One-Third of U.S. Museums May Not Survive the Year, Survey Finds

"fear of the atomic age" is proxy for "fear of a thermonuclear exchange between the US and the Soviet Union" for a generation of people. It's not comparable to COVID-19 and it's not comparable to the other concerns he listed, and for someone so deeply rooted in moral and ethical philosophy as C.S. Lewis I'm surprised.

Anyway, it's off topic, this is my last word on it.

But what I remember from economic history and what the article actually says is mostly opposite.

>Before the plague erupted, several centuries of population growth had produced a labour surplus, which was abruptly replaced with a labour shortage when many serfs and free peasants died. Historians have argued that this labour shortage allowed those peasants that survived the pandemic to demand better pay or to seek employment elsewhere. Despite government resistance, serfdom and the feudal system itself were ultimately eroded.

This was the main effect of the plague. The wealth concentration BBC talks about affected much fewer people.

This time the same is not going to happens because covid just increases demand for automation.

Simply having a sunk cost isn't a good enough reason to actually administer it.

If you lift lockdown, lots of people get infects. It takes a few days, maybe a week to show symptoms bad enough to go to a doctor for testing. This is the point in time when cases begin to go up. Imagine if you lifted the lockdown for a day and went back.

One to two weeks after that, people will get more seriously ill, requiring hospitalization. Initially this can be treated easy at a (presumably) low-load hospital with no issue, the death toll is low.

One more week and you have the majority of cases in the hospital, this is where most people will die. A month after you lifted the lockdown.

Now imagine not locking down after that one day. After 1 month, you're at the peak of Day 1 infections, the next day the peak of day 2 infections etc. It compounds fast and can overwhelm a hospital.

Once a hospital is unable to care for all patients properly, triage will be applied. People with good recovery chances will receive treatment, those who are risk groups will not.

That's when your death toll will explode very suddenly.

Death toll is a trailing indicator (IIRC, it tends to be about 10 days from infection to symptom onset in symptomatic cases, a little bit longer to hospitalization, a few more days to death where it occurs, and that's getting longer because of better care protocols with more experience, so the degree to which death is a trailing indicator is increasing), we've gotten better at managing serious cases (which is better for ventilator capacity since we are using less per case, but worse for overall hospital capacity, IIRC, because we're using more bed-days per hospitalization.)

The fact that cases over time are skewing younger also depresses the death rate but that's somewhat misleading as to impact, because seriously ill younger people are less likely to die but also more likely to have long hospitalization and post-hopsitalization convalescence, and that's only considering immediate consequences and not the increasing array of significant delayed health consequences that are being identified.

First, you lessen the load of the healthcare system. If a lot of people get sick at the same time, hospitals would be swamped and more people would die because care is impossible.

Second, you can bring the disease from an exponential growth to sub-exponential, potentially containing it mostly (this is what happened for example in Germany, where tracking individual infections is now possible again).

Third, you buy yourself time until a vaccine is available. Even if no vaccine is going to appear in the near future, as long as you slow it down long enough (1-2 years) from reaching saturation in the population, that's lives saved.

To slow the spread so that our medical facilities have the capacity to handle the sick, and we don't have to let people die due to lack of healthcare resources.

(Not to mention that many people either refuse to wear masks or don’t wear masks properly covering nose and mouth).

> Rapid border closures, full lockdowns, and wide-spread testing were not associated with COVID-19 mortality per million people. However, full lockdowns (RR=2.47: 95%CI: 1.08–5.64) and reduced country vulnerability to biological threats (i.e. high scores on the global health security scale for risk environment) (RR=1.55; 95%CI: 1.13–2.12) were significantly associated with increased patient recovery rates.

I mean, look, I agree, the idea of a museum selling an art piece to make ends meet leaves a very bad taste in my mouth. But I'd rather the museums stay open.

They're putting art and history, and, critically, many people's ability to learn from and appreciate that art and history 100, 200, 1000 years from now, above a few employee paychecks for a few months.

Public institutions should take a long-term view of their public duty.