Attending an anti-lockdown protest without taking proper social distancing measures is more akin to driving drunk on the freeway than it is to shooting heroin into one's veins. The latter can in many circumstances be understood to have negligible impact on the rights of others, the former cannot.
The question of "at what point do social distancing measures overstep the legitimate exercise of government power" is a nuanced one. It requires weighing individuals rights against one another in a situation where cause and effect are at best thinly statistical, emergent from collective behavior, and regionally variable (NYC != rural Kentucky).
No government is going to get their response to COVID-19 100% right, but I'm pretty sure focusing exclusively on individual self-harm would be an abysmal heuristic.
- Infection hospitalization rate -- similar.
- Probability of getting a vaccine in a moderately quick timeframe -- I'd call this one 50/50. Hard to bet on.
- How long it takes case counts to decay to a point where a contact tracing regime works -- This really depends. It looks like to me that in the US jurisdictions with the best controls, Rt =~ 0.6. This will take a -long- time to decay to the 1 case per million threshold where contact tracing, etc works; 6 months or more. Some models put the decay much quicker, at like a month from now, but I cannot understand why.
- Efficacy of a herd immunity strategy / serology information from various jurisdictions -- looking hopeful, but imperfect information. Sweden is getting there...
- Critical care utilization. In the SF Bay Area, we're below seasonal norms and COVID-19 cases in ICU have been (very slowly) decaying for the past 3 weeks.
- Seasonal effects. We don't really know, but it looks like there is probably a small seasonal swing to Rt. Seasonal effects justify more dramatic action either direction (containment or relaxation). Containment efforts will be made more effective during summer, but it's also an ideal time to experiment with loosening controls while seasonal factors are on our side.
The thing is, it's really dark. I have a pretty dark streak in my sense of humor, but were are a lot of moments when I thought to myself, "Did these guys forget that this show bills itself as a comedy?"
SPOILER ALERT
I think the most horrible scene was when some of the passengers get the idea that they aren't really trapped in space, that it's all a simulation and they're really on Earth after all. And so they decide they want to leave. Through the airlock...
And Captain Laurie and the engineer who won't shut up about being underappreciated by the morons around her (Why would you care about their opinions? They're morons) are in between them and the airlock.
Now maybe this means I'm a bad person, but my first gut reaction was, "Hey, let them go outside. It's evolution in action. A problem that solves itself, yeah?"
But then my real self kicks in and points out that, unless I try my very hardest to prevent these fucking morons from sucking vacuum, letting them spacewalk sans spacesuit is tantamount to murder. And I'm not a murderer.
Even though they are useless fucking morons who seemingly only exist to cause problems, standing by and letting them kill themselves is wrong. You'll hate yourself if you do.
That's the downside of self-awareness and intelligence. If you are the only person on the spaceship who knows the score guess where the buck stops?
I read the season as an allegory for where we are now politically. The captain is a figurehead, the passengers are readily manipulated, the far-off owners don’t care, yet everyone aboard is hurtling through space in a very complex machine that they don’t really understand.
Hugh Laurie is doing a great job in the show. Another draw is the creator, Armando Iannucci, who did Veep.
Always follow the first link on a Wikipedia page (excluding parentheticals with etymology and pronunciation), rinse and repeat: you eventually end up at philosophy.
Of course, "idiot" is pretty relative, and not everyone going out is an idiot, but that would undermine your eugenics argument
I look at it this way, and it sounds harsh but it's big-time decision-making life:
1. You could compel people to listen to something to ensure their safety by force, and then have a riot.
OR
2. You could urge sensible people do something for their own safety while letting the idiots commit suicide and clean-up the gene pool in the process.
I say take option #2 all-day, everyday because it's easier, cheaper, and better for others who do listen to have one less fewer, stupid liability in the world who would otherwise put others in danger.