Are deaths the only thing that matters to you? Shouldn't we be just as concerned about hospitalizations? Is there any reason that you're aware of for cases to not be a good proxy for hospitalizations?
When you say "observed drop in deaths" are you referring back to the original article? Because the first sentence is "Two new peer-reviewed studies are showing a sharp drop in mortality among hospitalized COVID-19 patients." so I'm having trouble making sense of what you're saying.
This is nonsense. Are you suggesting that if this illness had all the same characteristics -- long hospital stays, long-lasting damage to the body, highly transmissible -- but didn't kill, then we would not be "shutdown"?
Wrong hill to die on, bud. 60M people got infected with Swine Flu, and nobody even thought of shutting anything down. Why? Because it was about as deadly as regular flu. So yes, deaths are the right metric to track.
Completely irrelevant. There were an estimated 274k hospitalizations from swine flu, over the course of that year. So swine flu did not have the characteristics I specified.
A case only really matters to clinical medicine if there’s some type of symptom.
Of course it benefits the “concerned” side to couch their argument in the idea of some murky, unobservable effects.