Or ... is it that the restrictions are the thing keeping the hospitals from going over capacity?

You're talking about now, I'm talking about then. We had a ton of extra unused capacity and could have loosened restrictions back then, but didn't. If we had, then maybe people could have handled doing this longer, but we didn't and so people care less and less about following the restrictions.

Ok, so take a look at this data page from Germany, if you mess with the graphs a bit, you'll see new cases drop off around June, in time for summer holidays. Germany chose to reduce restrictions at that time. That's reasonable, right? https://news.google.com/covid19/map?hl=en-IE&mid=%2Fm%2F0345...

So New Zealand was even more successful. By July, they got things well and truly under control: https://news.google.com/covid19/map?hl=en-IE&mid=%2Fm%2F0ctw...

Or take France: https://news.google.com/covid19/map?hl=en-IE&mid=%2Fm%2F0f8l...

All of these are having a bit more trouble with the second wave, Clearly something has changed about the nature of Covid. But you can see them weathering the first wave, and dealing with the second wave. You see how the number of cases drops off to near 0 during summer?

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This is the USA: https://news.google.com/covid19/map?hl=en-IE&gl=IE&ceid=IE%3...

Take care: that Y axis is much larger than the other examples above.

On June 1 2020 there were still 22000 measured new cases on that day alone. Sure that's a slight drop from the 34000 cases on April 9. But that's not really safe to loosen restrictions, now is it?

(Now we do know that that's an aggregate and some individual states have done better. You can drill down to get that information.)

Continuing on from my other reply on country scale, we can actually drill down to Illinois and take a look:

https://news.google.com/covid19/map?hl=en-IE&gl=IE&ceid=IE%3...

You can see that restrictions did have clear effects in first and second wave. By June, restrictions had beaten back the virus almost far enough.

You can also see the effect of strong restrictions at the end of November (up to "Tier 3" by Nov 20) : the number of infections is trending back down.

Looks like Illinois is doing a fair job! Thank goodness those extra beds weren't needed.

You continue to ignore the extra hospital capacity that is my entire point for here, but I'll just add - the cases started dropping Nov 16, days before the new restrictions went into place. If it was the new restrictions having an effect, they shouldn't have started dropping until somewhere around Dec 5.

I think it's safe to assume that they were probably at "Tier 2" prior to Nov 20?

Due to the way that Covid is stealthy, you don't see the effects of policy measures for 14 days or more. It's not very surprising that policy measures would lag behind the curves.

And I don't really see a problem with the extra hospital beds. This particular pandemic is really hard to manage. If someone accidentally prepares more hospital beds than they need, that's perfectly fine by me. That's a much better plan than not having enough.

Unless you think that protecting citizens from harm (foreign or domestic) is not a duty of the government, I guess they're doing as good a job as they can, given the circumstances. It's not pretty, but then again it can't be.

Wait, just to be sure. I just realized ... Would your idea have been to allow the extra hospital capacity to be filled up?

Eh, probably not.

You'd know that some people who are hospitalized also die.

Also; knowing the difficulty of trying to deal with an exponential curve, how would you be sure to cut off at just the right time, before people start dying in the streets?

Ok, no, that can't be it. I don't think people are monsters, so you're unlikely to be one :-) .

> Would your idea have been to allow the extra hospital capacity to be filled up?

Not completely filled, but yes, this is exactly what I've been saying. If we had allowed the extra capacity to get used, instead of getting rid of it, the lockdowns wouldn't have had to be as strict. Less strict lockdowns means less economic problems, which means we could sustain them longer.

Which gets right back to my original point: As it is now, people have ended up with more pressing concerns than the virus and so care less and less about following the lockdowns.

Also another quick aside, back on that original point - "two weeks to slow the spread"? Lockdowns were sold to us specifically on slowing the spread while we increased capacity, to deal with the increase in patients. There was always an understanding that as long as we don't go past that capacity, no extra lives would be saved, they'd just be spread over a longer period. That's why the original slogan was "two weeks" - it was what we needed to build the extra capacity, then we could stop the lockdowns as long as we kept masks/social distancing.

I don't know what you were sold, of course. But surely you agree that deliberately making/letting people get sick is obviously evil.

What could possibly be a more pressing concern than people's health?

Indeed in many countries the original restrictions were lifted or ameliorated after the first wave. However -just looking at the numbers- obviously something went terribly wrong in the United States overall, and authorities were not able to keep their promise.

This sucks terribly. It doesn't magically make it safe to not have restrictions, of course.

> What could possibly be a more pressing concern than people's health?

"Health" is far more encompassing than "don't get the virus". I'm also talking mental health and security (food and shelter), both of which have been badly affected by the lockdowns and lost jobs from the lockdowns.

> obviously something went terribly wrong in the United States overall

There's (at least) two things going on here, neither of which has to do with the response:

* The US is big. Half the country has a different climate than the other half, and all evidence is that SARS-CoV-2 is heavily seasonal. What you're seeing in the country graph is as it recedes in one set of states, it grows in another set. Check out the curves for southern states like Florida, Mississipi, or Arizona - their first wave doesn't start until the summer, after first wave in the northern states like Illinois have already ended. Add them together and you get the consistently high rates for the whole country.

* Too-high-cycle PCR positives without symptoms being counted as a "case". The WHO just changed their recommendations last week because PCR testing has been being misused (as people have complained about since at least last summer) to take into account the false positives and symptoms; if these new recommendations are actually followed, expect the case rate to plummet pretty rapidly (though perhaps not sharply as different states may adopt it at different times).

Ah, and there's the difference between the USA and other countries (like Canada or Germany).

In those countries, those forms of security are already factored into the "Operating System" of society.

That was enlightening. Thanks for taking the time and patience to talk with me! :-)

Additionally, before you ask:

You might argue in this case they could have theoretically backed down restrictions to a lower level, once they saw that the lower level was already having an effect.

But in leadership, it's often good to stay a given course, if it is at all helpful. In this case, it is, You get back down to lower infection numbers faster, thus allowing people more freedoms again sooner.