[nevinera]

The reason he's confused is that he's thinking of isolation in terms of its impact on community transmission rate. That should definitely be part of your personal calculations (evaluating your personal risk without concern for any risk you create for others is sociopathic, if common).

But the truth is that even the most basic measures of isolation would suffice to properly mitigate the community risk if the community would broadly take them, and the most severe personal isolation on my part will not protect the community in any meaningful way if they don't.

Wearing a mask when it's appropriate and avoiding crowded/unsafe spaces is really all we owe our community. Anything further you do should be based on your personal evaluation of risks - I'm more isolated because we have high-risk relatives that we see regularly.

Edit: It's worth noting that this position is specific to the pandemic in question - it's totally plausible that we will get another pandemic later that requires us all to take more stringent isolation measures. And the evidence suggests that we will probably all die.

[InitialLastName]

You don't think that in the next one, people will be more willing to believe that all the freezer trucks full of bodies in the streets actually exist, and that the nurses and doctors all over the world saying "this is really bad" aren't crisis actors? Because I'm inclined to agree we're screwed.