> Chances are, some region will decide against doing that, and their outcome will provide a clear incentive for everyone else to be more rigorous about it.

I used to have a poster along these lines in my office. https://despair.com/products/mistakes

That's happening right now with Sweden and it's sure to be a pretty interesting case study. Their health system hasn't yet been overwhelmed, but they've had a lot of cases (and a lot of deaths), especially on a per capita basis for a smaller country:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/15/sweden-coronav...

Of course, some right-wing media outlets have still been touting this as a success and a model for a less economically-damaging approach— this article is from nine days ago, but it's not hard to find other similar ones:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-response-...

It's probably much too early to say one way or another, but I guess there is some value in having multiple approaches be tried. Particularly in a world where guys like Glenn Beck have gone on record saying they'd "rather die than kill the country."

Yeah no this is not happening, the young people will revolt before that. You can suspend civil liberties for a few months, that's fine, but not intermittently over several years. No way that governments in western countries will get away with that. I expect this to be an event that will remove most baby-boomers from power and bring in the millennial generation, they expect us to support ~5 old people through most of our productive life and now they created or are about to create debt that we will have to pay off for the rest of our lives. A lot of it is to prop up pension schemes and assets which are primarily owned by old people and projected to have collapsed by the time a 30 year old will retire.

I'm starting to doubt this.

What about Sweden vs Norway -- sure, the data is 4X worse for Sweden, but we are only talking thousands of infections and hundreds of deaths. Maybe this can't scale to bigger countries though.

> Every time the death rate spikes, we'll have to lock down again.

this will likely cause more business failures than a prolonged shut down. Starting up and shutting down a business is not free. There are legal costs and you need to source materials for operations. In the case of restaurants in particular, there will be loss due to spoilage