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Comment by unethical_ban | Hacker News Reader

Lockdowns make sense if emergency rooms cannot keep up with the emergency rate. Other than that*, we'll see a lot of people going back to WFH on a temp basis and lots of masks and hand sanitizer.

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Yeah, this is why lockdowns were started. The ER was full of sick people and, if you were in a car wreck or had a heart attack, you would likely die from lack of beds. Go back and look and the ER/ICU/All-Bed occupancy rates were >95% over most of the country for months.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8852235/

This is what it looked like in Dec 2020: https://www.statista.com/chart/23746/icu-bed-occupancy-rates...

Why does a private hospital's ER capacity dictate my ability to freely move about?

Because you live in a society.

Because the goal was really to close businesses rather than forcing service/retail workers to serve as a Petri dish. Politicians/bureaucrats are intrinsically authoritarian and often overshoot with simplistic heavy handed responses. Then a political movement formed around acting like idiots out of spite, cementing the opposing positions.

I was in a blue state that issued a strongly worded stay at home recommendation, but no "lockdown" with legal force. It worked great, owing in part to still having some sense of social cohesion. When your society can't get through novel disruptions with leadership informally keeping most everybody on the same page, that's what you should be worried about.

Just a bit of a SWAG (Scientific, Wild-Ass Guess) here but it looks like this is probably not you. [0]

[0] https://www.dallasnews.com/arts-entertainment/state-fair/202...

In my jurisdiction occupancy rates peaked in 2022.

> The preparedness paradox is the proposition that if a society or individual acts effectively to mitigate a potential disaster such as a pandemic, natural disaster or other catastrophe so that it causes less harm, the avoided danger will be perceived as having been much less serious because of the limited damage actually caused.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox

95% is not as scary as it sounds. it's currently like 80% and without COVID it peaks to 85% all the time:

https://www.cdc.gov/respiratory-viruses/data-research/dashbo...

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