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At this point any "expert" should be able to show somewhat accurate predictions that they made in February, March, or April. Otherwise their opinion is just a best guess.
Hospital administration has a pretty good idea on the capacity of their ICUs. And it shouldn't take an expert to look around an ICU with 4 empty beds and suspect they might be overwhelmed if more cases come in.
SF Bay Area has been flat for months, and everybody knows that. Yet we keep hearing about NYC, as if they represent the globe.
what? NYC has been dropping significantly, with a positivity rate of under 2%. Texas is at 10%. Nobody's freaking out about NYC right now.
Agreed. The final total number of deaths projected back in April [1] is about half of current deaths. It stands to reason that the problem is significantly worse than what our top epidemiologists expected and should be addressed accordingly.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/04/09/830664814/fauci-says-u-s-coro...

What if people took their advice so that their accurate prediction never came to pass?
As far as I'm concerned, if quarantine is the "answer" then the cure is worse than the disease.

In fact, I'd take this as evidence that quarantine might have been a mistake.

Masks give you a significant portion of the benefit of quarantining, with virtually none of the economic cost. And yet we have protests happening against wearing masks all across the south. That's the hill people have (literally) decided to die on.
The media and many others decided it was more important to focus on the fact that the president is choosing not to wear a mask rather than on the health benefits of wearing a mask.

It was a stupid thing to do on both sides, but now it's political and there's no going back.

> That's the hill people have (literally) decided to die on.

Only about half of a percent of them.

Only if you took this information on its own. Compare it to every other first world country that has implemented proper quarantine.

And also realise that what you're saying is that you advocate for a modeled 2 million deaths.

>And also realise that what you're saying is that you advocate for a modeled 2 million deaths.

So far as I know, there's no evidence that now that quarantine is over the same number of people aren't going to get it anyways and the deaths will be equal.

Quarantine should have been managed at the federal level. Instead we have seen 50 states each acting like their own country despite their codependence with, a paralyzed, executive and legislative branches. Had the us acted in January this would have blown over with few deaths. These lost lives now should weigh on the minds of our elected officials who resisted quarantine, who used this crisis for personal gain, who diminished the severity, etc.

Quarantine may be over in some places but strong restrictions are still exist in many. Which is more evidence for why pandemic response should have a top down coordination team.

Deaths may equal out to worst case predictions, in which case all of America failed.

it's not "get it anyways", they're going to get it because the quarantine is over.

Early lifting of the lockdown combined with things like people unwilling to wear masks and social distance themselves is going to render the benefits of the lockdown useless. America wasted the quarantine. The last few months have been rendered meaningless. That's not the case in other first world countries.

Yes, it is tricky to get evidence of future events that may or may not happen depending on the collective actions people take.

Which is why we build models.

There is no such thing as people who are "going to get it anyways."
Chilling at home is worse strangling to death on your own blood? My friend you may need to do some work on your home life.
Damaging the economy to the tune of 2 trillion in bailouts, the cost of the war in Iraq, just to have the exact same number of deaths delayed by 4 months is inexcusable.

And you should be ashamed of your self-righteous and dishonest argument style.

The delay in deaths is due to the impotent response by many elected leaders, and the propaganda they've used to support their asinine decisions.

The cost is due to officials using a crisis to benefit themselves. Only people should be bailed out. Let the free market take care of companies that have leveraged themselves off the cliff.

Except it's not the same number of deaths? And as another poster noted, immunity might be shortly conferred. In which case when will we learn that managing this virus is a good idea? The third wave? Fourth? Maybe the fifth? And it's ironic that you chastise the poster for his self-righteous argumentative style when your post history indicates you seem to do the same.
2 trillion dolllars is worth far less than even a single human life
Why do you struggle with staying home so much? What exactly are you missing? You can socialise at home, and maintain distance easily. You can still do outdoor activities. It's basically concerts, sporting events, restaurants and bars? Are these really that important to you? Americans live on average in the largest homes in the world, so there should be no real problem with this.

These things are NOT the entire economy, and large parts of the economy will continue with people avoiding these types of enviornments.

Just chill at home while food and money magically appear on the doorstep
Quarantine is where you restrict the movement of sick people.

Tyranny is where you restrict the movement of healthy ones.

Quarantine has always been a precautionary measure, applied to both sick and healthy people. The point is that you don't know who falls into which category.

The origin of the word is quarantena, Venetian for "40 days", the period of time a ship suspected of carrying disease had to wait outside the harbor.

No. Quarantine is where you restrict the movement of people who may be carriers for infectious diseases. Because spreading infectious diseases makes healthy people sick. You do realize that healthy people can get sick..right? Like...you know that some people who are sick were healthy prior to that? You realize that closing a door to a room doesn’t make the room disappear..right?
In a way, I can sympathize with this viewpoint. However, (and this may very well not apply to you) what shocks me is how often it comes packaged with a resistance to wearing masks, washing hands, social distancing or otherwise doing anything to acknowledge the dangerous situation that we're all now living in. It seems like we should be able to get a lot more mileage out of those simple behaviors that stop short of a full lockdown.
This viewpoint is rather funny, because it looks like soon countries will start barring US travelers due to our own reckless abandon.

Do you take into consideration how our reaction to the disease might affect us on a more global scale? Because I wonder if people who had the same thought about banning all travel to/from China will have the same consistent viewpoint when it becomes banning all travelers from the US.

I don't agree with the "cure is worse than the disease".

Have a look at this - https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/coronavirus...

Suppose that we quarantine people for longer while a vaccine is found, and suppose this vaccine is fairly effective. Presently there are 120,000 deaths. Who knows what this number will rise to. This number is already with some quarantine measurements in place.

If a vaccine is not found, you're bound to have a catastrophe on your hands. So let's hope that one is found so that we can resume things in some "normal" way again.

Whether or not you quarantined, the economy would collapse because you would have a massive death toll and paranoia throughout the country. People would stop going out, they would stop spending money and they would hunker down regardless. Economic turmoil is a positive feedback loop. The coronavirus or the quarantine are just the triggers for it to begin. This cannot be overstated.

At least with a vaccine, you can get out of this by the skin of your teeth and reduce the over all deaths. So no, I don't think that quarantining to save lives is the "cure is worse than the disease" scenario. The economy would have collapsed regardless.

> Whether or not you quarantined, the economy would collapse because you would have a massive death toll and paranoia throughout the country.

Citation needed. Plenty of economies have dealt with mass death and gotten along fine. This particular threat is also largely centered on the elderly who are, in coldly economic viewpoints, drains on the economy rather than contributors.

I don't particularly think the quarantine was a mistake, but you have to acknowledge that it is a gamble. Betting policy on a miracle vaccine is a bad idea. They might not work, or they might be short lived. Turning the economy on and off with lifted and then reinstated lockdowns is a bad idea.

According to that article, those vaccines are on track for next year, which I believe is a year too late.

>> Whether or not you quarantined, the economy would collapse because you would have a massive death toll and paranoia throughout the country.

Lol, what? 1/3rd of the covid deaths have been nursing-home patients. Covid basically doubles your odds of dying in a given year. So it'd be like 2 years worth of people died in 1 year (and importantly, mostly retired people), so no, not a societal collapse.

As I've said for months, the sooner we get to herd immunity, the better.

The US literally can't do testing and tracing to save their own lives. Yet people still pretend otherwise, like the tulip or bitcoin manias.

If we need 70% of the US population to get infected to reach herd immunity, and COVID has an infection fatality rate of .05%; this will kill about 1.2 Million people.

I, for one, am hopeful that we can get through this without that many deaths.

Recent studies have shown that covid antibodies disappear very quickly in a fairly high percentage of positive cases.

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/studies-report-ra...

[correction .05% -> .5% deleted]
> Yet people still pretend otherwise, like the tulip or bitcoin manias.

America's lack of testing is like Bitcoin? What an amusing and irrelevant example.

What evidence do we have that infection confers immunity?
How do you recover from a virus if not by becoming immune to it? Immune here in the sense of being able to fight it, not in the sense of being unaffected (the letter will clearly not happen, nor does it need to).
I do not want to contract the virus at all if I can help it, herd immunity be damned.
That's not an option in the US.

Even if there was a vaccine tomorrow, there's a lot of anti-vaxers in this country.

We need to protect high-risk people, while waiting for the rest of us to reach herd immunity. Anyone with even a suspected risk factor should get help to be able to hide out for the next year.

Instead, we have the opposite: everyone goes into lockdown, the nursing homes are ravaged, and there is no additional support for high risk people. The many high-risk people I know personally (diabetics, older people, people with lung conditions, heart conditions) will get asked to go back to work in the next couple of weeks, and none had any help isolating or buying groceries, and were barely able to isolate at all during the last few months.

I could lose a lot of friends and family over the next year because they have almost zero support, but thank goodness all the healthy people couldn't go to restaurants for 2-3 months.

Unpopular opinion, so downvote away. Nevermind that 96% of hospitalizations in new york were with patients with preexisting conditions that put them at higher risk, it goes against the trending opinion

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/health/coronavirus-patien...

The point of locking down everyone is to slow down the spread of the virus through the entire population, which protects the high-risk people from accidental exposure, until a vaccine can be developed and deployed. That way we get herd immunity without killing the percentage of people who can't survive a full infection, but will be just fine with a vaccination.

Having healthy people isolated is not about protecting the healthy people. It's about stopping the healthy people from spreading the disease to the high-risk people.

It has done very little to protect the high risk people I know, who are all going back to work soon, and nothing for any high risk people who worked in an essential service. I know of an 60ish year old person who was sent back to work at his meat packing plant less than 14 days after testing positive for covid because his life apparently didn't matter. If any of them had quit, they would have lost eligibility for any government support and ended up homeless
I am healthy and in a low-risk group for complications from Covid-19. Nevertheless I do not want to contract it. I don't care about herd immunity - give me a vaccine ASAP. Until then I'm wearing a mask and social distancing as much as possible.