[marineset]

2. Do hyperrestrictive regimens perform significantly better than open regimens in the long run? What is the justification for the immense economic and human costs of hyperrestrictions?

3. The math is wrong. 0.001% of 40M is 400. Which could have been people with serious comorbidities that would have fallen prey to flu or other respiratory viruses.

4. By now, everyone that wanted to is vaccinated. Which reduces the cost of severe covid by another order of magnitude.

[geraldyo]

2. How would we possibly know? The fact is in the short term, open measures are not working. Can you expand on the immense economic and human costs? Are you accounting for the economic and human impact from the millions of deaths from failed open measures? I agree there is a cost, my view is that the deaths also carry a great cost to those close to the dead, which extend the economic and human costs from the deaths themselves.

3. I noticed that, couldn't figure out how to edit, it may not be possible? But yes, I'm aware it's just this subgroup, I just still think it's very careless to brush them off. Yes, statistics, etc... But there is a human element being lost, imo.

4. I agree, sadly. At this point it seems people agreed that COVID is inevitable. But that made me think of another point these articles/advocates for open measures often gloss over: what are the LONG term effects of COVID? Is it even possible to know?

5. Yet another: what about new variants? Open measures = more people get COVID = more likely to have new variants, obviously not as linearly, but you see my point, I hope.

In any case, I'm not saying there aren't awful costs for strict measures, but the devastation brought from COVID is something I hope does not come to anyone's family/friends. And even more so about this article, just feels like a lot of complaining about wearing a mask, being in a room alone, learning over zoom, all things that are fairly inconsequential

[marineset]

Economic costs. For example, the US deficit in 2020 and 2021 is 3T dollars each, compared with .5T - 1T of previous years. This will weigh on generations to come. We are on the brink of completely wrecking the US economy and the US dollar.

Human costs. Spike in suicides, spike in drug overdoses, spike in crime, people disconnected from family and friends, spike in people abandoning their jobs, a generation of kids lost a year of school, mass delayed medical procedures, mass missed childhood vaccinations. Does any of this matter?

Some places (Austria, Canada, France, Germany, NY, CA) are openly forcing complete isolation from society of unvaccinated people (no work, no trade, no travel). The unvaccinated population is not negligible, 10-25%. This is on the level of crimes against humanity, surpassing even WW2 casualty lists. Is this a cost we should consider, or we'll simply dispense of 10-25% of the population with no second thoughts?

The cold reality is that we simply do not have the technology to stop the virus. We are using sand bags to fight a tsunami. Perhaps we can delay it for some time in a few select areas, but the wave is going to raise either way.