| > a temporary closure to “flatten the curve”. I had flashbacks to 2020. Realistically, covid is here for the forseeable future. It's a fast-mutating pathogen (which I understand is typical of respiratory infections) and since about half of humans worldwide are vaccinated and half aren't, in a perfect environment to evolve resistance to vaccines (and the immune systems defences generally). If covid were a worse infection, this would be really serious. But it isn't. It rarely kills people without pre-existing conditions (the biggest of which is old age). It's also getting less virulent: e.g. in the UK omicron has led to a big increase in infections, but not in deaths[1]. Scott Alexander calculated that it takes 52 person-months of lockdown to save one person-month of life[2]. This suggests to me that if lockdowns reduce quality of life by at least 2%, they are QALY-negative. My conclusion from all this is that I don't think lockdowns should be compulsory. If people think the threat to themselves or family members is severe, by all means they can lockdown; but expecting everyone else to is wrong as lockdowns reduce overall utility. Regarding schools, in this as in a lot of things vouchers would be a good system, then people who don't like how their state schools are run can walk away and take their kid's education money with them. 1: see https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/ 2: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness... |
But.. things have evolved since then. We have entire WFH movement ( and I am saying this as its proponent ) banking on its staying power ( and most of the old school management hates it ) and we have political people eyeing the power and money that could be tapped just by scaring people.
It is weird. It feels like a lifetime ago that I typed on this very forum something along the lines of:
'we're in this together thing lasted whole two weeks'
We are way past that and it shows.