Notably more negative sentiment in the comments here than I've seen in the past. I wonder if it's organic.
Note the one about not posting insinuations of astroturfing. There's a long body of explanation of why we have this rule: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... if anyone's interested.
If the most likely outcome is that 50-70% of the population gets infected anyway, then the goal shouldn't be to save lives. It should just be to keep a buffer of beds available in hospitals and to close only enough to keep that buffer. This is what NY is doing with their 30% hospital capacity buffer metric. The bay area has had plenty of hospital capacity and people can see that as a failure with the 50-70% assumption.
Of course, that all could be wrong, and we could save millions by continuing to be mostly closed. I'm not sure. But the change in tone could be people moving towards the first option.
What it has to do with my comment?
Data shows that most of the virus propagation happens inside and that, health wise, all that stay at home eating and watching TV will definitely have a cost on health, both body and mental, and still, a lot of people want the lockdown to continue.
Another of those instances where I don't understand my contemporaries I guess...
1. "It's just a bad flu": We never should have shut down in the first place. Vulnerable people can self-quarantine, everybody else should mostly carry on as normal.
2. "Lives are precious": We have to do everything we can to protect people, and that means shutting down until we have a vaccine or have few enough cases so we can effectively test-and-trace. Any economic damage is irrelevant compared to people's lives.
3. "Flatten the curve": Prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed and causing people to die who otherwise could have been saved. But acknowledge that most people are going to get it sooner or later, and the economic and psychological harm of lockdowns are very high, so we should consider the costs and benefits of specific restrictions and reopen in a controlled manner. (As you can probably tell, this is my position).
A month ago, almost everyone in the third group supported the lockdowns, because it looked like there was a real possibility that hospital capacity could be exceeded. But that didn't happen even with effectively uncontrolled spread in the densest city in the US, and is very unlikely to happen in the future because people aren't going to be rushing out to raves even if all restrictions were lifted. So we're starting to see conflicts between the second and third groups, and that's only going to increase.