> If you can't, then perhaps it might be a good idea to reconsider advocating for reopening the economy.
Can you prove that coronavirus didn't give me protection from some other more severe illness a la cowpox and smallpox?
No?
We can both come up with creative scenarios.
We are severely impacting the quality of life of hundreds of millions of people. We should have a reason to do so grounded in fact and educated guesses.
What reason do we have to suspect your scenario? What are the odds that it will occur? What are the odds it's going to be severe? What's the anticipated quality of life impact and with what confidence intervals?
Also: even if it did create this situation, and we know it for sure, what can we do about it?
We don't have a vaccine. We don't have effective treatments. Those are potentially years away, if they ever materialize at all.
How long, and how severe, should a lockdown be to prevent a hypothetical scenario? What are the impacts of a quarantine that's long enough to guarantee a vaccine with, say, 90% confidence?
The major reason for suspecting long-term consequences were initially extrapolations from SARS and other related diseases. This was speculation. This was confirmed with chest x-rays in China: long-term lung scarring. People wrote this off, since it came from China. This was recently re-confirmed in Europe. Young people come off of COVID19 with reduced lung capacity.
What we should be doing is mitigating damage to those hundreds of millions of people. That's a lot easier to do than just about anything else in this equation.
The main reason why we are severely impacting the quality of life for millions of people is because our government is not willing to act to either provide some sort of basic income, supplies or guarantee survival for small businesses.
As I've mentioned in other posts here, we're remarkably lucky that COVID-19 isn't something currently far more threatening. Considering attitudes such as yours would easily lead to mass extinction as we strive to save an imaginary economy rather than the people.
As for how long and how severe a lockdown should be, I leave that up to the medical community. You and I are not part of that community and are not nearly educated to make that decision for them, so trying to argue that the economy must be opened up now is an argument made from ignorance.
The economy is not some magic genie that will give us what we want if we ask nicely. It is simply impossible to leave major sectors shut down for months. Most members of the medical community lack the necessary understanding of economics to make informed, rational trade-offs on this issue.
Can you prove that coronavirus didn't give me protection from some other more severe illness a la cowpox and smallpox?
No?
We can both come up with creative scenarios.
We are severely impacting the quality of life of hundreds of millions of people. We should have a reason to do so grounded in fact and educated guesses.
What reason do we have to suspect your scenario? What are the odds that it will occur? What are the odds it's going to be severe? What's the anticipated quality of life impact and with what confidence intervals?
Also: even if it did create this situation, and we know it for sure, what can we do about it?
We don't have a vaccine. We don't have effective treatments. Those are potentially years away, if they ever materialize at all.
How long, and how severe, should a lockdown be to prevent a hypothetical scenario? What are the impacts of a quarantine that's long enough to guarantee a vaccine with, say, 90% confidence?