> Lockdowns are still justified under those numbers.
And what if the effects of an extended lockdown is a tanked ecomony with a 3x increase in suicides for the next decade? Is it still justified? Lockdowns are only justified if the only variable you are optimizing for is "number of covid-19 deaths". Yet there are hundreds of other variables that we are ignoring in our quest to minimize that one variable. Impossible to tell now, but tanking the economy to flatten the curve may end up indirectly killing even more people in the long run.
Fair point. In some sense, I share your feelings a bit (in a lighter sense). The park closings some Bay Area counties are doing (e.g. San Mateo) feel not justified; I'm also not sure why the SIP was extended all the way into May given the existing downward trajectory. [Looking at both Seattle and Iceland, you don't need full-on SIP to keep R at 1]
And what if the effects of an extended lockdown is a tanked ecomony with a 3x increase in suicides for the next decade? Is it still justified? Lockdowns are only justified if the only variable you are optimizing for is "number of covid-19 deaths". Yet there are hundreds of other variables that we are ignoring in our quest to minimize that one variable. Impossible to tell now, but tanking the economy to flatten the curve may end up indirectly killing even more people in the long run.