Why is trying to minimize a US death toll on the order of hundreds of thousands[1] at the cost of a 20% GDP hit not a "rational" choice? It may not be your personal choice, but it seems to be to most people. And it's absolutely a well-understood tradeoff by everyone involved. No one went into this blind to the costs.
[1] Maybe only ("only") mid-tens-of-thousands if you use the kind of life-years-saved metric that seems to be en vogue among the "open up" set.
a) they are not going to "save hundreds of thousands of deaths", because quarantine doesn't stop the virus it only slows it down, in other-words quarantine will spread out those deaths in time, but many of those deaths are still going to happen (in due time)
b) 20% GDP hit will inevitably directly and indirectly kill, make homeless and starve a lot of people
c) in 2nd and 3rd world contries the distruption of the global economy to this degree will kill a metric ton of people
d) it's impossible to keep quarantine for extended periods of time, because then it's going to be way more than 20% GDP hit.
The only question is which approach is going to kill more people and do more damage in the long run.
To me it seems obvious that extended general quarantine is going to do an order of magnitude more damage (than doing the sane thing - like isolating at risk groups).
They literally (literally literally!) already have. What do you think would have happened in late March if the lockdowns hadn't bent the curves? Why do you think the high exponent mode (doubling every 3-6 days) stopped, if you don't think the lockdowns did it?
The problem with the "anti-quarantine" arguments is that they confuse the death rates of the status quo (locked-down semi-containment) with those that obtain from an unrestricted economy. That's not how it works.
> The only question is which approach is going to kill more people and do more damage in the long run.
Find a serious person with numbers that support your case. I think you'll be surprised.
If quarantine made the virus go away (which it doesn't) - or it bought enough time to make vaccines or effective treatments, then it would make sense, but it doesn't.
All it does it make it seem like you are saving lives, while in effect the deaths are just spread across a longer timeframe and now you're killing, starving and impoverishing people from the severe and dire economic consequences.
For... the TFA is literally about Germany, a nation that had its outbreak R0 drop below one (i.e. their outbreak was shrinking), far, far, far underneath the herd immunity threshold. It's simply not true that Germany didn't prevent any deaths, that analysis is straight wrong. The same holds for most of east asia.
The only reason, quite frankly, that this doesn't seem to be happening in the US is because there is a segment of the population being led to believe that lockdowns are impossible, or that they don't work, or that they're an imposition on fundamental freedoms. So we're doing it badly. But it can absolutely be done well, as nations like Germany show.
If you take 1000 deaths and spread them across a 6months or a year instead of 2weeks, no lives have been "saved".
Similarly the act of spreading it out via general extended quarantine, does massive economic damage that will result in deaths, starvation, homelessness and impoverishment that arguably will completely eclipse whatever lives are actually saved by the quarantine (due to say availability of ventilators and medical care not being overrun).
Maybe that damage isn't as large in some developed countries like Germany who can maybe afford it, but it is in many other countries.
That is not the effect of a lockdown. There is your misunderstanding. The proof is in the linked article (or data for Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan, Hawaii, all of whom also contained the virus before reaching herd immunity).
If those measures are not feasible long term (this seems to be the case), that means they R0 can be held below zero only briefly. In other words, the spread of the virus is only slowed down (or even reversed briefly, with R0 < 0) and delayed, and in essence the most deaths are simply delayed and not saved.
While the deaths from the quarantine measures itself doesn't seem to ever get accounted for.
And that is the problem - those quarantine measure/economic damage deaths doesn't ever seem to be put into equation as if they don't exist or are negligible.
Which makes me question if quarantine does net-benefit or does more harm in log term when all the externalities and knock on effects are actually accounted for.
Or am I missing something?
Secondly, why is nobody ever talking about the amount of deaths, starvation, homelessness and impoverishment that will result from economic damage of general quarantine. This always gets completely ignored and negated as if it doesn't exist.
You can't say that quarantine saves lives unless you quantify how many people are killed and are going to be killed by it.
My argument is that this by far will kill, starve and impoverish way more people than whatever number of people will get saved by having access to a ventilator.
And it's the same thing with COVID-19. We can't quarantine everyone indefinitely, this is unlikely to end without us reaching herd immunity, and the quarantine itself causes non-negligible suffering. We have to approach this rationally.