This goes both ways, though. If you act early-- and way over-react-- and it works, you get to claim to be the savior of the country, even though the reaction was disproportionate.

There's no way to disprove it.

But we have other countries that didn't react at all and their crematoriums have been running non-stop, like Iran, China and Italy. We also have NYC, which has brought in mobile morgues for their dead since the standard system can't handle the overflow. Why are we acting like we don't know what outcome we are trying to defend against?

Iran, China, and Spain are all already loosening lockdowns. Pretty weird thing to do if they burning people into ashes nonstop.

You can't "disprove" overreacting, but you can disprove saving the country. Case in point, Italy was not saved. What would overreaction look like? Shutting an entire country down back in December? If your definition of "overreacting" is "shutting down a country before there's a single case", you can definitely prove or disprove that.

This is true, but also unhelpful. We all make significant choices all the time that cannot be proved effective, these are heuristics and not scientific theorems.

The gist is that this is more like avoiding rock climbing because you don't want to fall to your death. It's not likely that you fall to your death rock climbing, but it is MUCH less likely if you never climb. But, you can't know the future, so you can only take actions that are either right or wrong in hindsight.

Point of clarification: Are you saying that there's no way to disprove your claim of being a savior? Or no way to disprove the reaction was disproportionate.?

When you enact a bad policy, you can always claim it would have been worse if you hadn't acted. It's not like we can go back in time and see what would happen if the policy wasn't enacted.

The concern I have is the endgame with shelter in place rules. I'm fairly convinced they're working (although not completely so), but what happens when they're lifted? What is the timeline for doing so, and under what conditions? What do you do to prevent the infection crisis from hitting after lifting the rules?

There's already been huge economic impacts, and everyone seems to assume once this is all lifted things will be normal. But without a vaccine or systematic antibody testing, will we just end up delaying the worst of the virus?

My fear is one of two things will happen: either we will have done all this economic slaughter with the lockdowns and still end up with the direct effects of the virus, but delayed, because of lack of herd immunity; or we will do this indefinitely and the economic casualties will increase proportionately.

I'm not saying the lockdowns are or are not the wrong thing to do, but I do feel like doing them without a clear plan for getting out of them is. I also feel like in the absence of these plans, its unfair to compare no-lockdown policies to lockdown policies in current casualties because those places may just be experiencing pains that lockdown locations have temporarily avoided. Places with lockdowns too late may unwittingly be similar.