It's not clear anything is saving lives. Once everything opens up we could be right where we started. Also we've said basically that people with coronavirus matter more than other illnesses. There will be millions of deaths around the world because of shutdown. Things like AIDs medicine. Then thousands due to lack of treatment of cancers and people not going to doctor(England did a study on this). Then you'll have the domestic violence, murder rate increase. Then the negative effects on children decades later. It's only a trade off of lives, not a net saving of lives. If you think it's "clear" that any lives are being saved then I would challenge you to think more critically.

The shutdown will be looked back on in 10 years as one of the worst mistakes the world has ever made.

Why are you counting the increased ill effects of staying home but not the decreased ill effects of leaving home? No more car accidents, for example.

I don't think we're going to know in just 10 years. Maybe 50, or 100.

For myself, I definitely sense that we (collectively, or nation by nation) could have followed various pathways (and to some extent, we did). The "right" answer was (and is) not known, and we had a choice between erring on the side of caution over the damage caused by the disease versus that caused by economic disruption.

For now, I'm still in favor of erring in the direction of caution over the disease impact, but will concede that history may judge things quite differently.

The really thorny issues is that erring on the side of caution over the disease impact means that we are avoiding COVID cases at the expense of millions of undiagnosed / later-diagnosed cancer cases, and many other diseases.

That’s just a piece of the all cause mortality due to the COVID response.

And then after accepting all that direct cost, then you can start evaluating the economic damage on top (which to some extent is unavoidable regardless of lockdown policy).

Even though recessions cause loss of lives(as they always do), I'm not arguing we value the economy over lives. The economy will bounce back as it always does. I'm arguing that we should value all lives. We're only valuing covid lives over other lives right now. Meaning we're valuing our grandmother and great grandmothers lives over our brothers, sister, mothers, fathers even children. To be frank we have to look at average years of life loss with Covid. Let's call it how it is: The quarantine should just be called the life exchange.

Economies do not always "bounce back". In fact, after the major economic impacts of the 20th century, most economies worldwide required gigantic public policies targetting their rebuilding to reemerge, and even that tended to take many, many years.

With something so artificial as this lock down I'm sure it will. We basically removed millions of jobs from the economy on purpose.

But we didn't remove the requirement to pay rent/mortgages on the real estate used by the businesses that shut down, or make the loan payments on the loans that they took out. Consequently, oodles of small business are simply going to fail.

I'd love to believe that you're right (and 3 months ago, I felt the same way). But I just don't.

This is one reason you need to look at all cause mortality. Another is that COVID specific counts don't catch all related deaths and include possible unrelated deaths.

I'm aware of excess death or all cause. This doesn't take in account the delay of deaths we're going to have. So we need to look at all cause globally in a year or two or ten

Finland has it under control for now, but they should expect to see future waves of infection, since nearly every country that did a hard lockdown has. So the question is, will they be able to do the same severe response 2, 3, 4 times before they get the required supply of vaccines?

If and only if there is an effective vaccine within a year or two.

Sweden didn’t make this bet. Finland, Norway, and New Zealand did.

Sustained lockdown and lack of travel will be very costly if it has to be maintained for two years; and the fatigue from maintaining it will undo all of the supposed success.

This is not decidable at this point in time, and likely not within the next 5 years.

Perhaps! I'm not an expert on COVID, and I've not been following trends in Europe. His claim would only make sense if Finland's low current rates are due to lockdown, and Sweden's low current rates are not because of lockdown but because COVID is no longer spreading much due to prior spread.