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Notes -
I think an initial plea of "this is looking like it could be a pandemic: please restrict social contact", along with the governmental support to allow people to do so*, would have been a very good idea and would have been sensible in such a case. This is not the same as a government-enforced lockdown, especially one as hamfistedly done as COVID was.
In some ways this is less effective than an outright lockdown; this is far less likely to cause widespread backlash.
Of course, it's now in many ways a moot point. That credibility was burnt; this is close enough that it was caught in the backlash and also wouldn't be feasible now.
[* e.g. government-financed no-questions-asked refunds for travel, decrees that workers must be able to take sick days, vacation, or leave without retaliation for the next X days, that sort of thing. I am overall very much against Big Government, but as long as we're already taking the downsides...]
I think the primary place our calculations here differ is mine includes the time lost in lockdown in the downside. If you lock people up for a hundred man-years to save one person, you haven't actually gained much of anything.
This pushes the tipping point earlier (assuming lockdowns in the first place).
My bigger issue here is that I've heard a growing amount of attempted retroactive changes of the narrative, of the same people who were proclaiming on day 90 that LOCKDOWNS MUST CONTINUE who are now backing off and attempting to say they were saying otherwise on day 90.
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