I would also add that delaying the spread also contributes to making it progressively harder to get the disease to spread.
France has already lifted many of their lockdown restrictions.
> Assuming we'll all contract COVID-19 anyway, eventually,
That's a big assumption, and not necessarily correct.
First, we won't all get it - herd immunity means infection rates max out at something like 60% to 90% of the population. I understand this maximum is to some extent a function of how fast your infection rates rise due to a sort of momentum effect.
Second, we may be able to suppress maximum infections indefinitely (or until we get a vaccine or treatment) with tracing, local lockdowns and so on. It's not clear if this is an effective long-term strategy, and is disputed by some epidemiologists, but seems to be the leading preferred strategy by most experts.
> it makes little sense to adopt strong restrictive measures on personal liberty to slow the spread down to a crawl
The problem is that you can't really adopt half measures. That's linear thinking, and it's an exponential curve. You either keep the reproduction rate above 1 or below 1. Above 1 you get an accelerating increase and eventually overwhelmed hospitals. Below 1 your infection rates start halving.
Luckily, the measures required for keeping R<1 don't seem to be too intolerable. Spain, Italy, France etc. have managed to squash their epidemics and are getting close to having something like normal society back.
I don't believe Levitt's interpretation. I certainly hope it's true, but I don't think it is. He seems to believe containment measures have no effect, which is implausible to me.
He's just talking about the stats, without giving a biological hypothesis for why infections would top out - that seems to be coming in an upcoming video that hasn't been released yet.
I'm also a bit sceptical about his conclusions. The effects of containment measures aren't really visible in the curve, but e.g. Sweden has a much worse exponent - increasing the chance for more outbreaks will also change the parameters for Levitts curves. I think Germanys curve got very slightly worse recently (shops opening - masks didn't compensate). But I'm not sure if masks did anything at all - there is no clear trend-break in the growth-rate of Germany. Also masks may just keep a local population infectious for a longer time - increasing the risk for visitors.
One biological hypothesis is that covid-19 spreads in local clusters - and has a hard time to move to other places. (e.g. it might need 20 minutes of close-contact talking) The growth-rate is shrinking exponentially (something that Levitt noticed, and can be seen everywhere)- each outbreak locally is trapped and doomed to fizzle, because it is competing with itself - it's just not mobile enough to move to another location before it burns out to maintain a constant R=1.
"Assuming we'll all contract COVID-19 anyway, eventually" is not a reasonable assumption - it was the worst case scenario that the world has avoided and (as it seems) will continue to avoid. It's reasonable to expect that if we solve this issue through a vaccine in 2021, then by that time perhaps 10% of the world's population will have contracted COVID-19 and almost everyone else will not. And the expected difference between Sweden and France is going to be that by the time that we have a solution, one of them will have burned through more of their population for no good reason.
Assuming we'll all contract COVID-19 anyway, eventually, it makes little sense to adopt strong restrictive measures on personal liberty to slow the spread down to a crawl. Sure, you have to impose some restrictions in order not to overload hospitals and whatnot, but anything beyond that is just extending the suffering (both making living harder and ensuring it will go on for a longer duration), is it not?