Specifically, I think that first world societies can afford to give 25% of the workforce a paid sabbatical without ceasing to exist. And I find it depressing that there are people who think this is a shock that rich societies cannot absorb.
Sure, it'll be painful. Taxes will have to go up afterwards, the retirement age might have to rise. But it's possible.
"Society" ending or "Socialism only for the rich" ending?
Don't forget the gaslighting "100k people dead is doing a good job" BS.
People are being hoodwinked while they're scared shitless.
It always looked bad and looks worse the closer 100k becomes. It can’t be too long before some measures will say it has been exceeded. Then what will the claim be?
Anyone can go look and see that south korea, a far more urbanized state is open for business right now.
Active disinformation campaigns work.
Saying SK is open while we're not leads to "let's open America" for that mindset.
Now do the per capita numbers and see that we’re actually doing better on a deaths/million basis than several European countries.
By suppressing the transmission of this virus, we have failed to build immunity in most of the population. As a result any serious lifting of suppression measures will lead to moderate-severe outbreaks.
On balance, I believe that the most effective method is to resume life as normal, and focus on encouraging the at-risk to shelter, along with providing them appropriate government support. Whereas the approach we've taken has destroyed our economy in a very real sense, which will increase mortality even in the absence of a global food crisis.
The suspension of elective surgeries on a broad basis was very clearly a mistake, but unfortunately it's the type of mistake that no-one will admit was a mistake.
We postponed absolutely important surgeries as a result of this, even in areas like, for example, my county in Central California, which has very low prevalence of COVID-19. Here in California we "only" suspended elective surgeries for a month and now have a backlog that we're still working through.
So, just to say it explicitly: the fear that "things will never be normal again" is unfounded, at least in those who are operating off a mental model wherein COVID-19 is 10x as deadly as we previously thought.
The fact that we chose a strategy of indefinite postponement was our mistake. Because now people are beginning to realize that if we "go back to normal" then "the lockdown was for nothing". I consider this to just be a sunk cost fallacy, I believe quite frankly that ultimately the lockdown "was for nothing" (that is to say that, at the time it may have been justified based off the projected numbers, but with what we know now we should know that we only shot ourselves in the foot).
TL;DR: I believe that we need to resume normal operation of society, and make strong efforts to protect the at-risk. Trying to indefinitely postpone exposure to COVID-19 is a loosing battle. We've adopted a strategy of indefinite containment/postponement that relies on hunkering down and waiting for a _temporally unbounded event_. Given that lockdown-associated damage increases the longer containment is maintained, we are trading off a linear component of damage for a speculated future improvement in outcomes due to vaccines/a game-changer treatment. That to me is eminently foolish.
Most decision-making heuristics don't just try to blindly increase expected value (decrease expected loss) but also factor in uncertainy. In general it's acceptable to trade off a little EV for a lot more uncertainty. (Unfortunately in the case of the lockdown, I believe we incurred -EV along with far more uncertainty, for a net loss across all dimensions)
Nearly half the population is at-risk (age, comorbidities, obesity).