how do you quantify "five times as bad" ? if I run my car into a brick wall at ten miles an hour, vs. 50, one event damages my car the other kills me. is that "five times as bad"?
> are we now going to spend dozens of times more money/effort mitigating the flu every year? If yes then we will see lockdowns like this regularly going forward.
no, why would we? the flu does not overwhelm hospitals [edit: the 2018 flu season comparison is a counterpoint but there is no argument this is anything on the scale what covid has done in places like NYC], cripple the entire medical system such that thousands of patients are left to die in hallways and parking lots, and spread exponentially to kill hundreds of thousands of people within just a few months.
> If no, then the vast majority of the response to COVID is an emotional overreaction, not rational risk mitigation/pricing in externalities.
you have made no argument to support this case.
> I will say in mid-March, when things looked quite different based on our limited knowledge of the virus, that the response wasn't entirely unwarranted.
what exactly "looked quite different" ? the main things that were known in march, e.g. spreads exponentially, r0 is something like 2 or 3 if steps aren't taken, has a 20% hospitalization rate, has a high death rate for those hospitalized which has improved somewaht but that is predicated on the fact that hospitals are availble, are still true.
There were a lot of tweets from people who work in public health about the argument you're making. "If people said we overreacted, then we will know we did our job". That's how it works when you prevent a horrible thing from going out of control. People who for whatever reason don't seem to understand what happened will crow about how unnecessary that was. Can you see how this looks to anyone who is actually trained in this area?
yes it does https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie...
flu may not kill as much as covid or spread as fast as covid but still thousand of people die every year, so somehow that is acceptable without lockdown ?
https://www.contagionlive.com/news/why-comparing-flu-covid-1...
>there was not a global lockdown for the 2018 flu season
Yes, so despite that there are thousand of death due to flue and hospital overwhelmed, somehow is was acceptable to not have lockdown back then?
Due to lockdown the hospital are furloughing, lying off nurse, freeze hiring.
Just look at Sweden where they didn't lockdown.
Doesn't mean I say we should not take any step. Step to make vaccine still has to be done, improving treatment still have to be done, increasing health care capacity still have to be done.
If we are spending hundreds of times as much mitigating a virus five times as bad as common illnesses (yes a once in a century event) are we now going to spend dozens of times more money/effort mitigating the flu every year? If yes then we will see lockdowns like this regularly going forward. If no, then the vast majority of the response to COVID is an emotional overreaction, not rational risk mitigation/pricing in externalities.
I will say in mid-March, when things looked quite different based on our limited knowledge of the virus, that the response wasn't entirely unwarranted. But we've known for months that this isn't nearly as bad as feared. It isn't the second coming of smallpox. Yet we still have most of the restrictions and shaming from March, even to this day.