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Comment by _skel | Hacker News Reader

> And if shutting down non-essentials can reduce the rate of infection, it improve the outcome for _everyone_ afterwards.

For how long? What if there is never a vaccine? Will we hide in our homes forever?

There is a reason California is reopening. Lockdowns just can't last forever. We have to move on and do the best we can to live with the virus as a normal part of life, even though it means more people are going to get sick.

We should also all be uncomfortable with the government deciding which companies deserve to survive. We are supposed to have a market economy. We can put up with those kinds of government controls as short-term emergency measures, but they would cause economic collapse in the long term.

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> For how long? What if there is never a vaccine? Will we hide in our homes forever? [...] Lockdowns just can't last forever

Indeed. The purpose of the lockdown was to buy us time to build e.g. contract tracing infrastructure, massively expand testing, and develop other means to allow us to reopen safely.

Instead for the most part we've sat on our hands and done very little. Thus we're saying, well, sucks to be us, I guess we have to reopen and let people die.

It didn't have to be this way. It doesn't have to be this way. There is plenty of evidence of this from around the world.

> It didn't have to be this way. It doesn't have to be this way. There is plenty of evidence of this from around the world.

But it is this way, so what's your point?

We can wish all we want for things to be better, but we have to start reopening no matter what. The economy will collapse if we don't. We are out of time.

My point was to respond to your "what if there's never a vaccine? Will we hide in our homes forever?"

There's a middle ground between "no attempt made to mitigate the loss of human life" and "safe and effective vaccine readily available". We can and should be doing more.

It's also not too late to do more.

But instead, we seem to be adopting the nihilism that I read in your original post, that, (in a few ways) time's up.

I'm not advocating that we just forget about the virus. We are doing what we can to mitigate loss of life. There are social distancing policies for businesses, people are wearing masks, etc. -- but businesses are reopening.

> We are doing what we can to mitigate loss of life.

Some individuals/business-owners doing what they can to mitigate loss of life caused by the reopening of their businesses, yes. Some people are wearing masks.

This is by no means universal. You don't have to go far to see videos from Vegas, or of airlines not enforcing their own mask policies.

And also, as a society we absolutely are not doing what we can to mitigate loss of life even within the parameters of a fixed amount of economic activity.

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