A case for ending lockdown

I had it. Its o way similar to the flu.

> Weeks and months later, facts on the ground show that the purported collapse of the healthcare system did not occur.

Yes, because we locked down population centers quickly. That's the whole point. ICUs have still been over capacity though. Without the lockdowns, it's obvious we'd have a lot more dead people the past month.

> Moreover, this was not due to success in seriously curtailing the spread in hard-hit areas like New York, but was rather due to the aforementioned discovery that COVID-19, while extremely deadly in certain subsets of the population, was not nearly as deadly overall as previously thought.

This is a lie followed by possible truth. New York and other cities were under pretty extreme lockdowns (all non-essential businesses closed, social distancing, but most people have been staying inside) for the past two months. If one asserts that had no or little effect, well... HN doesn't take kindly to what I'd like to say. Let's just say that you're delusional.

> An analysis of the flawed IMHE model is outside the scope of this article

Ah, how convenient - lying about the effect of the lockdowns and attributing it instead to (nothing? since ICUs have clearly been over capacity while we've cut down transmission rates) then ignoring analysis of them.

I didn't really dive into the rest of the article since I don't really like reading words written by intellectually dishonest people.

As an addition, not all the measures were correct to "fight" the pandemic in Northern Italy, where I am located. Glaring errors were made in putting patients within nursing homes, with "guarantees" of separation. Well, these guarantees did not hold, and death counts flared up there. To be fair, this also happened in all nursing homes in the country.

Also some regions were more efficient than others, some even started implementing contact tracing in absence of a position from the government (still not clear as of today).

I believe that a more directed lockdown (or avoiding errors like in Alzano Lombardo, near Bergamo, where basically a hospital turned into an "infection center") would've worked miles better than the current situation, where regions with almost no new infections are locked up as much as those with significant counts.

If I bought the assumption that getting COVID19 was relatively safe for me, I'd gladly swap jobs to keep someone else safe, especially if it meant moving up in the world. An at-risk individual could do my job, and I'd take their in-person job.

While I think there are better mechanisms, free markets could take care of swapping people around. If you're self-quarantining, and you have a better job than I do, I'll take your job. My job is now vacant for you. That's far from ideal -- you've just taken a pay cut -- but it's far better than mass unemployment.

What we'd need from there would be much cheaper than the successive stimuli (e.g. support for at-risk low-income individuals: like a stimulus check, bigger, but only to people who need it).

Now, to be willing to do this, I'd need to believe COVID19 is relatively safe for me (e.g. <1% odds of death _or significant long-term complications_). That's an assumption I don't buy. By looking at IFR/CFR numbers, we've ignored the much bigger question: how many people end up with permanent lung damage or other organ damage. Until we have a clear answer, I'm in lock-down mode unless I'm forced out.