As rossdavidh correctly pointed out, if we don't get a vaccine soon (which we probably won't), then herd immunity is virtually the only way out anyway. Even if it turns out there are long term health problems, that doesn't really change that calculus. Very few people can completely isolate themselves indefinitely (remember, the virus doesn't just magically not spread in supermarkets), and if everyone did that, most of us would starve and the few who didn't starve would inherit a post-civilization ruin.

It does change the economic break even point a little bit. If intervention A reduces infection count 10% in the time to a vaccine, whether it's worth it depends upon whether it prevents 20,000 deaths, or 20,000 deaths and 40,000 long term illnesses.

The threshold to herd immunity depends upon contact rate. So interventions well short of "lockdown" may not completely prevent the spread of the virus but still reach equilibrium at a lower number of people infected.

You're right, the question of where the break even point is is quite complex. Aside from the numbers you posted, it also depends on the economic side effects of "intervention A": better to be one of the 40,000 with long-term illnesses in a functional society, than to avoid the long-term illnesses but live in a non-functional society because we destroyed the whole economy.

The economy is a human construct, subject to redefinition if needed. It’s not some inevitable product of the natural world.

Sacrificing lives unnecessarily to “save the economy” is perverse in that the economy is supposed to serve us, not the other way around.

I’m not saying we should stay in lockdown forever, but I’d rather our leaders think creatively with a default view of “let’s be cautious with a global pandemic that has so far shown great destructive powers when left unchecked”.

There's this boogeyman floating around that "the economy" consists of a bunch of billionaires drawing lines on charts, drinking champagne and laughing at the proles. If any of that is going on and is costing lives, by all means, put an end to it.

But when I talk about "the economy", I mean the process that puts food on plates and electricity in houses. Someone has to grow the food, someone has to transport it, someone has to store it, distribute it. Sure, we could round up the world's billionaires and force them to do that, but unfortunately there aren't enough of them to do it for everyone, so someone else will have to do it too. And someone will have to service the cars and trains those workers take to get to work, and someone will have to watch their kids, and someone will have to provide toys to the people watching their kids, etc. etc. etc. THAT'S what I mean by "the economy".

You are completely ignoring the knock-on effects of this experiment, like driving an enormous population into destitution and fostering crime and violence.

Fewer than 300,000 people have died with nexus to Covid. Even if that population were to double, we're left with 0.0066% chance of death. It's great to be legitimately concerned, but those are good odds as far as I'm concerned.

What's an acceptable risk for you?

WWII, the country came together, dealt with rationing for years. The draft and rationing forced everyone to sacrifice.

This disease has the potential to kill 3 million Americans, 70 million people globally, and that’s only if we spread it out.

Why aren’t we all sacrificing so that the poorest, most vulnerable population can have sufficient funding so that they will have a roof and food and clothing? Why isn’t the federal government sending monthly checks? Where’s my tax increase? Where’s why aren’t I being drafted to work in health care or food delivery?

All our government has asked of us, begrudgingly, is to stay inside for a while, and we can’t even do that without whining.

> This disease has the potential to kill 3 million Americans

This is looking less and less likely. With increasing evidence that the infection fatality rate is 0.6%, and that the herd immunity threshold may be somewhere around 30% infected, it's more like 700k. Still catastrophe, but 1/4th the catastrophe you imply...

> All our government has asked of us, begrudgingly, is to stay inside for a while, and we can’t even do that without whining.

I favored sheltering before everyone else. It was a good way to blunt the incident wave of the epidemic and prevent health care overload.

At this point, Rt with the current intervention isn't low enough to ever get us to a regime of extreme containment in any reasonable/attainable amount of time, and there's too many jurisdictions that are hotbeds of the virus that will just reintroduce it. I am not convinced that the current strategy saves lives in the long term.

It even risks backing us into a corner, where we have no choice but to reopen more than we'd like, and then face a devastating fall season with little population immunity and no seasonal factors on our side. Especially in locations like the SF Bay Area, under the nation's strictest health order but also with a very low per capita case load.

Worse, it's hard to be sure the intervention is even effective. Looking at data series on https://rt.live , there's no obvious inflection or discontinuity relating to sheltering or relaxing of sheltering in the individual states' series. Rt was falling before sheltering, and continued to fall at a comparable rate afterwards...

Where did everyone get the idea that isolation was meant to reduce the overall number of infections?

Uh, reducing transmission does prevent drastic overshoot past the herd immunity threshold, so it does affect the area under the curve a bit-- not just flatten it.