you try, and ‘more testing’ isn’t by itself going to tell you in advance. OTOH maybe it’s not minimal; on the third hand mainly it would be minimal if the precautions were really followed but they won’t be. But if they won’t be, what makes us think the govt can sustain a ‘lock down’ without people ignoring that?
-
My point was simply that politicized people on left and right will have their talking points about this, which they will each stubbornly stick to for years or decades, even after there’s more actual factual information potentially available. They’ll never agree because each assumes whatever the other is saying must be wrong because of who is saying it, and the more extremely they disagree, the more virtuous they are.
So yeah it would be nice to have clear answer in the details to what non-COVID suffering each of myriad different restrictions impose v how much COVID suffering they prevent. But a lot of the facts are missing now, and politicized people aren’t that interested in facts necessarily unless ones which prove the other side is evil. And that won’t change necessarily when less political people detect that there are more actual facts around.
The problem IMHO is that the “shutdowns” have been inconsistent nationally and somewhat panicked. Particularly in areas like the NYC metro that was hardest hit. Like we literally went from where my wife and I were in separate business conferences the last week of February to where everything was closed and people were afraid to even leave their apartments maybe a week or two later. Assuming they didn’t leave town altogether to go hide out in some second vacation home.
But that’s not sustainable. People generally do not have weeks or months of extra food and supplies squirreled away. And there is no plan for safely shutting down all economic activity, except for essential services
I would rather be lonely than dead. YMMV.
I agree neither a real ‘lock down’ or even the more limited measures we have here (also NY area) is sustainable. But to your observation of the big change in this area from Feb to Mar and since, there still seems little information in the details of which particular measures produced which result in terms of rate of infection and particularly in serious outcomes*. Plus one realistically has to consider all the people who don’t do what they’re told, under any given set of restrictions. But it will probably break down more and more for stricter restrictions over time. Although OTOH in term of economic rebound there are people who will be too scared to resume given economic activities they’ve been told they can resume. And one immediately realizes by walking around that this is not a left/right thing in this area. It’s got an obvious socio-economic correlation. There are pre-existing differences in how much various segments of society listen to authority, experts etc. (again not just ‘MAGA goobers’ v sophisticated city folk) and in particularly in this case the degree of economic suffering from not being able to go to work varies a lot.
*as for example NYS’s finding that 66% of new hospitalizations were people ostensibly ‘sheltering at home’, I believe 84% them and people in institutions. They expected a disproportionate % among ‘essential’ workers, wasn’t so. This is one piece of raw data, with various possible interpretations, and the answer is surely complicated. But seems to me the biggest gap in knowledge right now, how exactly do people end up getting it, usually, and how does this relate to particular restriction measures? PS I had it apparently, per antibody test with claimed 100% specificity, my guess is I got it at a funeral mass of a friend’s mom in late February, big close crowd.
I would think another consideration would be is how much time left to live those who are primarily dying from this virus actually have. We have never attempted to protect everyone from all natural disasters including viruses. This particular virus seems to be very selective in who it kills with very few exceptions.
Unfortunately, people don’t walk around with countdown clocks over their heads, or a pricetag showing how much they’re current worth to society.
Frankly, I’d rather save a bunch of intelligent, productive 70 year old’s than some useless young slackers.