Look, *everybody* wants to open up all the way back to normal, *if* there were no cost.... It's really time to stop whipping this up in to the plague-it's not, and we need to start living normally again.
But there is a cost to opening up further. So, it is not helpful for us to loudly proclaim we should buy more opening up, if we don’t know the price and we don’t know our budget.
We should actually just say how many excess deaths would make us comfortable (our budget), and then we can open up to the extent and duration that would kill the right number of people. But how much opening up would we actually receive at the expense of 100,000 (or 200,000 or 1,000,000 or whatever) additional excess deaths above what our current level of opening up would produce by a target date? Nobody has said, in this thread.
If we don’t say our budget, and we don’t say how much we would get for paying our budget, then how would we know whether we are advocating buying a pig in a poke?
Actually, there was an upper limit mentioned in this forum on the price. The upper limit was mentioned to be below that of “the plague,” which must mean the Black Death’s killing of 30 to 50 percent of the population of Europe over four years. With only that upper limit mentioned, our rallying cry so far is that we should open up more because merely less than 30 percent of us all would additionally die within four years. Hmm. That would help only if we are a country of extravagant spenders of lives!
In short, we all want to open up, and all the governors are taking tentative steps, with mistakes and inconsistencies, but it’s not as if we can realistically just start to “live normally”. We have to find and keep some sort of tolerable trade-off between cost and benefit.
It’s just too bad that we are now starting from such a bungled initial response and high current baseline and that we have so divided our population away from teamwork that we can’t even all wear the simple mask.
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