> Also, healthcare systems were overwhelmed nevertheless and with measures (lockdowns) in place.

This is more or less a myth. The real story is the massive scaledown in medical capacity across the country.

Locally, in New York, certain hospitals hit capacity. Other hospitals nearby did not.

Additionally, if the goal is only to avoid hospital overrun, you should concede that our current strategy is totally misguided, since we are trying to suppress spread way beyond the threshold required to prevent overrun. (Actually, I believe that we could do literally nothing to slow spread and not have a true overrun scenario, but that's a discussion for another time)

Case in point: In California our Dear Leader Gavin Newsom just plunged us right back into lockdown, including closing fitness centers (gyms), despite our hospital system being in completely fine shape.

It's all a farce. I don't use that word lightly.

As a thought experiment, imagine a world where SARS-CoV-2 jumped to humans just the same as it did, but magically we never found out about it. So, it spreads completely uninhibited. That world is a world with less unemployment, less poverty, better educated kids, less attainment disparities (lockdown, online schooling, etc ALWAYS disproportionately impacts the poor), less all-cause mortality, and in my opinion, less COVID-19 mortality over the medium-term.

Contrary to everyone saying "how can you say this is a mild virus, are you crazy?", the evidence overwhelmingly shows that it is very comparable to a bad-severe flu season at worst.

No, we would have been way better off doing nothing. That's what's so sad. Every measure we've deployed has not only been arbitrary and capricious, has not only been ineffective, but has actually made the problem worse insofar as they were effective.

I've seen people make risk appraisals with COVID-19 that are completely alien to how they evaluate risk in any other areas of their life. In the extreme case, I have friends who regularly engage in unprotected sex and do all kinds of dangerous drugs like benzodiazapenes, who are not in a COVID-19 at-risk group whatsoever, yet are petrified with fear for their personal safety (it's not that they're super selfless and just worried about infecting others, to be clear).

As a more moderate example, I've seen mothers petrified to send their kids back to school, despite the fact that their kids are at no risk from this, and despite the fact that their kids are actually at risk from Influenza, from meningitis, etc.

The real pandemic was the pandemic of mass collective delusion, accentuated by (here in the US) our tumultuous political environment in which people are willing to distort anything to the point of absurdity if they think it will win them political points.

> We don’t know whether that’s true still and what the impact exactly is.

Well, at this point you must be willfully closing your eyes. We have good evidence of pre-existing immunity in a chunk of the population. We have good bounds on our IFR, leading me to settle on a final number of around .30%. We have very clearly delineated risk factors. For many people, Influenza is more deadly, for many people they are about equivalent (for example if you are 55 with diabetes/hypertension and overweight but not obese, your risks are pretty comparable), and there are some for whom SARS-2 is way more dangerous (people 70+ with comorbidities). So even ignoring the pre-existing immunity and even without accounting for heterogenous suceptibility, when you run the numbers it quickly becomes clear that what we've done is not just unprecedented but is actually insane.

Note I haven't even brought up the constitutional/ethical implications of what we've done. I think what we've done, speaking from a US perspective, is completely unconstitutional, doubly so after the BLM protests started and were given a free pass while people were banned from church (I don't have a religious bone in my body and I think that's incredibly evil). Not to mention we've thrown the notion of personal responsibility out the door. It used to be that if I went out into public and got the Flu, I understand that that was a risk of being a human in the real world, and that if I wanted to avoid the flu I should have stayed sealed in a hamster ball, whether metaphorically or literally. And yet with COVID, if someone goes to the grocery store and gets COVID, suddenly it's the fault of everyone who ever refused to wear a mask, or everyone who did wear a mask but went to the grocery store just to grab one item rather than dutifully only going every 2 weeks, etc.

The reason I don't talk about ethics/constitutionality is because it doesn't convince the people I'm trying to convince (people like you). I consider it self-evident that anyone who seriously supports lockdown simply does not care about the constitution and clearly does not share my ethical framework, which I understand. Which is what's so crazy about this to me - purely from a utiltiarian perspective, any truly balanced look at the risks/rewards of lockdown would have any sane person immediately run out of the room screaming. That's how bad the deal is. Yet somehow, the risks of COVID-19 (which are quite well-defined right now btw) are perpetually unknown and we never know enough and there could always be lifelong damage, people with shards of glass in their lungs and clotted blood spilling out of every orifice, and yet nobody points out the very obvious unprecedented and unknown effects of embarking upon a massive global economic destabilization (which is forecasted to kill more from child hunger alone than COVID-19 ever could), and an unprecedented environment of fear, hysteria and panic that lost the plot back in the beginning of March.