To my way of thinking there's also a big question that's mostly getting overlooked: not "should we have lockdowns" but "what, specifically, should lockdowns look like?"
So far nobody I directly know has been seriously affected by Covid (which is just chance, I'm not saying nobody gets sick or dies from it - in fact if you get into friends of friends I had a couple of those die back in the spring) but I know two people who can't get treatment for very serious illnesses because of precautionary closures in medical departments.
So to me the debate shouldn't really be "do lockdowns save lives?" but "what specific closures do the most to slow the spread while killing the fewest people?"
But like everything else these days, it's been turned into a litmus test of "do you support XYZ? YES OR NO YOU MONSTER" when in reality it's a super complicated question. I support some measures and I oppose others. I would much rather see people rationally discussing the specifics of how to move forward than just sorting themselves into two teams on yet another issue and shrieking about how you either need to "support the science!!!" or "stop living in fear!!!"
I mean it's a strange illness...the case fatality rate seems to be around 1%, although that's different than the infection fatality rate: the CFR only includes people who become symptomatic and nobody is sure yet if that's half the total infections, or fewer...I don't think I'm seeing estimates that it's more than half but maybe. But it's unusual to see something where, say, half the people get it and nothing happens at all, like there's no way to know without testing that they've had it. But then some fraction get it and get extremely sick and sometimes die. That's just odd and I don't blame people for having mixed reactions. Lots of people I know in the states have stories about someone at work getting sick, and then everyone in the office getting tested and discovering half of them have it, the guy who's sick wasn't the first person to get it but the last. But that doesn't mean it's not dangerous; it just means that people's personal experience with it can vary wildly. So how can you blame people for having different ideas about what should be done?
Rather than focusing on team membership I think people need to be accepting that there are lot of different potential experiences here and consequently of course there will be lots of different opinions about how to proceed and talking about what to do without calling each other sheep or murderers. It's not an either-or situation here.
