Yet we decimated our economy out of an absolute panic and still continue to push for lockdown even when numbers show it’s time to start things again.
80,000 Americans died, and thousands more will die before this is over.
There's no world in which the pandemic is running unchecked through society and people are acting like everything is fine and normal and doing all the usual stuff they're accustomed to.
This is a conflation of what the virus itself has down, and the response to it.
The loss of a loved one is never temporary.
There is no vaccine against COVID-19... unless you consider drinking bleach or dying...
The actual deaths we've seen and the overwhelming of hospitals in multiple countries refute the kind of narrative you're fantasizing about.
However, for perspective, North America (which is mainly the US) has had 1.65M cases and 100K deaths, while Europe has had 1.76M cases and 161K deaths.
With all the focus on the US as the single country with by far the most cases, it seems to have not registered with most people that Europe as a whole is of comparable size, has had a comparable number of cases, and has seen a lot more casualties.
I wouldn't draw the conclusion that this validates the US health care system, or the decisions of authorities, because of other variables, but it makes me wonder if a narrative about how terrible the US is has been allowed to obscure the facts.
The stats I was looking at appear to be based on a definition of Europe that is about 700 million, while "North America" is about 590 million.
Which numbers would those be? Because I'm looking at https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/new-cases, and it does not in any way support your claim.
A declining number of hospital beds used is an extremely good sign, but there is very limited data for this nationwide.
If the goal is to find a cure before we lift lockdowns we better do something to help those economically impacted by them (and giving away free money is not a viable option). If the goal is to not overwhelm our healthcare systems we are doing that great but a country wide lockdown is not viable either. The New York Times has a good map [0] to show how little most of the country has been affected. That is why state governments should be handling the outbreaks in their own state instead of shutting down the country all together.
These lockdowns were implemented because we had no idea how this virus worked or where it was. We have a much better idea now and each state can act accordingly.
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-c...
[0]: https://www.npr.org/847415273#georgia
edit: April 24 was earlier than May 1 for some lifted restrictions.
https://twitter.com/GAFollowers/status/1261688916375212037?s...
We should instead be teaching people to recognize early symptoms so they can immediately isolate during the time-bounded phase of virus shedding.
Testing is sanitation theater with the side effect of creating a surveillance society.
It's also not the interval immediately after infection takes place (your hour later) that matters, it's the period starting a few days later. Get them out of circulation before they have a chance to spread the virus and we can slow it down further than we have till now, even with more activity taking place.
The testing is nice to have, but shouldn't really alter people's behavior.
That being said, the messaging hasn’t been calibrated very well.
Everyone talks about the post 9/11 “security theater” of the TSA, but because we’re unable to reasonably assess the threat, today we’ve got equivalent public health theater, but the TSA is us.
CDC own numbers on this aren't really supporting the panic level either.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm
Pneumonia is still stomping covid19 as far as deaths. Death projections are made from the 2017-2019 data and as of now they're at 101% of their protections. That number moves up and down but has been sticking really close to 100%. With 60+k unexpected covid19 we should be around 105-107% deaths but we're not.
Things aren't over yet but all the be data coming out is very much supporting that is has been a massive overreaction. If we're going to overreact for the purpose of saving lives, why don't we don't we do it to solve the 9.1 million deaths from hunger and hunger related issues?
No, the UK was following in Sweden's footsteps until forecasts became untenable, by which time a lot of damage had been already done: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/03/16/905285/uk-droppi...
Compared to its neighbours, Sweden is doing remarkably bad: https://twitter.com/MarkkuPeltonen/status/126113845423635251...
In terms of economy, Sweden's GDP is expected to fall about as much as rest of the EU (~7%).
UK was just one example. Sweden is no worse off that other European countries. You can cherry pick the neighbors but that's doing a disservice.
Of course their GDP is expected to fall. All of the countries are tightly linked together in their economic outcomes.
The main difference is that they have a lot more deaths relative to many other countries that handled social distancing better.
Remember: the correct recation to a situation like this will probably look like an extreme overreaction.
There is basically no way of telling the adequate response from a complete overreaction right now.
Even if it turns out that in the end the IFR of the disease was just 0.1%, or that 50% had existing immunity... then that will only change after the fact what would have been the correct response. The decision needs to be made without that information.