| SvennoJ said: It's not so much what's right or wrong, it's the going back and forth and half measures that costs more lives in the end. Quick strict lock down (new Zealand, South Korea), quick to re-open. No lock down (Brazil maybe), economy fine?, bunch of people dead and some maimed. Soft lock down, some people die now + recession that only gets worse the softer the lock down. So if you want to optimize saving lives, there has to be cooperation. Protests don't help, only make things worse. There's only 2 viable strategies to optimize saving lives, act fast and decisively, or don't act at all. Not something our Western freedom is capable of handling very well. However I don't think not acting ever was a viable option. It would not save more lives in the long run. It would not spare those waiting for a transplant or depending on long term medical care as not acting would have collapsed the health care system. The disease would still severely disrupt the economy, panic would take hold when the deaths keep piling up and people would stay home out of fear anyway. The best simulated mitigation strategies still ended in disaster. The hard part now is, how to restart the economy without failing and having to undo the current progress again. People need to keep avoiding non essential traffic and keep observing social distancing rules. The biggest test is yet to come, when flu season starts again. |
It's a worldwide problem though, and was almost certainly going to be that, one way or another. So expecting a reasonable amount of cooperation worldwide would actually be an unreasonable assumption. If more was known about the illness, then perhaps, but based on the scenario, cooperation was highly unlikely.
All we know is what we know so far, which doesn't tell the full story. Will we ever get the full truth about everything anyway? How can we be so sure if we don't have extremely reliable numbers coming from open sources?
Both extremes weren't a good option. Not doing anything, or locking things down like they have been in some places, were too much. Somewhere in the middle would likely be best.
Some think the protests are stupid because it's just making the lock down last longer, but who really thinks that's going to stop them? It's not as simple as sit down and shut up and do as we say. Everyone needs to find a reasonable balance, which is easier said than done. The smart thing would be to have as little restrictions as possible, while containing the spread as much as possible. If you've gone so far that the people don't care and will spread it through protests, then you need to adjust to find a new balance point. The world is not static.
This is part of the future problem. The economy won't be going back to normal quickly, and the more time this drags on, the more non Covid 19 related deaths it will lead to eventually. Another flu season, and the possibility of Covid returning with a vengeance, would through more lock downs and further economic decline, lead to more and more non Covid 19 related deaths.
Whether we are doing the right thing overall can't be known for certain, as we can't know the future. I would actually say the lack of cooperation could be looked at as a positive. Odds are if everyone did the same thing, we wouldn't have chosen the optimum strategy. By many nations taking different approaches, we should have a better idea of which strategy works best. Which would hopefully lead to more lives saved in the future because of it, the next time we have to deal with something like this again.
Last edited by EricHiggin - on 28 April 2020
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