Obviously there is not going to be a total lockdown in the the US no matter what happens. Regardless of the potential benefits, that option isn't even remotely politically feasible. People simply won't comply, and there aren't enough police to enforce it.
Obviously the political situation and what’s feasible is different, but I hope restrictions on group sizes and a small number of activities is not infeasible. They are not “lockdown”, they are the way to avoid lockdown.
Again there is no political possibility of a future strict lockdown in the US. So for better or worse it has already been avoided.
There are some obvious ones, like: no new cases in the city/county reported in 14 days.
For some reason, it seems people thought this would take a month or two, and then everything will be back to normal. But it wouldn't. Two months is a ramp-up period, a default if you do nothing. "Flattening the curve" measures were always going to extend the partial lockdowns until late this year. We knew that in March.
The "more trivial things" like normal social interaction, employment, and healthy exercise?
I've never seen a more pointed example of most people's abject inability to perform utilitarian reasoning than this pandemic. If you think causing at least tens of thousands of suicides since the start of the lockdowns, impoverishing millions of people for years to come, and drastically reducing almost everyone's quality of life is a reasonable tradeoff for buying (on expectation) an extra few months of life for geriatrics, you are not rational.
Yep, me neither. If more people could, we wouldn't have this problem, because people who could would stay home. And going to the gym is indeed one of the "more trivial things".
I suppose the problem is that it's hard to impress on people the seriousness of the situation. If instead of a virus, you had a madman or enemy soldiers going through the street and shooting every two hundredth person at random (even with a heavy bias towards the elderly), everyone would stay home and keep crying the government needs to do more.
If a single-basis-point-scale increase in annual death rates is enough to make you “stay home”, you should never go outside in the first place.
On expectation, my marginal increase in risk of death from depression from becoming a shut-in is higher than the marginal increase in risk of death from contracting covid.
The primary problem with this disease is the asymptomatic spread.
I've included everyone I come into contact with. The risk to them is insufficient to justify me becoming a hermit. If they have a vastly different risk profile from me, they'll become a hermit of their own accord and I don't have to worry about them catching it from me.
> The primary problem with this disease is the asymptomatic spread.
If that's the "primary problem", then it's probably not something to worry about, don't you think?
If you think an 85 year old dying 3 months earlier is the same as a 27 year old killing themselves, you’re beyond help.
> Again, wow. I'm sorry you hate your gramma... You're the one that's not rational, and I expected the HN crowd to be better at digesting statistics.
Absolutely moronic emotional appeals and accusations of being irrational within a few sentences of each other? You are a hopeless midwit.
I’m not arguing for total lockdown. I’m arguing for avoiding the more risky activities that involve heavy breathing in close quarters so total lockdown can be avoided. Local governments mostly know this, and have set policies accordingly. In general they should do a better job of compensating businesses in the short term since it’s not the gym owner’s fault (for example) that his business happens to have been risky right now.
I don’t think it’s good behavior to go out of your way to circumvent a public health policy based on a personal risk tolerance.