> "To my reading, you are still engaged in that odd dichotomous debate..."

it's uncharitable to project. you're also trying to coerce my position into "do nothing", which is not only uncharitable but incorrect. "do only things that have meaningful, not mollifying, effect" is more correct.

> "But we absolutely need restrictions."

that's cart before horse, an overly confident a priori assertion, rather than an empirically-backed deduction, like much of the discussion around "the science".

> "...they need to be based on science..."

science will expand our body of knowledge in time, but science is not unassailable (science doesn't create truth, only reflects incomplete shades of it back to us), and an unrealistic faith in science to settle decision-making under uncertainty today simply doesn't help. it just plays into media partisanship, as an unwarranted appeal to authority to coerce others' behaviors (i.e., an application of power) irrationally. in 20-50 years, science might tell us what the best course of action might have been, but it won't settle the debate in this moment.

but luckily we already have plenty of information to make informed decisions, even if much of that information is imperfect. and note that it's not the complicity rituals we've bought into from our "leadership".

for instance, it was clear as early as february that the elderly were at much heightened risk. we should have locked down elderly care facilities and bubbled them, employing a tiny fraction of the $2T in economic aid spent already (in the US) rather than largely wasting it on further enriching the already wealthy. that would have reduced fatalities by on the order of ~60%. a meaningful effort, rather than safety theater.

it was clear around march that those with co-morbidities were also at heightened risk. that's harder, but getting that information out to the public changed the behavior of those at risk without the need for lockdowns for everyone. people are capable of making informed decisions with trustworthy information. it's (partisan and media-fueled) propaganda that's made it difficult to tease out what's reliable and trustworthy, cornering us into largely ineffective, performative mitigations (i just heard a woman on npr proclaim "i don't just wash for 20 seconds, i wash for 30 seconds!" as if that makes any difference to anything other than her own self-righteous ego and npr's editorialized virtue signaling).

it was clear that the trajectory of the virus was more flu than black death, deadly to less than 1% rather than 30-60%, despite the hyperbolic rhetoric around "exponential" growth (actually sigmoidal/logistic). if it had it been a new black plague, it would have been quite obvious early on, and people's behavior would have swiftly adapted out of self-preservation without requiring martial law.

it's clear that a few simple mitigations (distancing, avoiding large gatherings) can keep the infection rate largely under control, which is about the best we can do without destroying entire societies, governments, and economies (which we seem wont to do anyway).

life is an endless series of cost-benefit tradeoffs. we accept risk and death every day, not attempting to save every single life at all costs. if we did, we'd spend every excess dollar beyond water, food, shelter, and clothing on potentially preventable causes of mortality like cardiovascular disease, cancer, and respiratory disease[0], but we don't. it's irrational to act differently for a novel virus that isn't very deadly, all things considered.

lies told by the "left" are no better than the lies told by the "right". and the whole left-right dichotomy is a misdirection perpetrated by both to blinder our thinking in ways that benefit only the entrenched powers. in other words, break free and stop parroting phrases like "based on science" and apply your brain to understanding how to independently make decisions under uncertainty and with imperfect information. that's a true super-power.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rat...