That was the excuse for the shutdowns/lockdowns: if we didn’t do it, we would be in an Italy situation watching people dying in the hallways of overflowing hospitals. I still don’t think the shutdowns/lockdowns were a good move at all. I think it killed a lot of businesses and thrust a lot of people into poverty unnecessarily, and poverty is the absolute biggest killer on Earth.
We still want to slow the spread. Right now, we have somewhere between 204,000 - 250,000 dead from COVID-19 (the upper figure is based on the total excess mortality numbers seen this year, strongly suggesting we’ve been undercounting COVID deaths somewhat) with around 9% of the population previously or currently infected. Herd immunity is around 60% (R0 of 2.5, HIT calculated as 1-1/R0).
We have two paths to reach herd immunity. The first is President Trump’s path: get a well tested, safe, and effective vaccine to the American public as quickly as possible so people get inoculated. The second is to simply let this thing burn through the population unimpeded. President Trump wants the first path because it saves a LOT of lives. The slower the virus moves through the population while we get safe and effective vaccines to people, the fewer vulnerable people die from it. Simple math tells us that reaching herd immunity without a vaccine will cost us over a million American deaths. Some places want to keep everything and everyone shut down for however long it takes to get a vaccine out there, but that’s clearly counterproductive and unsustainable. Masks and social distancing are easy to maintain for a few months. They cost next to nothing. They don’t kill businesses and force people into poverty. And they DO slow transmission, which saves lives.
Well, capitalizing words is hardly convincing. The duration and universality of these orders is simply unprecedented in human history. I’ve yet to hear a rational explanation for this. However, I’d be okay with mask mandates if all other restrictions on business were lifted. Control freaks can’t have that unfortunately.