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There is a Presidential election in six months. That means there is a major element of politics in everything that happens between now and then.

The incumbent candidate wants to reopen. Because the election is near, it's especially important for the other side to portray whatever he does as wrong and incompetent and life-threatening. So you then have a major political apparatus pushing the argument that reopening is dangerous and publicizing any instance of any authority saying anything negative about it. They don't benefit from a nuanced or moderate position.

Some of the people you hear pushing this are the partisans themselves, but most of them are just the people who only listen to the media from one side and then repeat what they're told. Meanwhile if you listen to the President the economy is doing great and everything is fine and we'll all be back to normal in a month or two.

The truth is, as always, complicated, and somewhere in the middle.

> The incumbent candidate wants to reopen. Because the election is near, it's especially important for the other side to portray whatever he does as wrong and incompetent and life-threatening. So you then have a major political apparatus pushing the argument that reopening is dangerous and publicizing any instance of any authority saying anything negative about it. They don't benefit from a nuanced or moderate position.

This same debate is happening in every country in the world, including ones that don't have an election in six months.

So, no, this is not just a bunch of political wankery that's aimed at making Orange Man look bad. It's a very clear consequence of what the two parties value.

> This same debate is happening in every country in the world, including ones that don't have an election in six months.

They get CNN in more than 200 countries.

> It's a very clear consequence of what the two parties value.

So it's normal for the Democrats to be the conservative party banging the "save American lives at all costs" drum and the Republicans to be the ones worried about blue collar workers and people living paycheck to paycheck, is that it?

The democrats have always banged that drum on domestic issues, and the republicans have always prioritized businesses over public and worker safety, so, yes?

> The democrats have always banged that drum on domestic issues

So the Democrats are usually the ones in favor of authoritarian War on Drugs measures to prevent domestic overdose deaths? Mandatory employee drug testing? Having the police arrest inconvenient/"unsanitary" protesters?

> the republicans have always prioritized businesses over public and worker safety

Walmart, Pfizer and Netflix are doing fine. The airlines are screwed, but that's already done, they can't go bankrupt twice at once and people aren't going to want to get on a plane for recreational purposes anytime soon even if we reopen.

It's workers who are suffering the most from continuing to not have a paycheck. If you look at what labor unions are saying, it's more along the lines of "here's how we think we should reopen" and not "we don't want to reopen" -- is it normal for Republicans and labor unions to be on the same page?

All of the stupid, cynical partisan bullshit that America's press comes up with to try and kick Trump out of office is spilling over to other countries and screwing up our ideas about our coronavirus responses, though. For example, early on the CDC screwed up its coronavirus test, delaying the rollout of wider testing. The press saw blood and started blaming all the American deaths on the Trump administration failing to test for coronavirus. The trouble is, this was fixed some months ago, so in order to keep this narrative going publications like the New York Times took increasingly massive levels of testing that no country had managed, such as testing everyone with symptoms or testing 10% of the population a day, and made them sound like things all countries had achieved but the US had missed due to Trump. This worked on a massive scale - the narrative spread, and people in every Western country became convinced that their government is failing at coronavirus testing compared to the rest of the work due to not being able to manage those things, and that it was killing people.

I even had a discussion with a couple of Germans on here the other day who were convinced their coronavirus testing was abysmal, despite them having one of the biggest programs out there and being the country that the US and UK media currently point to in order to convince us that our governments are failing on testing.

To make matters even more stupid, the US actually passed mass testing success story South Korea - the country which supposedly proves all those deaths could be avoided if you just had proper coronavirus testing - quite some time ago, and people didn't realize because the media carefully avoided updating people's beliefs since this changed. I keep seeing people point to the US supposedly having less per-capita testing than South Korea in HN comments as proof they should be able to do better, even now. Astoundingly, when Trump debunked this widespread, false belief in a recent press conference, this is how the New York Times summed it up in a headline "Trump Misrepresents Testing Record". (The "misrepresentation" was that even though what he said was true it wasn't true two months ago, and also the US hadn't beaten every single country on the planet on coronavirus testing. Seriously.)

Also, the sides certainly aren't the same in all countries when it comes to the legal legitimacy of lockdowns. For example, in the UK our right-wing party is currently in power, which means that arguments that their lockdown rules are illegitimate and exceed their powers mostly come from supporters of the other, left-wing party. The justifications for why they're exceeding their powers actually look similar in many ways to the ones in this lawsuit.

> For example, in the UK our right-wing party is currently in power, which means that arguments that their lockdown rules are illegitimate and exceed their powers mostly come from supporters of the other, left-wing party. The justifications for why they're exceeding their powers actually look similar in many ways to the ones in this lawsuit.

Not convinced you’ve even been following British politics then. The main criticism coming from Starmer is about late decision making and inaction. I haven’t heard anything about abuse of powers or a clamour to reopen from them.

Indeed British [and especially English] politics is indeed a good example of the lockdown itself being depoliticised. The UK politicians who want to end the lockdown sooner rather than later sit on the right of Johnson's party, so they make their arguments quietly, in economic terms, and mostly behind closed doors. Johnson's natural political instincts might be sympathetic to them, but he's also sympathetic to the arguments of his scientists against opening up. The left overwhelmingly supports the principle of a lockdown, so their criticisms of Johnson focus on the details of his decision making and communication. Public support for the lockdown isn't as universal as political support for some sort of lockdown, but only a handful of people turned up to London's anti-lockdown protests and nobody influential saw any political benefit to encouraging them.

As I said, this is mostly coming from supporters of the party. Though Starmer has been pushing for firm reopening plans sooner than is perhaps advisable, he has indeed mostly been doing risk-free back-seat driving that demonstrates how much easier life is when you don't have to actually pull of the things you're calling for. (For example, his latest thing is expecting the government to have information on what exactly is causing excess deaths that actual scientific experts reckon they won't be able to pin down any time soon.)

I think you're missing a few aspects that explain the change in attitude pretty well:

- While most people have almost nothing to fear personally from this virus, the vast majority of people have close ones that do have a lot to fear from the virus

- We have all found out since March, and took to heart, that you may get the virus, feel well, pass it on to loved ones who are at risk, and only later start having ANY symptoms

- the time required until 40-70% of the population will catch this virus while never having so much people infected that hospitals are overwhelmed is YEARS - the popular flatten the curve article omitted this little piece of math

- and obviously, everyone was probably pretty moved by the scenes from Italy and Spain, which brought it much closer to home than similar scenes in China or Iran ever could

So overall, most people are understandably reluctant to go on vacations or visit too many restaurants and concerts, and this will likely continue for a good long time. It is going to be devastating to these industries, but it's going to help keep the curve flat, and I'm sure that we'll see plenty stimulus packages in the months to come. Keeping things forcefully shut down is not going to help in places that are in good shape. However, the alternative must still be social distancing and careful screening and perhaps even enforced quarantine for people coming from hotspots, whether internal or international.

So since March we've seen multiple countries (Korea, China, New Zealand) largely contain the virus, and start re-opening the economy. The way you do it is to get R<1 (where R is the reproduction number - the average number of people that an infected person infects). When R is smaller than 1, then you have an exponential decay curve, where there are fewer new cases each day.

The way that these countries have been able to get R<1 is a combination of social distancing, hygiene (masks), and test-trace-isolate system. So that's the endgame now. The shelter-in-place orders gets R<1, then we keep it at <1 by getting everyone to wear masks, and by getting a tracing system in place so that anyone who comes in contact with an infected person can quickly get tested and self-isolate.

That at least is my understanding, and it's been largely informed by this webpage, which I found incredibly helpful. https://ncase.me/covid-19/

A lot of people do present that understanding, but it's inaccurate. China and New Zealand don't have an R < 1 strategy; they believe that harsh lockdowns must be maintained until local transmission stops entirely. (Which is obviously infeasible for most countries at this point.)

> I think (as is usually the case) the right approach sits directly in between the "open now" and "keep everything shut down" camps.

At least in my country, there's already been a lot of complaints about repeated changes to advice and rules.

I'm pretty sure the government's science advisers would ideally like to do a gradual, multi-stage re-opening with the option to roll things back if they need to. You know, reopen some schools next month with teachers under the age of 45, if death rates rise shut them down again, otherwise reopen more the month after, and so on.

The fear is that message is too complicated, and people who are told "here is a schedule for reopenings on a trial basis and subject to change" will hear "lockdown is over, I can finally visit my friends and loved ones" - and we'll get a second peak even worse than the first.

I think the real underlying justification for the lockdowns wasn't "we need to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed" so much as "hospitals might be overwhelmed and we need more information to see the tail risk exposure." People weren't distancing before the lockdowns because of fear of hospitals being overwhelmed, they were distancing because they did not personally want to get sick.

I agree that the goals seem to have changed. We have never contained a widespread respiratory virus without a vaccine and the fastest vaccine ever developed was Mumps and that took 4 years. I guess the best hope now is that by slowing it down, we have more time to develop better treatment options. Or maybe with how much effort is spent on vaccine development, we can develop one in a year? The optimistic estimates for vaccine development seem to put the timeframe at around a year at the earliest? Are we expecting to contain this for a year via social distancing?

"But at some point, almost every one I know has switched to believing that the real goal is eradication, that we need to be extremely socially distanced until case counts are near zero, or until a vaccine arrives. People now seem terrified at the thought of catching it, despite having no risk factors. What I don't understand is why this switch occurred."

Tribalism and politics. Edit: This comment was downvoted, which just proves my point.

The bad orange man said open up, and the responsible looking people who are good at looking serious as they stare into cameras and repeat information that they have no expertise in decided that they had to oppose him to be a voice for their viewers who didn't vote for him. (That is literally what CNN and MSNBC producers tell their on air anchors)

You, like me, will find that whenever you ask this question you will immediately be condemned as a follower of the bad orange man who cares about money more than human life.

Never mind that you didn't vote for the orange man, or that you supported the lock down to flatten the curve. You are questioning the tribe's decision. And boy do the tribal elders know how to scold.

Remember, if you don't toe the line, you are a bad person who sacrifices the poor workers to the volcano God.

Not that the tribe asked the workers what they want or need. The tribe all sit at desks for a living, and don't actually know any of the workers. But they are supremely confident that they speak for them.

Am example of the tribe at work:

I'm getting a haircut today. My governor is a Democrat. He has responsibly reopened certain kinds of businesses. Not much different than Georgia's governor. But nobody in the media talks about my state, because the narrative they have pushed is GOP are reopening, and Dems aren't. As if this is a partisan issue. It's not. It's a class issue.

Lockdown can't last forever and so countries or US states need a plan to transition away from lockdown back to a new normality.

That plan includes massive testing and tracing. It includes science and data. It includes sensible triggers for further action -- if we start seeing more infections in the community we slow down the transition to normality.

I don't know much about the US but it feels like a lot of this is really hard to do.

It's literally unprecedented as a method for trying to deal with a respiratory infection, as far as I can tell. Test and trace worked for SARS and MERS, but they were much easier diseases to contain for various reasons and didn't require massive-scale testing and tracing as a result. It is not in any way, shape, or form part of the normal playbook for dealing with a pandemic like this.

The problem is that nobody in the history of medicine have ever solved an pandemic once it left a containable area, but as most epidemics follow an bell curve you get a lot of people thinking some action or another solved the problem.

Add to that the story driven way we get out version of the truth and there is now an irresistible pressure on the politicians in charge to do something and to claim that something was effective the data be damned, and that real science is never 100% sure and tend to take years if not decade to come to any kind of conclusion.