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There is still a piper to pay for the lockdowns, and that is the patients who will die due to untreated heart disease, missed cancer treatments and surgeries, mental health problems, und so weiter. Not to mention all the people who will now find their disease at a later date and suffer a worse prognosis for it. The lockdowns could have created more deaths and suffering than were prevented, but we won't know for some time.

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Social distancing was always going to happen. Restaurants here in NYC were running at one quarter their normal business in the days leading up to the official lockdown. People aren't stupid, and will choose to stay home when a pandemic is ravaging their community regardless of what official guidance might be.

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.

Not at all. Hospitals shut down elective procedures, not because they were running out of room, but because they were ordered to do so. That freed capacity may have been necessary in NYC, and maybe not, but nowhere else was it necessary.

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