The mortality is around 1%. So in the US alone that would leave over 3 million dead. Due to this 50 state lukewarm solution I think we'll ultimately see 1 million dead. The economy is made up of people, by the way.
All the shutdown was intended to do was to "slow the spread" from the 18 months to 24 months, and to hopefully keep hospitals from being overwhelmed.
Once we knew how infectious it was, Covid was always expected to infect nearly everyone eventually, whether the economy was shut down or not.
Slowing the spread was to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed (flatten the curve) but it was also to minimize the number of people infected before either a vaccine or effective treatments became available. In the US a vaccine is likely still a year off, but we already know more about how to treat this than we did 4 months ago. And in another 4 months we'll likely have even better treatments and protocols.
It's not inevitable that 80% have to be infected within 18-24 months. Other countries have slowed the spread with Hong Kong, S Korea and Taiwan being 3 of the more notable examples.
> The economy is made up of people, by the way.
And there is almost always an economic boom after any plague or war. Vacuums get filled, create opportunity.
If you think fear from COVID-19 would not have crippled the economy, well, maybe we’ll get the opportunity to see if that’s true in some localities. I’ll firmly bet on No, it totally would still, especially as the severity increases.
The states caused our deaths. New York and others shoved the elderly (an at risk population) into nursing homes. This isn’t due to good or bad responses from the Feds. The state governments are what killed us. https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/02/opinions/steady-death-rate-co...
Ultimately the disease was going to infect us. The only question was “could we slow the spread of the disease in such a way that we don’t overwhelm the medical system?”
Two reasons to believe fear of the virus would not have, by itself, crippled the economy:
1. If people were that afraid they would have been sheltering in place before the government ordered them to do so, but they were not doing that, and they only started doing that when the government ordered them to.
2. The behavior of people after the lockdowns ended.
People don't tend to fear something until it's tangible to them. When one of their family members or best friends gets ripped apart and then dumped into a grave, it will become a lot clearer very fast what kind of danger it can pose to oneself.
>2. The behavior of people after the lockdowns ended.
Some people are behaving that way, but I'm pretty sure it's mostly limited to America where we've decided wearing a mask is a political statement. (There are exceptions, but they are also often other places with similar or worse anti-science/medicine sentiment.) It's hard to even know what the outbreak would look like if both businesses and all ordinary people went back to normal. I know the economies have not recovered anywhere where lockdown has ended.
On the other hand, we do know that the economies of countries that never locked down (Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Sweden) are doing better than economies in countries that did.
If countries that locked down are not recovering, that is likely a consequence of the lockdowns themselves. It's not a surprise that ordering everyone to stay at home would tank an economy.
I can say from my experience that the economy runs a lot smoother and recovers a lot quicker if people aren't terrified about a pandemic causing them long term health implications and killing their family.
Perhaps it's more a damning evidence for the unrestrained capitalism you hold so dear, that it spells catastrophe and misery if people aren't unable to keep working their bullshit jobs in the middle of the most pressing public health crisis of the last 100 years.
Now people will still die + their families will be without a job.
This virus has a higher mortality than the flu, indeed. But the jury is still out to see if the current scenario will be better that the alternative (after you factor in suicides, depressions, overdoses, etc)
But personally, I would have much preferred to live in the alternative world where the virus would have spread freely and we'd already be in herd immunity (and with the economy not destroyed)