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Originally Posted by someone123
I think it would have been worse than other similar events in recent decades but far below the worst-case scenarios even without the society-wide mitigation measures which probably did little in the long run and had a catastrophically bad cost-benefit. I agree with you about the falsifiability problem and most people seem to have a hard time seeing this or why it's a problem.
One thing we can see even right now with omicron (maybe the 4th or 5th time this same thing has happened) is that rather than rapidly infecting everybody the spread tends to be limited long before then. With omicron the spread was fast (maybe faster generation time) and the peak came quite quickly. But it's hard because people want to know what will happen in the future and so the false certainty of the simple models is alluring, or they're held up as a kind of "worst-case scenario" we must always plan for (even though we don't have the resources to respond to every potential threat in this way). Furthermore many people attribute peaks and declines in cases to whatever they want, which could be expanded mitigation measures (even though around here most of the same stuff has been in place for many months now). Many people will look at the "wave-like" case curves and make up a story that fits their views, which around here mostly means faith in masks and social distancing, etc.
I wonder how much the mitigation measures are extending the pain at this point. Even if all we cared about were hospitals I wonder if our strategy makes sense.
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Agree. We can debate what degree of lockdown was appropriate in the spring of 2020, but by 2022, the answer is pretty obvious: locking everything down even now that everyone's vaccinated and we've switched to dominant strain that's weaker than a cold is not a good economic cost-benefit calculation at all.