We shut down fairly hard and fairly early in Denmark. Our neighbour Sweden didn’t shut down at all. Their economy suffered roughly the same as ours, but the number of deaths per 100,000 population is 43.9 and ours is 10.

We’re pretty much reopening everything that isn’t big concentrated gatherings or night-clubs. Even things like Zoos are opening. Our border to Germany and Norway is also semi-open now, but remains closed toward Sweden for obvious reasons.

We did shut down in Sweden. It's a myth that needs to be debunked. I (and many others) have been working from home for several months now. All events (like sports, cinemas) have been postponed or canceled. Most people in larger cities are ordering groceries and stuffs online. Sweden is a very digital, even cashless society. Sure, it's open in some ways but many stores are shutting down because everything have went digital.

The net effect was that the death rate was vastly higher in Sweden than their northern Scandinavian neighbors. Over 4000 deaths more based on population size. Not having more aggressive stay at home policies doomed thousands more people to die than were likely if you had followed policies of your neighbors. Sweden has now joined the ranks of the worst performing countries in Europe based on death rate. The UK, France, Spain, and Sweden.

Here's the opportunity Sweden missed: The disease had an early outbreak in those other countries, it was already raging before the countries shutdown (Spain and Italy were overwhelmed). But as we saw in Finland, Norway etc, if it wasn't raging, by shutting down you could tremendously reduce the infections. I know Sweden tried to protect elderly in sr citizen homes as we call them in the US, but you failed. People could still go out to bars and restaurants, your economy was somewhat more functional that other countries, at the cost of currently 3-4k extra deaths.

It's a terrible situation, but in my opinion the wrong one.

Thank you for this.

We’re the shutdowns and working from home government mandated, or due to people just doing it?

Similar situation here in Czech Republic, just in the last few days most foreign travel restrictions were lifted for European Countries - but UK & Sweden are firmly red on the map the government has published, traveling there is not advised and you would have to go to a 14 day quarantine and get tested after returning from there.

The epidemiological curve in my state was exponential until roughly a week after the shutdown. If it had continued, then a couple weeks later we would have had more new cases per day than there are hospital beds in the state. What would you have proposed instead to keep our hospitals from completely filling like they did in Italy?

Which state are you in?

Curves are exponential until they aren't. In most states, hospitals were never anywhere near being "overwhelmed", quite the opposite in fact. In my county (Santa Clara, CA), there are under 5% hospital beds occupied by Covid patients.

I would point to other states that never shut down, like Wyoming and South Dakota, and states with light shut downs, like TX or FL (which did far better than NY or NJ). They all followed the same curve. An enormous amount of the case load was from infected nursing homes. Meanwhile, what was the goal of shutting down beaches and parks? Just to spread misery and give people nowhere to go? To deprive people of essential vitamin D and exercise? Madness, all of it.

In my state it's not true that the majority of the case load is from infected nursing homes. Most of the deaths were in the beginning but the new cases and deaths are from the general populace.

Our beaches and parks have been open for weeks now. People have not been forced to stay indoors at all hours. Our governor's order has been exclusively focused on avoiding situations where two people from different households encounter each other for extended periods because that creates a vector from one household to the other. I've been walking outside the entire time we've been "under quarantine." There are runners and bikers and all kinds of people doing the same. The only difference is we give each other a wide berth on the trail.

I think you're blowing the scope of the "quarantines" out of proportion. And you didn't answer my original question. What would you have done differently? What would your plan have been?

We shut down beaches and parks because we didn't know at the time the pattern of spreading. We had theories but we didn't have solid emperical evidence yet about how covid spread.

Also the difference between light and hard shutdowns isn't as much as you'd think. Especially when most people's behavior changes despite whether there is a lockdown or not.

“I’ll point to states not representative of other stares in density at all.”

Texas or Florida are representative of the density of the US. If the mass shut downs had been limited to NY and NJ, without the media working everyone into a frenzy about beach goers in Florida, people in those other states wouldn’t be so upset.

We’re not a single country. We’re 50 different states with vastly different requirements. NYC and NJ did need the extreme shut downs. In fact, they should have shut down earlier and harder. South Dakota, Texas, etc., did not. Many sparse states like Oregon overreacted and shut down more than they needed to.

Of course, nobody can predict these things. Mistakes happen. What drives me nuts is that the same media that flipped out because not all states were taking the drastic measures that were needed in NYC is going to peddle a narrative about what happened that totally glosses over the lesson that those states didn’t really need to take such drastic measures.

> Many sparse states like Oregon

Just like anywhere else, conditions inside a particular state are like conditions inside the whole country, i.e. not consistent and comparable. A large chunk of Oregon is practically empty. Then there is Portland, which has 60% of the entire population of the state.

Locking down Portland arguably made sense. Locking down rural Oregon not as much.

I can’t stress what a huge outlier the NYC/NJ area is. Portland has a population density 1/5 as much as NYC. It has half the population density of DC, which itself probably shut down more than it needed to.

But yes, locking down Portland was at least plausible. Locking down my wife’s mother in law down in Lincoln City, however, generated a lot of ill will to Governor Brown that I can’t say was undeserved.

I agree on all points. Ideologically I should agree with our governor, but I find that her response to the pandemic has been pretty awful. She's not alone, I suppose, it seems like many (most?) state governors were only qualified to hold their position in a time of peace, few seem to have stepped up to the challenge of the coronavirus and taken charge as leaders.

For the longest time we didn't have anything even approximating an actual metric for when we could reopen things, and then all of the sudden we just decided to go ahead with it. I think her hand got forced on that, because when everyone realizes you don't have a plan, they start to make their own.

Sorry for the politics. I just find the entire situation very frustrating.

Lincoln City from when I’ve been there had has a lot of tourists (I presume you meant your mother in law) compared to say Coos Bay and would hardly be that isolated

Lincoln City is pretty sparse until the summer! (I meant my wife's grandmother. Not even close!)

Comparing Wyoming and New York is disingenuous. You'd be wise to compare, say, New York Metro and the Bay Area, [1] two areas of the US that are arguably almost equal density.

Note how San Francisco declared a state of emergency in February. By the first week of March, most were working from home, and the week after, it had a shelter in place order.

1 - https://abc7news.com/feature/health/coronavirus-how-close-wa...

What will triggers the great depression is the huge decline in consummation. It will be a month since the end of the lockdown here and my expense have been cut in more than half. I'm not the only one. I've repaired my bike and did not buy a new one for summer as intended, friends of mine did delay their new car (they don't need it as much now). working from home made people less afraid to cook for themselves and thus they are spending a lot less.

Restaurants opened this week and my sister told me it was so calm she was able to study during the service, and nobody said anything. If anything i spent 6 time more during the first month of the lockdown than the first month after the lift (500 vs 3K, not counting rent). I still have planned expenses but for my vacations, after fixing my wing, i will kitesurf around where i live and camp rather than go to the mediteranean. I assume most people like me will do the same.

This comportment, if widespread, will cause a great depression-like event. Still won't change.

> huge decline in consummation

If anything I think the lockdowns increased consummation.

I’d have to concur.

consummation - (1) The action of making a marriage or relationship complete by having sexual intercourse. (2) The point at which something is complete or finalized.

Shutdowns worked elsewhere. What doesn't work is half a shutdown.

Proper countries put a testing-and-quarantine regime in place and have paid sick leave. Not the US, unfortunately.

What is shaping up to be an absolute catastrophe is the Black Lives Matter demonstrations all over the country. Would you consider talking to a contact tracer after you've been to a protest against the police? People will justifiably think it's one of those test-your-meth stunts that sheriffs at times pull. Well, now there's the blowback.

Yeah, police really should have chosen a better time to murder someone on film and then have authorities ignore it for days. Protesters should go home to avoid spreading disease. They can resume protesting the next time an officer kills someone for the crime of having the wrong skin color. It will surely happen again soon.

Even if you are willing to talk to a contact tracer, what good will it do? The vast majority of a protester's contacts would be from the protest. Under the best of circumstances, that is a black hole for contact tracing.

Imagine someone was at a BLM demonstration, possibly did some light rioting (spraypainting, flyposting, damage to vehicles), and the following morning wakes up with respiratory symptoms and tests positive for coronaplague. Now the contact tracer calls. Anyone would think this is a sheriff's ruse, trying to find out what his circle of friends is.

Not with the Apple/Google solution, because the phones in the crowd should be able to exchange keys with each other. But it hasn't been deployed yet.

Great depression was bad. 10 world wars 2 of u.s. deaths, also bad.

I think the lesson we'll learn is we should have locked down earlier, harder, and longer so we can start a full recovery faster.

Even though bars and restaurants are open, myself and every person I know is acting as if a lockdown is still in place. ( I know there are some people who are but there are lots of people who aren't)

There will be no fast recovery, period. We have deprived businesses of oxygen for 3 months. Cash flow is the life blood of businesses. We've sucked all the cash flow out of the worldwide economy. The bankruptcies will start rolling in and we will lose at least a decade of economic growth just to recover to where we were. 40+ million unemployed in the U.S. Near record levels. WWII caused 50+ million deaths. Are we on that track now? Hard to say. But I certainly fear worldwide economic instability more than I do Covid-19. My reading of history is that those events cause far more death and destruction than viruses. We know by now that Covid isn't the plague.

What level of disability or death would make you change your mind? 100k deaths seems a lot to me and how far through is the US now?

40% of those were nursing home deaths: https://heavy.com/news/2020/05/covid-19-deaths-nursing-homes...

Median age of Covid deaths? 75-84 years. https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Death-Counts-...

This is on par with median age of death in the U.S. on any given year.

You cannot crush the future of your country to extend the life of the elderly by no statistically significant amount. I'm sorry, but that's the truth.

For 20-55 year olds, the core of the economy, this virus is not very deadly at all. This age group is far more likely to die from many other causes.

I would say, fix the nursing home problem. Ask the elderly to wear masks or shelter in place and to beef up on vitamin intake and anything else that would help their immune system.

Then, I would let the youth and young and middle aged adults continue life as normal, develop herd immunity, and therefore prevent a widespread infection next winter.

It seems that the average number of years of life lost per covid death is about 10.

https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/coronavirus/headline_720672_en.ht...

A far less cruel alternative would be to expand sick leave and to detatch health care from employment.

> expand sick leave and to detatch health care from employment.

It is probably possible to do this and aim for eradication. This is NZs plan. It’ll be interesting once the borders are unlocked.

U.S. deaths from world war 2 ~300,000

FWIW, around here the breweries were "full". (with full being defined as all available tables occupied. Obviously the number of available tables is less now than it was before)

In the absence of mandatory shutdowns, the general retail, hospitality, etc. sectors would have still seen collapses of at least 50% or more. Maybe it wouldn't have been quite so bad as the 80% that actually happened, but that kind of crash would absolutely wipe out the industry without government support.

What was wrong about the shut downs is the arbitrary nature of them and inconsistent application from state to state. The same is occurring again with the lessening of restrictions.

We saw attempts by some governors and mayors to play political games with the shut downs by favoring certain business types over others when both had similar staffing concerns all to score points with one group or another and little to no concern with public health. We even had one governor ship sick people to elderly care homes!

A lot of this can be laid at the feet of the CDC, which Trump not withstanding and I really question his affect over the CDC, which fumbled the whole event and still does not manage it well.

However people need to realize, outside of war, the Federal Government of the US in not up to the task. They have fumbled natural distastes with the most recent famous one being Katrina but even subsequent disasters did not show much improvement.

To that end, what Congress should have been doing instead of trying to craft stimulus programs to benefit political buddies is run the CDC and FEMA through the ringer and start the process of building a coordinated process to follow for the duration of COVID19 as well as future issues. Instead they are all playing up for the November elections

I wonder what kind of an event losing 2-5% of the population to a pandemic would trigger.

US lost 1% of its population to Spanish flu which was shortly followed by the roaring twenties.

Please supply some facts, then. I expect better from you.