- The projections were wrong
- The fatality rate is lower than feared
- Other diseases kill people too
- This isn't as bad as the Spanish Flu
- Lockdowns can harm people too
The only good argument I've heard against lockdowns is that we have mounting evidence that less onerous restrictions are sufficient to keep the transmission rate low. This article doesn't touch on that at all.
The only argument which needs to be satisfied is what restrictions should be in place.
They don't need to justify anything to reopen. The pro-lockdown crowd needs to continually justify every restriction.
So the reopen crowd is a bit up in arms right now because they keep hearing contradictory statements coming out. It's not as deadly as thought. Masks work (they didn't use to, right?). It's not transmitted as easily by surfaces as previously stated. With so many things being drawn back there is an expectation that restrictions should be drawn back as well.
That said, I get groceries twice as week and that's it, but I'm lucky to have a remote job and no real worries about my finances.
+ some of the projections were correct
- The fatality rate is lower than feared
+ higher in some countries
- Other diseases kill people too
+ like smallpox and ebola
- This isn't as bad as the Spanish Flu
+ it's only just started
- Lockdowns can harm people too
+ less than killing and permanently injuring people
False. That is one of the effects of lockdown. We need to try compare the level, but people are being injured and dying because of the lockdown.
Are you referring to Ioannidis? If not, can you link to them?
That's an arbitrary high bar to set and compare. We don't have hindsight nor the test compacity to compare it to historic pandemics. People are going to write thesis about covid19 for decades to come.
the measures taken will cause more damage and greater loss of life than what they save
And as we all well know, a diseases' damage can grow geometrically. That's the whole issue. Which can also be 'conveniently forgot'
Based on the above math, that puts a proposed death toll from the economic response at ~777k citizens (25% minus the preCOVID 4% unemployment rate). Current death toll from COVID specifically is ~100k citizens. So we shifted the deaths from high risk individuals to economically disadvantaged individuals.
The thesis that we overreacted ("the measures taken will cause more damage and greater loss of life than what they save") holds water. People were going to die regardless, and its easy to say we did the right thing when it's not you sitting at home waiting for a broken state unemployment system to provide you the benefits you're entitled to.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23271769
[2] https://nypost.com/2020/04/20/explaining-the-link-between-un...
Everybody on the internet who can divide one number by another, starts broadcasting bad math and claims to know the whole story. Its getting exhausting.
We reacted, perhaps too strongly. But we had geometric growth and high morbidity as the only knows at the time.
Now we know more. If we can get past the blame-throwing and hand-wringing, we can start monitoring and carefully restoring normal public behavior.
But at least we saved some lives /s
[1] https://www.marketplace.org/2020/05/08/how-many-jobs-will-co...
[2] https://bfi.uchicago.edu/working-paper/covid-19-is-also-a-re...
[3] https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-nightly-corona...
My local library was built by the WPA.
> The Works Progress Administration (WPA; renamed in 1939 as the Work Projects Administration) was an American New Deal agency, employing millions of job-seekers (mostly unskilled men) to carry out public works projects, including the construction of public buildings and roads. It was established on May 6, 1935, by Executive Order 7034.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration
We could fix a lot of our infrastructure and unemployment problems through something like that.
But if people are on unemployment because they were laid off, then are offered their job back and refuse to come back to work... that's a different matter.
The idea that some people seem to have is that we can simply pay everybody a living wage regardless of whether they are doing any work. I think we've tried this out several times in the past.
Where are you getting this data to conclude we haven't seen a such a spike?
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
* Select "Excess deaths with and without COVID-19" for the dashboard
* Enter "New York City" as the location (New York state as a whole shows a similar trend)
New York state was locked down March 20th. Notice the marked increase in non-COVID-19 related deaths starting March 21st, increasing steadily into April (almost 200% higher than predicted number of deaths). The tooltips also say that this data is still incomplete, so these numbers could climb.
Now maybe it's unrelated, or maybe it's COVID-19 related that was incorrectly assigned, but you seem fairly confident that it's unrelated to the other factors the OP mentioned. I don't see how you can reach that conclusion given the data available at this time.
If you do it in New York, chances are you would be attributing COVID-19-related but unconfirmed deaths to lockdown.
And still, perhaps the complete lockdown was an overreaction if you did not aim for Virus suppression like in NZ. It depends on when the vaccine is available.