But you don’t have to shut down the economy to deal with AIDS because it’s sexually transmitted. That’s my point: the vast majority of people have never had to make serious changes to their behavior or lifestyle to avoid contagion before.
That I agree with, but as far as I can tell the degree of measures we're trying to take are unprecedented even in non-living memory. School closures and public gathering bans, sure, but those measures happen pretty frequently during lesser scale outbreaks. If anyone tried to ban social calls during the Spanish Flu, I'm not aware of it.
> as far as I can tell the degree of measures we're trying to take are unprecedented even in non-living memory.
This is exactly my point. Nobody in the west has ever lived through something that has necessitated these kinds of measures. People thought this kind of thing only happened in the movies, Asia, or Africa. That it couldn’t happen to us. And that lack of personal experience is why, in my opinion, our response was probably always going to be slower than it needed to be.
But my concern is, are these kinds of measures actually necessitated? The entire argument for doing them appears to be that China did them; in fact, I'm not sure I've seen anyone make an argument, rather than just silently assuming "extreme social distancing" must mean Wuhan-style authoritarian control. You say "Asia and Africa", but before 2020, is there any precedent at all for controlling a pandemic by mandatory universal lockdown of its healthy citizens?
In other words, what are the chances that we look back in a decade, and realize that we inflicted a month of trauma on the country because we assumed authoritarian China must have a good reason for it?
I mean, there’s the basic logic that reducing human interaction will inhibit the virulence of something which spreads by human interaction. My personal opinion is that we probably could have avoided blanket shutdowns if we had ramped up testing capacity in late January and February. Now the hope is that we avoid becoming Northern Italy. I think the Chinese have demonstrated that it’s possible to avoid an outcome like that. Whether we’ll be severe enough in our lockdowns to pull that off is another story. Doesn’t seem like people around me are taking this seriously enough. But I’ve been self isolating since late February.
They didn't. That's why it killed tens of millions of people back when the global population was about 1/4 of what it is today, and mobility was much more constrained. No jets in 1918.
The expected death toll from Covid, assuming an overall mortality rate of 1%, would be about 75 million people. So far the death toll worldwide is about 13,000. That's a big number, but only about 0.02% of the expected total without intervention.
