I work for IT in hospitals and at least in Crawfordsville (small town) and Lafayette (college town) both in Indiana (a "hot zone"), the hospitals are less busy than normal. If anything would be causing hospital personal to being overburdened would be the current policy that if anyone coming to a clinic (in the hospital network) has any of the like 20 covid symptoms, they MUST go to the hospital for care (for anything). I saw a lady turned away in a clinic because she had a headache and very much needed attention for a blood pressure issue. Either she goes to the hospital and has a higher bill or chooses not to because money possibly and her health is adversely affected. In a couple months or so we'll be deploying new PCs to the biggest hospital in the network in Indianapolis and I'll get to see how it looks there.
How does having a lockdown policy help the groups you're talking about being cruel to? It's not safe for the elderly to go back to "normal life" regardless of the plan enacted. And a non-lockdown plan makes it so they wouldn't have to isolate for as long. You're failing to address the moral issues on the other side. 100s of millions are starving because of the lockdowns, 10s of millions in America are going to lose their houses, the poor are being far more greatly affected than the rich, and kids are not learning correctly and missing out on basic food and nutrition (and having to do things like sit outside 7-Elevens for wifi to participate in class).
The point of the Japan example is that any country can do what Japan has done and do it extremely cheaply. Stuff like informing the population about taking supplements like vitamin d and zinc (that Japan's population naturally gets from food) would help in greatly lowering the harm the virus poses saving many lives, saving people from needing hospitalizations, saving overburdened healthcare workers from too much work. The fact that everyone wears masks in Japan means when people do get infected the viral load is much less meaning the infection is much less severe. Half of Tokyo has most likely been infected and the entire country has less than 2,000 deaths. Japan is the perfect example of somewhere that has great results that has not suppressed the virus; suppression isn't the only path to victory. It's all about looking at the data and just enacting simple common sense approaches. I've been saying that for months.
The Great Barrington Declaration is far far less of any kind of exacting guidelines and more a conversation starter IMO because of how very general it is. The main doctors that talk about their stances aren't saying anything along the lines of "everything back to normal, rope off the old people". It's not like they're saying let's have big ass conventions of 50,000 people again, have movie theaters packed, have people riding public transportation body-to-body without masks, etc. Just because their stance is against the overprotection of the "status quo" doesn't mean they are on the extreme other end.
USA
