1-1/R0 may be off by a factor of two or more due to heterogeneity, which I don't consider negligible. I listed that and other effects because I believe they are real and significant, and not because they fit cleanly into any argument for a preconceived position. I agree that a horrifying number of people have died (and will die) of coronavirus. I also believe that the societal costs of the lockdowns will be huge, and will be paid for years to come. Ten years from now, will social scientists find a significant and permanent divergence in educational attainment between rich and poor schoolchildren starting from the school closures? I don't know, but from other studies of interruptions in education I fear yes.

Both harms seem tremendous to me, neither so obviously larger than the other that we should disregard information that helps make the best estimate possible. Do you disagree? If yes, how did you convince yourself that the costs of the lockdowns were definitely smaller? I agree that some of the people arguing against lockdowns are ignorant of the likely death toll, or indifferent to human life; but some of them just think you're underestimating the cost of the lockdowns, just as you think they're underestimating the cost in human life.

In any case, we certainly both agree that the government should take actions to mitigate the coronavirus. In your reply above, you've switched freely between "lockdown" and "mitigation", when the latter is a broader category. Japan is surely undercounting some (like everywhere), but you can't miss NYC-scale mortality. I see basically no question that Japan has many fewer deaths, despite the near-absence of lockdown-type mitigations there. As you say, the Japanese aren't aliens--so if something in their culture is saving them, why can't we find out what and adopt it? Whatever they're doing, compared to the USA, it let them operate their society almost uninterrupted and avoided about 46,000 deaths. How can you dismiss whatever they did as non-actionable, when we don't even know what it was?

Was it all the masks? I don't know, but maybe. So why haven't we tried actually enforcing their use, and a big public education campaign on how to wear them properly? How many Americans have dismissed masks because they tried a fabric mask made from too many layers of high-thread-count fabric and found it hard to breathe through? Masks made from meltblown material are easier, and back close to normal prices. Do Americans know that? I didn't until recently.

Or maybe it's the contact tracing? I doubted that before because Japan is missing most of its cases, but I read a paper observing that heterogeneity meant the most important cases (super-spreaders) would be found preferentially. So maybe it's their cooperation with contact tracers? You could spend more than Coca Cola does in a year advertising the importance of that, and it would cost less than a day of strict lockdown. Why haven't we tried that? Or hygiene in general? Are Americans just bad at washing their hands? Major ad campaigns for basic public health measures have been successful in Africa. Why couldn't they here?

Or maybe it really is something non-replicable? I liked the humidity theory, though the trend in Florida goes against that (though Japan also tends to run the air conditioning hotter and more humid than American tastes; should we advise people to do that?). Something genetic? But even if it's not replicable, I'm amazed by the incuriosity most people--on either side of the "lockdown" debate--show at this massive unexplained difference.

I'm afraid you're trying to interpret my comments as supporting or opposing a small number of well-known, hardened, binary political positions. The result is confusing, because reality is a poor fit for either side of those positions. To the extent I have any goal in writing this beyond procrastinating, it's to show that, and to encourage people to spend their time exploring all the (messy, uncertain, self-contradictory) information available, instead of just arguing a position.