> I also find the idea that the IFR would stay at 0.3% to be absurdly optimistic. We know that fatality rates scale with hospital load, any minor change to IFR could result in tens or hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths.

Hospitals being overwhelmed is not a serious concern at this point in time. Even at NY at the peak, one hospital would be past capacity while a nearby one would be nearly empty. Shuffling is not ideal but it works.

> This level of nihilism is genuinely baffling to me. What course of action are you recommending? Just ignore it?

It's not nihilism. I don't believe that practicing containment actually avoids mortality, except in the most optimistic scenario where lockdown-associated deaths are unreasonably low and a safe/effective vaccine is developed and deployed unreasonably fast.

My recommendation is not to employ any measures to slow the spread of SARS-2 in the general population, but instead to let the virus naturally pass through the general population. We can practice containment for elderly care facilities, although those individuals should be permitted to leave the facility and stay at home if they abject to the prison-like conditions required to avoid pre-symptomatic spread.

> Let’s be precise. That’s a quarter of a million dead Americans. I’d consider that number to be deep in the “catastrophic failure” territory.

Well, we already have 130,000 deaths, so that's about double where we're at now. So, we're talking about a delta of +120,000 if you want to be hyper-precise (I was not to account for uncertainty).

That's not a catastrophic failure at all; early (unrealistic, but that didn't stop our policy leaders from using them) estimates were forecasting 2.2 million dead, that's Ferguson's paper with a .9% IFR and 82% of pop. getting infected.

Please don't twist these words to portray me as callous, as you seem apt to do, but are you aware that ~500k americans die from cardiac disease every year? Smoking?

> Prove it.

You know that there will never be a RCT, so you must rely on good mental models and experimental results, such as ones showing the incredible role of vitamin D in the pathology of respiratory illness, the fact that nitric oxide lowers blood pressure and is currently being studied as a possible COVID-19 treatment, the obvious result that closing gyms = less exercise, the fact that unemployment is disruptive to one's life and tends to lead to a disregulation of sleep schedules, emotional states, etc.

> It’s worked elsewhere.

Where, exactly? Be specific.

New Zealand is the classic example held up here, and now New Zealand, which is a tourist economy, cannot allow any foreign entrants into their country without a 2+ week quarantine. I think that's a bad and unstable solution. BTW this is less of a concern but it makes them vulnerable to bioterrorism (intentionally spreading SARS-2).

OTOH Sweden followed a herd immunity strategy and has gotten there. Findings of t-cell cross-reactivity in the absence of having ever been exposed to a SARS-type virus indicates that a large swath of the population is not susceptible to COVID-19, period. Of those that are, the vast majority will either be asymptomatic, paucisymptomatic, or experience symptoms consistent with a mild cold. A small fraction will develop severe COVID-19 (which is dramatically worsened by vitamin d deficiency), culminating in the need for invasive ventilation and possible death.

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In general, the risks of COVID-19 itself have been overblown, and somehow we never have enough information despite very well-defined risk categories and good bounds on what bad COVID-19 looks like (it looks like SARS-1, the original SARS). Whereas what we do not have bounds on are the results of an unprecedented global economic destabilization and lockdown, nor the socioemotional costs we're inflicting upon our children as well as ourselves.