Plan for 5 Years of Lockdown

I would bet you that, at least in the modern day West, taking away schools wouldn't reduce basic literacy and numeracy by even a tenth of a percent.

Medical schools, too.

No, you're not alone in feeling this way. But I would assert that most people who feel this way are currently employed or have significant savings. It's easy to comment on hacker news from your cushy WFH job about "those silly protestors who want to re-open the economy." But there is a reason they are so frustrated. They are people who have been living paycheck-to-paycheck and suddenly find themselves without a job, but with bills still arriving and kids still asking for food on the table. They want the world to be healthy, too. They don't want to endanger you or themselves. But they want to feed their families.

We don’t need to “just” reopen things as a kneejerk reaction. We will need to reopen things sometime.

But from the earliest lockdowns, all the forecasts have been that about 60% of the world population ultimately gets infected anyway. The lockdowns are about making that happen in a more orderly way, one that doesn’t absolutely crush our hospitals, ICUs, ventilator capacity, and our stocks of PPE. That’s what we’re buying with the lockdowns. That’s where the lives are being saved.

That makes sense, for a while. That doesn’t make sense for five years. The question is where the line goes in between, and I really don’t know exactly where. We may have passed it or it may be months ahead.

Just remember that even if we are right to call for a much longer lockdown, we shouldn’t go all William Bligh about it, condescending to abuse people who are stubborn and wrong for their stupidity on the matter. Such an approach is anti-leadership; it gets you senseless mutinies instead of buy-in.

(See also: Bill de Blasio enjoying the amenities of the Park Slope YMCA mere moments before shutting down all the gyms. Not a great way to build solidarity.)

I'm struggling to understand this comment. The GP is entirely correct here: any thinking adult knows that 5 years of lockdown would cause human suffering on a scale unheard of in modern history. There is no correct choice here for policy makers, but an extended lockdown will cause death and suffering as well.

The UK equivalent would be more orderly, but they still need to pay for the NHS with finite supplies of tax dollars and borrowing. They had staffing and recruitment and budget issues before the crisis, and some lockdown approaches might deprive them of seeking any more talent from major sources like India.

You ignored the rest of that point.

What happens to the European hospitals when tax income falls way below what the government needs to operate?

It's still a problem, though. "Haha, told you so." is not a solution.

Besides, publicly funded hospitals and healthcare systems in general need money, too. If there's hardly any tax income anymore because there's hardly any taxable income anymore funds for publicly funded hospitals will dry up, too.

If you really believe "Communist revolutions" are the path of least death, I have a Great Leap Forward to sell you.

The evolution dictates that it should become less deadly because dead host mostly means dead virus and live host may mean more live viruses.

I think this is not true and lot of people are living out of moral superiority, fake altruism, based on the ego. They want to be a cultural hero by saying stuff that imply moral superiority and people with other opinions are evil!

There are good reasons to be sceptical about locking down a complete economy, but everybody is afraid to speak out, because they know they will be destroyed by the moralists!

The communists believed in altruism... they thought they were right and people around them evil. The human mind is corrupt. Some people simply live in a fantasy world. The christians, communists and fascists had 1 thing in common... they thought they were right and used the truths as a weapon against other people.

Speaking about other people as "evil", is sometimes projection or an egoic illusion.

Rumor has it that power plants are having a hard time getting replacement parts, too.

I expect, though, that these sorts of things will get sorted out. For one, no government is going to be keen on letting people who are confined to home and dependent on computers and the Internet to keep their little corner of the economy going go without power for long just because it's suddenly next-to-impossible to get some special precision bracket from the overseas factory that got the contract to make it back in 2005, while at the same time the domestic economy has hordes of ex-machinists who aren't quite ready to retire yet yet, and would be more than happy to quit their jobs as greeters at the local big box store in order to return to a job that pays more and reduces their risk of exposure to SARS-CoV-2.

Worst case scenario, perhaps we won't return to the "easily availability of basically everything so everything's basically disposable because the global supply chain is so fluid that it's easier to buy new broken crap than replace old broken crap" that we enjoyed so far this millennium. But I doubt it'll get much worse than the level of availability that developed economies enjoyed when I was a kid. Which is still pretty good. It would take a bit longer to rejigger the design of consumer products so that they return to using more standardized parts that can easily be stocked locally instead of all this fragile, disposable, special snowflake industrial design. But I could see that shifting fairly quickly, too, if things are still looking bad in 5 years.

> a 2 week quarantine on incoming goods

Huh, this is the first I hear of such a thing. Is this in the US? I thought the scientific consensus was that even under the most favorable circumstances the virus isn't viable on any surface after two or three days. And typically much shorter and very unlikely to be sufficiently concentrated in the first place, e.g., the person manufacturing your dryer in China won't be sneezing into it constantly. So locking things up for two weeks seems surprising.

No idea why it would be 5 years. But a lockdown would not result in starvation. Why would it? We "only" lock down social life (bad enough with all kinds of negative impacts on people, society and economy), but the food supply won't brake down. Why would it? All necessary things will be kept open.

Worse thing is, starvation will be the lesser concern if it were to happen. People won't let themselves die of starvation, they will kill for food. Food scarcity will be nothing compared to the ensuing violence.

I don't get the "starvation" point. As far as I know, nowhere in the world does "lockdown" mean "farmers aren't allowed to tend to their fields and animals". I live in Austria, which has been in "lockdown" for almost six weeks now. The shops are full of fresh food: Both food production and distribution are working exactly as before. There are non-staple foods where production is endangered -- asparagus and strawberries, I think -- because they depend on obscenely cheap foreign labor, which will now be flown in and given special exemptions. But even without that, we wouldn't starve without asparagus and strawberries.

Could you explain what kind of lockdown model you are thinking of that would prohibit production or distribution of food?

That's a nice way of saying "the title is clickbait."

AKA, fear based clickbait? Probably the worst kind of clickbait, when people are already scared and anxious.

But the argument "These estimates are way to optimistic; don't pay attention. Here's my equally ridiculous pessimistic estimate. Pay attention!" carries no weight. It's that annoying person who always stakes out the contrarian position just because.

So the headline and thesis have been successful in getting us discussing the situation, but the content is weak with no evidence from a source with zero credibility.

Those developing vaccines are professionals and are going through all the necessary steps. Phase I human clinical trials are already 6-7 weeks in for the Moderna vaccine. By the time there’s enough vaccine for Phase III trials, I’ll be comfortable enough with the risk. Besides, by volunteering early, I’m doing a service to others. Any additional risk I’d be taking would be buying-down risks for others later, so I’d be happy.

Being pessimistic just means having negative bias.

Being cautious is emotionally neutral, we should strive for it, for sure.

Acting only on negative predictions without weighing in positive predictions or the uncertainty of the original prediction is stupid and unscientific, and likely the result of fear. That you see all the time right now.

Where do people discuss the postponed cancer operations and their casualties, what is the cost of livelihoods destroyed, like yoga studios and hair dresser small businesses? How do you even measure it? Who's stating their opinion on coronavirus lockdown, while also adding the disclaimer about their steady and safe monthly salary as a conflict of interest? People who want to reopen don't care about the "money," they care about economical survival, most probably in most cases.