If every bar and restaurant within 10 miles of me were 100% open for sit-down dining, I'd have eaten in exactly zero of them for the last 6 months, down from probably 50 or more visits plus 20 bar visits in the same period in 2019.

Zero government influence in the above paragraph.

That's a poor anecdotal take on the point. What matters is that if the government makes it impossible, the possibility for everyone is zero, while it would be between 0 and maybe 50% without lockdowns. That's the difference between a business surviving and not.

More-or-less what happened here in Sweden, no lockdowns during the first wave, still most people wouldn't dare going out for eating and drinking. It eased up a little during summer with number of cases falling, after it picked up again in September there was a noticeable drop again without government intervention.

Then in November it was visible that without intervention cases would start to pile up and service business were still suffering due to low patronage, there is no way out of this and government intervention vs no intervention isn't the root cause of the downfall for the service industry, it's pretty clear.

> It would be more honest if predictions like this were mentioned alongside articles in the press that claim lockdowns are the only option we have.

What are the other options? For all of humanity's advancements, quarantine-like behavior is our best bet against novel diseases.

In fact, many governments only implemented half-assed "soft" lockdowns. They should have acted immediately and decisively. Lockdown early and hard, at the very first signs that this thing was becoming a pandemic. And don't let go until it's under control.

Instead, we got this lame lockdown-but-not-quite (places of worship open, are you serious?), no mask mandate, nothing. And as soon as things start to look better, reopen. Oops, bad again, close. And now are are only prolonging the suffering.

Developing countries are once again in a bad shape, but richer countries should know better. Treat this as a war, support your citizens. Even though large companies like airlines are important, most of the focus should have been towards small businesses and individuals. Also on PPE at the very beginning.

There is enough money in the developed world to help with the problem. Make some fewer F-35 (at 200M a pop) if need be. That's a lot of food and rent money.

The coronavirus is not entirely novel. Researchers report people who had a case of SARS-CoV-1 have t-cells that recognize SARS-CoV-2.

By the time the COVID-19 was recognized as a distinct virus, it was already too late to do anything about it, except to start distributing Vitamin D and other useful nutrient to the vulnerable.

> There is enough money in the developed world to help with the problem

Money is a useful fiction, nothing more. Money allows people to trade their time. Telling large numbers of people they can’t do anything with their time destroys exponentially more wealth than it protects.

That's not true though. Even if the government does nothing you still have people altering their behavior out of fear. More online shopping, working from home, less traveling, activities outside the home. Looking at Sweden where they didn't lock down, I would say that seems a very large part of the change in economic activity.

And because the virus tends to get more out of control, this change is magnified compared to when the government takes action. Is it really better for the economy over the long term to lockdown or not? I don't think we know the answer one way or the other.

To take the extreme example. China was the epicenter of the pandemic, took the strongest government action and snuffed it out. Now our economy suffers while theirs does much better. Maybe our problem is we couldn't be as extreme as them, we don't have a hope of eliminating it in our countries in the West through lockdowns.

There’s so many assumptions and ignored aspects in this discussion. Whether it be the effectiveness of mitigation strategies, respect for individual rights, costs of lost years of education for 10s of millions of kids and how that affects their lives, cost to business that are destroyed forever more, health consequences due to shuttering inside, mental health consequences, the list goes on...

We’re told all of this is in our best interest by rich people who will not suffer much cost if any - most politicians may come out ahead financially.

Reactions by people are sufficient. It’s unclear how many people are basing their decisions solely on what the governments allow at this point.

I've seen anecdotal claims that attendance at restaurants and theaters has been way down even in states or regions that had no restrictions. Would be interesting to see some actual data for this.