Most of his workers were in an age group at negligible risk from covid; they'd be more likely to die in a road accident driving home.

How many of those workers have friends and/or relatives who are part of a vulnerable demographic?

Nobody's forcing them to associate with vulnerable friends or relatives. And it's not like they don't have a choice; tech workers aren't exactly poor.

What do tech workers have to do with a car factory?

Workers at a Tesla factory are high-skilled and highly paid, it's not some third-world sweatshop.

OR driving to the funerals of their parents, grandparents, friends, neighbors, and other loved ones and acquaintances who they infected with COVID-19.

Wow, people here really hate statistics. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-020-00698-1... ; if you're aged under 34 (as are the majority of tech workers), in the USA you're almost ten times more likely to die from "other acccidental fatalities" (0.0032) than covid if you catch it (0.004). Note that to assess risk the covid IFR there should be multiplied by the chance of catching it, to make it more comparable with the other columns, so if the chance of catching covid is less than 50%, then overall you're also more likely to die in a traffic accident.

You are making a strong point for further lockdowns.

Traffic accidents decrease, other accidental fatalities decreases, the number of people who catch covid decrease in a lockdown.

>Traffic accidents decrease, other accidental fatalities decreases, the number of people who catch covid decrease in a lockdown.

What's the point of being alive if you can't live life? Fine if you choose that for yourself, but you're a monster if you'd dare to assume you have the right to confine everybody else to such a miserable existence.

Marx has a great quote along those lines:

"The human body is mortal by nature. Hence illnesses are inevitable. Why does a man only go to the doctor when he is ill, and not when he is well? Because not only the illness, but even the doctor is an evil. Under constant medical tutelage, life would be regarded as an evil and the human body as an object for treatment by medical institutions. Is not death more desirable than life that is a mere preventive measure against death? Does not life involve also free movement? What is any illness except life that is hampered in its freedom? A perpetual physician would be an illness in which one would not even have the prospect of dying, but only of living. Let life die; death must not live. Has not the spirit more right than the body?"

It's a good thing not everyone has such disregard and lack of empathy for their fellow humans. I'm guessing you're Libertarian, not Communist, right?

It's good that not everybody has such flagrant disregard for human rights; I'm guessing you're a Democrat?

The risk of Covid has never been the individualized risk. It's the collective risk of what happens when hospitals and ICUs reach capacity when too many people catch Covid at once. For example, what is happening in India.

This was widely known in the US on the first week of March in 2020.

When hospitals reach capacity, people in their 40s and 50s become much more likely to die from Covid. Lots of preventable loss of life is going to occur, from Covid and from everything else that can't be attended to because the hospitals are full.

The point of lockdowns is not to reduce the individual risk. It's to reduce the collective risk of getting hit by a runaway train that completely overwhelms our health systems.

>For example, what is happening in India.

What is happening in India? The death rate per capita there is still way less than in the US or UK. How come the death rate in Florida is less than that in California and New York, in spite of no lockdowns and an older population in Florida?

There's no statistical evidence that countries with stricter lockdowns had a lower death rate than those without.

I think it's well understood that deaths in India are massively underreported.

California and New York both came close to having their health care systems overwhelmed in certain counties, Florida did not. That's exactly my point.

> There's no statistical evidence that countries with stricter lockdowns had a lower death rate than those without.

Honestly, you would expect it to be the other way around. Lockdowns are a last-resort tool to prevent healthcare systems from being overwhelmed. You would expect areas that implement lockdowns to be either denser (thus, hypothetically having less warning time between rising case counts and hospital saturation) or, more likely, to have an existing large scale Covid problem that they need to get under control.

Lockdowns are correlated with bad Covid outcomes because lockdowns are implemented in places that are liable to, or are already having, bad Covid problems.

The signals I'm seeing from India strongly suggest that their death rate is massively under-reported.

http://www.healthdata.org/special-analysis/estimation-excess...

Death rate per capita I think is a misleading way to look at it. If covid wipes half of my say 10 ppl family and half of someone else’s say 4 ppl family, I lose 5 ppl and they lose 2 ppl. Per capita rate is fine for statisticians after the fact. But during the pandemic you can’t tell me we lost same ppl per capita. Obviously I lost much more (hypothetically)