Not to mention there is a gray are. You be a supporter of lockdowns but also believe the government did not sufficiently protect people/businesses.
This is a multi-faceted issue, not a binary one.
Humans are REALLY bad at responding to "highly unlikely" risk.
With the corona virus, there is a really small chance (~2% depending on factors) that you die after catching the disease. Some people look at this and say "well, I probably won't even get enough viral load to get sick". There are sone people say "wait, I might survive, but then spread it to someone else, with X% probability - and EACH OF THEM might die".
Both groups are EQUALLY INCAPABLE of properly assessing the likelihood of living a healthy life or dying (or something in the middle). BOTH GROUPS are responding out of "gut feelings" and emotion and VERY LITTLE LOGIC.
I say this not to condem you - in fact I have been in both parties. I say this so that we can find common ground and MEET TOGETHER and acknowledge that is IS HARD, and we should try to work TOGETHER AND NOT DIVID.
A year later, to have all those things and follow the same policies implies we either a) nailed it from the start or b) are not applying what we've learned. One of those is unlikely and the other unacceptable.
Ordinary people had little trusted data.
Experts had data from cruise ships showing a low infection fatality rate [1], data from the first quarantined cities in Italy showing 60% of asymptomaticity[2], data showing that the average Covid victim is 80 years old and has three comorbidities[3].
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00885-w [2] https://www.repubblica.it/salute/medicina-e-ricerca/2020/03/... [3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-tho...
Asympomaticity or pre-symptomacity?
>Experts had data from cruise ships showing a low infection fatality rate [1], data from the first quarantined cities in Italy showing 60% of asymptomaticity[2], data showing that the average Covid victim is 80 years old and has three comorbidities[3].
Yet Italy had crowded ICUs and Sweden had to beg neighboring countries to take some ICU patients from them. It'd have been all much much worse without lockdown. Your CFR assumes good critical care.
Terrorism was the excuse last time, and we were told to support the troops. Now it's a viral infection, and we are told to follow the science.
This should not ever be a valid excuse, especially since one doesn't have to be that old to remember the last time these sorts of excuses were made - to justify the West's horrific and brutal Middle East occupations. We knew better, and in the face of those facts this excuse is either made out of ignorance, or to cover up for remarkable amounts of incompetence. Neither should be acceptable justifications to the citizens of those countries who hide behind that excuse.
> Not to mention there is a gray are. You be a supporter of lockdowns but also believe the government did not sufficiently protect people/businesses.
Under what circumstances would a government be able to lock their people down and shutter their businesses, while also sufficiently protecting those people and those businesses? Which governments would have the resources to actually achieve success using these strategies?
Governments have a responsibility to operate within their own laws and any country whose legal code allows for the government to overreach into the movement of individual people as they have over the past year, are at grave risk of morphing into the sorts of evil regimes we haven't had to deal with since the end of the second world war.
EDIT: Programmers should have better social intelligence than this. Most people in this world do not want to live like programmers, locked up in a room looking at screens all day, transporting bits of electricity from one place to another. In fact, I would reckon many would rather die than live like we do. If people want to live this way freely and of their own choosing, fine - but to impose this on others as the only answer to a multi-faceted issue is just cruel to the broader public.