Opening up does not need an argument.

The only argument which needs to be satisfied is what restrictions should be in place.

They don't need to justify anything to reopen. The pro-lockdown crowd needs to continually justify every restriction.

So the reopen crowd is a bit up in arms right now because they keep hearing contradictory statements coming out. It's not as deadly as thought. Masks work (they didn't use to, right?). It's not transmitted as easily by surfaces as previously stated. With so many things being drawn back there is an expectation that restrictions should be drawn back as well.

That said, I get groceries twice as week and that's it, but I'm lucky to have a remote job and no real worries about my finances.

- The projections were wrong

+ some of the projections were correct

- The fatality rate is lower than feared

+ higher in some countries

- Other diseases kill people too

+ like smallpox and ebola

- This isn't as bad as the Spanish Flu

+ it's only just started

- Lockdowns can harm people too

+ less than killing and permanently injuring people

“ + less than killing and permanently injuring people”

False. That is one of the effects of lockdown. We need to try compare the level, but people are being injured and dying because of the lockdown.

"some of the projections were correct"

Are you referring to Ioannidis? If not, can you link to them?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23115056

- This isn't as bad as the Spanish Flu

That's an arbitrary high bar to set and compare. We don't have hindsight nor the test compacity to compare it to historic pandemics. People are going to write thesis about covid19 for decades to come.

the most important summary of the paper, that you conveniently forget is that

the measures taken will cause more damage and greater loss of life than what they save

Please limit the personal attacks.

And as we all well know, a diseases' damage can grow geometrically. That's the whole issue. Which can also be 'conveniently forgot'

Assuming a US centric view, roughly 25% of the workforce is currently unemployed [1] (based on unemployment claims data). There is data suggesting ~37k deaths for every 1% increase in the unemployment rate [2], without considering deaths due to forced isolation (suicides and such).

Based on the above math, that puts a proposed death toll from the economic response at ~777k citizens (25% minus the preCOVID 4% unemployment rate). Current death toll from COVID specifically is ~100k citizens. So we shifted the deaths from high risk individuals to economically disadvantaged individuals.

The thesis that we overreacted ("the measures taken will cause more damage and greater loss of life than what they save") holds water. People were going to die regardless, and its easy to say we did the right thing when it's not you sitting at home waiting for a broken state unemployment system to provide you the benefits you're entitled to.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23271769

[2] https://nypost.com/2020/04/20/explaining-the-link-between-un...

Ignoring the time periods of course, and using annual figures instead of pro-rated? The lockdown is a temporary measure until we get a handle on things.

Everybody on the internet who can divide one number by another, starts broadcasting bad math and claims to know the whole story. Its getting exhausting.

We reacted, perhaps too strongly. But we had geometric growth and high morbidity as the only knows at the time.

Now we know more. If we can get past the blame-throwing and hand-wringing, we can start monitoring and carefully restoring normal public behavior.

Economic advisers [1] [2] [3] have specifically said it will take years to recover the jobs lost over 3 months. It took 10 years from the 2008 GFC to arrive close to 3-4% unemployment. While unemployment is higher, more people will die from that economic situation. Are we going to go to Medicare For All and robust benefits systems to support citizens until those jobs come back so they don't die from lack of income and healthcare? Of course not, this is America.

But at least we saved some lives /s

[1] https://www.marketplace.org/2020/05/08/how-many-jobs-will-co...

[2] https://bfi.uchicago.edu/working-paper/covid-19-is-also-a-re...

[3] https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-nightly-corona...

Where there's a will there's a way.

My local library was built by the WPA.

> The Works Progress Administration (WPA; renamed in 1939 as the Work Projects Administration) was an American New Deal agency, employing millions of job-seekers (mostly unskilled men) to carry out public works projects, including the construction of public buildings and roads. It was established on May 6, 1935, by Executive Order 7034.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration

We could fix a lot of our infrastructure and unemployment problems through something like that.

There is no political will.

30,000,000 unemployed people aren't going to just sit around with their thumbs up their bums forever.

Hopefully! The situation will need to deteriorate further before those folks take the necessary actions though.

And somebody has a crystal ball to predict unemployment won't rebound after lockdown? But yeah, keep on dividing those numbers by other numbers...

If we keep throwing money at people who refuse to come back to work, then yeah, unemployment will remain high.

Jesus now its their fault for being unemployed? This is silly, and I'm done here.

I didn't say that.

But if people are on unemployment because they were laid off, then are offered their job back and refuse to come back to work... that's a different matter.

The idea that some people seem to have is that we can simply pay everybody a living wage regardless of whether they are doing any work. I think we've tried this out several times in the past.

You are extrapolating linear relationship between unemployment and deaths way outside the range of historical data on which it was estimated. Surely we would see some of the ~777k deaths already. The fact that we don't suggests that the relationship does not really hold when pushed so far out.

> Surely we would see some of the ~777k deaths already. The fact that we don't

Where are you getting this data to conclude we haven't seen a such a spike?

CDC publishes weekly number of deaths from all causes:

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

Great. Since the whole country is not in lockdown, let's examine a region which has been highly impacted:

* Select "Excess deaths with and without COVID-19" for the dashboard

* Enter "New York City" as the location (New York state as a whole shows a similar trend)

New York state was locked down March 20th. Notice the marked increase in non-COVID-19 related deaths starting March 21st, increasing steadily into April (almost 200% higher than predicted number of deaths). The tooltips also say that this data is still incomplete, so these numbers could climb.

Now maybe it's unrelated, or maybe it's COVID-19 related that was incorrectly assigned, but you seem fairly confident that it's unrelated to the other factors the OP mentioned. I don't see how you can reach that conclusion given the data available at this time.

Look at non-COVID-19 related deaths in a location with lockdown in effect, but with few COVID-19 deaths. Those should not be people who died from COVID-19 without a test, but if lockdown drives deaths up, there should be enough of them to be visible.

If you do it in New York, chances are you would be attributing COVID-19-related but unconfirmed deaths to lockdown.

You assume that with no lockdown and with a strategy like Sweden, economic growth won't be stifled and you won't reach ~20% unemployment rate in the US.

And still, perhaps the complete lockdown was an overreaction if you did not aim for Virus suppression like in NZ. It depends on when the vaccine is available.