A disease isn’t something you can solve by pretending really hard that it doesn’t exist. People getting their news from irresponsible politicians get sick like everyone else, and that’s why it won’t get back to normal before there’s a vaccine or very effective treatment: it’ll be the same cycle of open-spike-close and businesses not having enough customers to be viable.

>A disease isn’t something you can solve by pretending really hard that it doesn’t exist.

This is demonstrably false. Some places are already back to life as normal, like Florida and Sweden, with no business closures. And in spite of this they still have lower deaths per capita than some places with heavy lockdowns like New York, Peru, Belgium and Spain.

Come on. Florida is not "back to normal". The health department is still advocating the full suite of social interventions for citizens, including masks & social distancing.

https://floridahealthcovid19.gov/prevention/

Sweden is not back to normal. Mass gatherings are still banned and people are self isolating en masse.

Not to mention the economic crater, and suicides!

> it’ll be the same cycle of open-spike-close and businesses not having enough customers to be viable.

That's the part I'm referring to by "not caring" - just ignoring the close orders, especially since "two weeks to slow the spread" has been so completely abandoned.

Ignoring the law doesn’t lead to normal: just more preventable deaths and bankruptcies when businesses burn capital trying to stay open without enough customers to be profitable, even assuming they avoid legal repercussions.

A few things here:

* What law? In the US, the lockdowns were under emergency powers of the executive branch, which are supposed to only last a limited time (30 days where I am, for example). Several of these were challenged and found to be unlawful.

* The US lockdowns were originally only mean to prevent hospitals from being overloaded. We are way way past that point where that was an issue - all the emergency capacity has been dismantled for months.

* As sibling comment implies, something like half the states in the US aren't under any lockdown now, businesses there aren't having issues staying open, and their stats are no worse than the locked-down states.

* Speaking of preventable deaths, suicide and overdose are climbing where lockdowns are still in place.

In the U.S., the lockdowns were issued in compliance with local laws. As you could easily learn for yourself, those vary from state to state and city to city so you can't make a blanket statement without being incorrect. In the context of this thread, you specifically referred to “ignoring close orders” which implicitly acknowledges the existence of an order issued by someone with the authority to do so under current law.

In some cases there have been legal challenges to those laws so there aren't givens but even if those are successful, my point was that even if you do re-open you can't force customers to come back when they feel unsafe. Even in the states where restrictions have been relaxed, a large number of people are not comfortable hanging out at a bar or restaurant — the problem being the risk of a serious disease, not the countermeasures deployed against it.

> The US lockdowns were originally only mean to prevent hospitals from being overloaded. We are way way past that point where that was an issue - all the emergency capacity has been dismantled for months.

The lockdowns were, as clearly communicated at the time, intended to slow community spread. Avoiding hospital overload was part of that but so was avoiding large numbers of people getting a serious disease with potentially life-changing impact when they don't need to.

> As sibling comment implies, something like half the states in the US aren't under any lockdown now, businesses there aren't having issues staying open, and their stats are no worse than the locked-down states.

And that commenter was wrong just like you are wrong. Anyone who follows this issue knows that the cases have been rising recently (~35%) and there's a noticeable correlation with the states which re-opened high risk activities and those who did not.

For example, they mentioned South Dakota which is at an all-time peak:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/south-dakota-cor...

Compare with, say, New York which is roughly 20 times larger even before you account for density differences:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/new-york-coronav...

A common cause of error here are people looking at the all-time cumulative stats rather than the last week or two and missing that while, say, NYC was hit early with quick community spread in a dense environment and thus had a brutal spring but the increased lockdown have kept levels low since then.

>without enough customers to be profitable

I encourage you to visit one of the no-lockdown states like Florida or South Dakota sometime and see how much of a complete falsehood this is.

Unfortunately, that’s not how a disease with a likely limited duration of immunity works. Also, the knock on effects of uncontrolled spread over the winter will almost guarantee that next year won’t be normal across many domains.