I wanna say it was like 2 months in Illinois where I'm from. The fact that you had the virus slowly moving through the essential workforce meant that once you opened back up, the virus was going to get back to the numbers it was at eventually. There was very little put in place anywhere (in the US) that wasn't just basically "let's all slowly open back up and hope covid doesn't notice". That was doomed to fail and primed to have the public call bullshit on a 2nd lockdown (since the 1st one didn't work).A year? We didn't even do it for a month. Lotta places didn't even *try*. I'd absolutely *love* to try it for a month
I said every single post that the US IFR is not 1+% without a doubt, it's most likely not even 0.5%. Is the US not a rich western country with a age-heavy population? England's own agencies put the IFR below 0.5% as well. I don't get what you want, the IFR is not 1% anywhere (unless you single out high-risk groups). You're cherry picking the few estimates that put the IFR above 1% that you've said yourself are "plucked out one's ass" to state the IFR is 1+%. Common sense tells you the US IFR is below 1%. Probably the only way to get an IFR at 1+% is the collapse of the healthcare system.Let me absolutely plain, seeing as the last few comments evidently haven't sunk in: I basically don't give a shit what the global IFR is. It's a stupid, empty statistic that is being abused to uphold claims it has no business upholding. Specifically, claims that covid-19 is kind of harmless, so let's open everything up.
The point is not how many people die, but how many people could die. There is evidence that in our age-heavy Western countries it could be over 1% if we did not take appropriate measures.
No shit.
But what happens if you don't lockdown is stuff stops anyway, because workers have to pull out of work infected or sick or with care duties, people won't go out anyway because they are being responsible or are afraid. Thus the alternative to lockdown is places take a social and economic hit anyway, plus more people get infected and die, and probably the health system collapses. We have been passing around this myth of "lives or economy", but the reality is that we were going to take a beating either way. It was only really a matter of how many lives were spared.
Ironically, of course, what we've seen is countries that took stricter control measures have also been able to reopen more quickly and widely. All these most problematic, heavy, long lockdowns are the result of mass infection, caused because some leaders thought they could trade off economic damage by allowing more spread.
The economy doing legit bad and just doing less than a year ago are 2 different things. For example, Japan's economy took a hit but if you compare it to the hit the US took, it looks great. I doubt any economy went up during the pandemic, which is fine, but for economists if it's not growing, then it's basically shit to them. You can do both lives and the economy (maybe you can't have growing economy but for normal people, it doesn't need to be growing). The US strat of just slowly opening up and hoping covid didn't notice was a shit strat and doesn't prove much except that it was shit strat.