• Lung scarring
• Stroke, embolisms, and blood clotting
• Heart damage
• Neurocognitive and mental health impacts
• Childhood inflammation, male infertility, and other possible lasting effects
https://www.vox.com/2020/5/8/21251899/coronavirus-long-term-...
I'd argue that too many people are numb to these risks. Popping a pill should be seen as scary. Driving two blocks down is making a life/death risk calculation. Sure some people will take that risk every day, dozen of times a day, without nothing happening.
But we should still acknowledge there is a risk, and I'd argue it should be reduced to whatever level makes sense for the situation and not shrug it away as "it's just life"
PS: this is mostly a reaction to "we would have to shut down life as we know it". My point "life as we know it" shouldn't be the status quo.
While I get you point about mental and physical breakdown, paracetamol overdose [0] for instance is a fairly common thing. Too many people see it at the same level as coffee or a redbull, when it's something else altogether. Same for people abusing antibiotics, whith far reaching consequences going way beyond a single person's stress level.
For driving, sure too much fear depletes mental resources. But currently we are around 1.3 billion people just for the death count each year, and the majority of accidents occur on short daily trips on well know roads, from lack of focus and stress.
[0] https://www.nps.org.au/news/paracetamol-overdoses-rise [1] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffi...
The US is way behind, largely because its lockdowns haven't been well-heeded by people who think they constitute "shutting everything down". But we're not that far behind that the lockdowns have failed, either. Stay home. We're beating this.
The death rates in these countries also peaked about two weeks into lockdown, way too soon for lockdown to have had any impact. The death rates are also following a similar bell curve across the world, seemingly independent of any lockdown policy.
The countries that have done well implemented test and trace early, and got people who had tested positive with COVID well out the way of anyone else in hospital wards.
I don't know what you mean, except that they go up exponentially and then they go down exponentially and so that's a "bell" curve[1]. The important metric isn't the shape of the thing, it's the size. And the sizes of these curves very widely between nations, tracking lockdown agility and adherence surprisingly well.
[1] That observation is, frankly, pretty trivial. Outbreaks grow with some probability from every individual case, so the derivative is proportional to the value of the function, always. They must have an exponential shape on both sides. That's just math.
On the contrary, that's exactly what you'd see if lockdown had maximum effect.
Suppose lockdown were totally effective, such that nobody contracted a new infection of the disease after policies become effective. In that best-case situation, the medical system would still have to deal with everyone who contracted the illness up to this point.
Because the virus spreads exponentially, the curve of "newly-contracted infections" would come to a peak just before lockdown and then fall to zero afterwards. Those cases would then go through their normal progression, and some would die -- about two weeks after contracting the illness.
This single observation isn't enough to conclude that lockdown is effective since it doesn't rule out other possibilities for a declining death rate (medical treatments, bad reporting, etc), but it's certainly not evidence against the efficacy of lockdown policies.
> The death rates are also following a similar bell curve across the world, seemingly independent of any lockdown policy.
A "bell curve" for disease progression implies a typical logistic curve for the number of total cases. That in turn implies that the community is nearing a 'herd immunity' level.
No nation in the world has anywhere near 'herd immunity' yet. With the highly-transmissible nature of nCoV, more than half of a population would need to be infected to confer herd immunity.
> The countries that have done well implemented test and trace early,
The problem here is that you can't implement test and trace late. Public health officials have a finite contact-tracing capability. One community transmission exceeds this threshold, the only tool left is lockdown -- specifically to reduce transmission down to the point where tracing is again possible.