Seeing as all these terrible economic outcomes would happen whether or not the virus infected the population, I think this is a pretty solid win and a poor article title.
And similar logic can be applied to many other countries struggling with obesity (latino, south east asians and so on).
Now we put in cardiovascular, lung and immunity issues. Add older people. And suddenly its not 1% but much, much larger group.
> Most of the terrible economic outcomes have been due to the lockdowns not the actual deaths.
First, it's not lockdowns vs deaths. The biggest factor by far in the US was the existence of the virus. https://privwww.ssrn.com/abstract=3631180
"While overall consumer traffic fell by 60 percentage points, legal restrictions explain only 7 percentage points of this. Individual choices were far more important"
But you don't need a fancy study. States that didn't have lockdowns saw similar economic declines to other states, even though they should have experienced a boom on the border as people traveled in to do business if it was the lockdown.
Second, deaths are not the only cost. People get sick, too, and it's a pretty big deal for many of them even if you don't see it on TV. It's possible they'll have permanent organ damage and shorter lives. Those people call in sick, or worse, they go to work and get others sick.
Third, if you let it get out of control, you overwhelm the hospital system. It's hard to see how that helps.
It's clear to me that people use this argument as a virtual escape hatch from any critical argument about the response to coronavirus.
We don't really even have a specific number of how many people were infected - never mind the number of people with long-term effects. We don't even really know the long-term effects (and descriptions are relatively vague). It's probable that the prevalence and severity of those effects are overstated.
Given the evidence so far, it seems reasonable to assume the overwhelming majority of healthy people are not at risk from the virus. And appealing to things we don't know and assuming the worst-case isn't realistic - it's a convenient way to justify medieval mitigation methods that decimate the economy and violate civil liberties, while casting any objectors as misanthropes.
Also, seems like every state will have their own variant with varying effectiveness (and possibly some bad side effects), I don't see things very rosy for next few years.
It will be probably good enough situation eventually, but I presume it will just become one of those ever-present, potentially deadly things that you can get when traveling to exotic places like malaria or chikungunya.
But this time, you can also get it in your grocery shop/kindergarten/work.
The thing is, if everybody really followed all the rules, the virus would die on its own due to R being close to 0. But that's pure fantasy when I look outside, always somebody not wearing mask properly (ie under the nose), skipping wearing it with pretense of drinking.
The general suspicion amongst experts seems to be that the current wave of vaccine candidates are probably not going to be effective enough to allow ending the control measures that have been put in place.
Countries that don't go for elimination might just have to be permanently locked out from countries that manage to eliminate it.