I am 62.
My Coronavirus risks are higher than yours.
We each have a right to assess our own risk and state our own opinions.
Risk of Deaths and economic risks have to be weighed up against each other. Neither is an absolute.
Catatastrophic economic depression is possible if the lockdowns last long enough.
No lockdown can eliminate the virus or its future mutations which may be more virulent.
While I disagree with the current lockdowns and express that opinion, I abide by the current rules and do not advocate non compliance to others.
Sweden Japan and South Korea are not locking down the way other nations are and China is retreating from lockdowns.
I’m 30 and on paper I’m in great health. However, a certain heart condition runs in my family. I was going to get tested for it but will have to wait until non-essential doctor’s appointments are allowed to resume. Also just about every cold I have ever had has turned into bronchitis. I actually got pneumonia when I was 11. Does that mean I have a higher risk of complications or death from this virus? I don’t know. I read about a healthy 30 year old baseball coach who died from CV. Doctors are speculating that some people produce less surfectant in their lungs and those people are the ones who have the most trouble breathing after a CV infection. If so, than age and certain health conditions are no longer the only risk factors.
The lockdown was never about stopping the virus entirely because that’s impossible until someone comes up with a vaccine. It was about flattening the curve enough that health care systems are not overwhelmed to the point where people who would have survived it die anyway because there are no ICU beds left for them.
CV could definitely be an exception but most viruses actually mutate to less deadly forms over time because killing the host is counterproductive to the virus’s reproductive success.
China is relaxing the lockdowns because the lockdowns did what they were supposed to do: flatten the curve. China is still getting new CV cases but their rate of increase is no longer itself increasing.
South Korea didn’t have to do a months-long shutdown because they aggressively tested their population from Day One of this thing. So they could just quarantine the CV-positive people and their contacts. Unfortunately we just have too many cases for that approach to be practical now. If we had started testing people back in January we could have done what South Korea did and the US economy, even NY, would already be back in business, but that’s not the world we live in.
The Japanese were bowing rather than shaking hands and wearing masks and the Swedes were standing far apart from each other before anyone ever heard of the coronavirus. So CV is spreading more slowly through those populations because ANY virus would spread more slowly through Japan and Sweden.