“Someone please explain to me how shutting down will, in the long term, save lives”
By spreading out serious infections and preventing more cases at one time than there are hospital beds.
“and prevent people from eventually getting the virus.”
The lower we make R0, the fewer people ever get the virus: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3506030/
It’s a big country. We have the space to make more beds. South Korea converted corporate dormitories into facilities to house the less sick, non-critical patients. This also served as a quarantine to keep them out of the public. The strategy worked. They needed a little time to ramp things up and get things read like any country would. But the idea that we need long-term stay-at-home orders, shutdowns and lockdowns is absolutely absurd. Any government who says that is simply a government that is not doing their job. It would be like the garbageman saying we don’t have the capacity to store your garbage, so you have to keep at home this year.
Well, I have 3 sons with higher math degrees that would understand this, but I sure don’t.
The virus will never disappear, but will always be with us lurking somewhere, so it is inevitable that most of those who are susceptible to getting it eventually get it.......