A substantial risk of passing a deadly virus on to vulnerable people is not a freedom, it's negligence.
Stay-at-home orders/curfews are affronts to freedom. Derailing this to imply wanting to go outside at all is negligence is disingenuous. Preventing people from seeing other people over long period of times is known to be psychologically bad for human (and is a form of torture, see [1]. Although it is different in some ways, it seems clear its not good for the population well-being).
>nor a foolproof way (even now) to test everyone at-risk populations might come in contact with.
Don't let perfection hinder practicality. Keeping at-risk population away from infected people at a good rate is very feasible. It doesn't have to be foolproof (nor is it right now). It does not seem either harder or worse than what we are doing right now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solitary_confinement#Torture
I only have experience with the U.S. orders in California specifically. I spent a lot of time outside in parks and nature reserves instead of inside buildings. From what I saw, a lot more people than usual were also doing the same. It's quite possible that countries that restricted people to their own houses went overboard, but e.g. New Zealand had an optimal outcome with a very quick lockdown and contact tracing.
There are some similar situations: curfews and blackouts during world war II bombing raids, and laws against shooting firearms into the air. Both restrict "freedom" in a general sense but are examples of legitimately limiting individual freedom because it causes undue risk to others. I don't have a solid threshold for where restrictions make sense, but a starter might be the total net QALYs. Wars are often supported despite reducing net QALYs for everyone, for example, but that's hopefully an outlier.
According to [1], an estimate of 810,000 discounted QALYs were lost by July 2020 in the U.S. This number would likely have been significantly higher with uncontrolled spread. Dividing that out into the U.S. population means the lockdowns would have to reduce everyone's life expectancy by about a day due to the 3-4 months we were in lockdown to reach the threshold where I'd start to consider scaling the lockdowns back. As the U.S.'s failed attempt to control the spread continued for the entire year, the cost/benefit changed. Extrapolating from about 150k covid deaths in July/August 2020 to the 560k now linearly we'd be up to four lost days balanced against QALY losses from covid. Suicide rates seem to have decreased in 2020, so the losses would have to come from delayed effects or adverse health from lack of exercise, etc. I can be convinced that the lockdowns were too extreme, but it'll take solid analysis and it probably won't be fully measurable until a few years from now when we see follow-on effects.
> Don't let perfection hinder practicality. Keeping at-risk population away from infected people at a good rate is very feasible. It doesn't have to be foolproof (nor is it right now). It does not seem either harder or worse than what we are doing right now.
To keep vulnerable people healthy, we have to keep everyone they interact with healthy or at least non-contagious. If covid had unrestricted spread through everyone under 65 that's 80% of the population being a vector within a couple months. We didn't have test infrastructure or certainty on mechanism of spread by May 2020, so quite likely most vulnerable populations would be in contact with contagious people and get sick as well.
I agree we're basically at the tipping point but it's because vaccines are getting us closer to herd immunity. Attempts at "opening up" in the past were misguided because they only resulted in a large spike of new infections and deaths, the latter the key indication that despite best efforts the vulnerable populations were not well protected.
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hec.4208
1. Using QALYs seems ok w/r to covid, but not in relation to lockdowns. You say 4 days of QALYs lost per person and I'd argue that being unable to see your friends & family or do most activity is alike to being sickly (which is what is used to calculate QALYs). Maybe its not a 1:1 correspondance but lockdowns for 8 months (I'm not sure USA, I'm more familiar with Canada) have (imo) exceeded 4 days of QALYs per person by a long margin.
2. I have major issue with this line of thinking:
>I can be convinced that the lockdowns were too extreme, but it'll take solid analysis and it probably won't be fully measurable until a few years from now when we see follow-on effects.
It's a strongly held belief of mine that, in order to restrict the freedom of people (ala blackouts during WW2), you have to have a solid argument that what your doing not only outweigh the disadvantages, but far outweigh them. Restricting people's freedom is not like an economic decision. I believe this is what the general society has come to accept too (e.g. civil law has preponderance of evidence vs penal code which has abundance of evidence).
I agree that we can grant an "emergency response" where we are unsure of the risks, but I disagree strongly that this emergency response can last this long without a very strong case/public discourse that this is significant enough to restrict freedom.