The past three months have proved it: the costs of lockdown are too high

Pandemics are not new, they're millennia old, and the correct response is simple - The point, in a pandemic, is to overreact, and overreact fast. The pride-before-a-fall west did not consider themselves vulnerable enough and physical actions were taken far too late. It is most likely at least verging on criminal, wilful negligence - the responses from the UK government.

I know a lot of people talk about how 'they didn't have all the facts', or 'it all happened too fast'. I don't buy it.

Hindsight is 20/20, isn’t it? In my view the initial extreme lockdowns were essentially necessary due to the unpreparedness of the Western world.

How many people had masks in the West in March? Basically no one. And yet in the East people wear masks every flu season.

I have to admit to myself that a few years ago I thought my coworker wearing a mask to work after an illness was sort of an oddball thing to do, like this person watched one too many anime shows. I was wrong.

The West didn’t listen to the East when it came to previous serious pandemics. There was no alternative to extreme lockdown because there wasn’t and still isn’t any effective contract tracing.

As of May 11, Taiwan has only 7 COVID-19 deaths. They engaged in contact tracing essentially from day one. They were ready. You can’t be ready retroactively, that’s like starting a professional sports season without conditioning first.

All of the economic criticisms of lockdown just take for granted a Darwinian government policy of laissez-faire, trickle-down economics, which you find in the US, and to a lesser extent in the UK. It's possible to economically survive a lockdown, or any other kind of widespread crisis, if the government provides massive social support for the vulnerable. The problem isn't the lockdown, the problem is the callous greed of the wealthy.

Why don't all these people who are out of work just learn to code?

Interesting voice, the inflections in the language used are designed to impress the idea that any dissent from this idea that lockdowns are too expensive is uninformed or ignorant. This is the someone's opinion they are trying to impress on the larger world; this is the Capitalists using the media channels they own to say the economy is more important than human lives, while the East handles the pandemic so successfully it makes the USA and the UK look like children.