| HN Mirror

I don't disagree that there will be long term effects from the lockdown that we can't conceptualize or measure quite yet.

But the choice presented is basically between a relatively known effect (killing more people, especially those that skew older) and an unknown effect (mental health + economic + other impacts we don't understand as a result of lockdown measures).

People are losing mothers, fathers, grandparents, etc. that had plenty years of productive, happy life left. Families have been destroyed by this thing. There are major mental and economic impacts to killing more people.

Furthermore, this is a _new_ disease in humans and we're already seeing signs that it can may have serious long term health effects on people that survive it, including younger people. Any estimation of the net impact on society the virus cannot simply be a function of the number of people that are dead and at what age they died.

The _only_ reasonable line of thinking I can imagine to support not implementing lockdown policies at all is the hypothesis that most of the spread of the virus occurs via social interactions that are unaffected by the not-so-strict lockdown policies - by friends visiting each other in small, intimate settings unaffected by the not-so-strict lockdown measures, which would then only serve to cause economic turmoil without actual benefit. And I do think that this is something worth looking into [0]

But then when I see the instances of super-spreader events such as the one that occurred in that South Korean church or the Sturgis motorcycle rally (which, if lockdown policy were implemented at the federal level, would probably not have happened), it becomes really hard for me to think that, at the very least, preventing large gatherings of people is a bad idea.. including shutting down restaurants, where people are likely to take masks off to eat and talk.

[0] I found one datapoint here: https://static.dw.com/image/55445964_7.png And the big light blue lines on top would describe the method of infection I was referring to. But this is data we received from a country that instituted lockdown measures - we don't know how the numbers would skew if nothing was done at all. So we would need to find a similar country with similar demographics and behaviors that implemented none at all in order to truly understand these numbers.