Coronavirus latest: Austria set to become Europe’s first country to roll-back lockdown
https://www.ft.com/content/db36991b-572c-3f1a-ae73-25078b512499

Maybe an old, frail retired person who owns his own home and lives on social security has little to lose from a lockdown, but would probably die if he got sick. Sometimes he helps babysit his little great-grandkid, who behaves as if Skynet designed the perfect disease-vector Terminator. So he’s pro lockdown.

A young, healthy person who is most likely effectively immune since he won’t get any serious symptoms if he gets infected, and who went into huge debt to start a small business that the lockdown destroyed, is probably con.

Maybe the old man is the young man’s grandfather and cares about his welfare, and vice versa, so interests are complicated.

Also, you can imagine someone in the middle, with medium risk, medium insulation vs hardship, medium levels of support. He’s kind of like a swing voter, little things may shift his opinion one way or the other.

On the one hand, life under lockdown is stressful and psychologically wearying, for a variety of reasons, and as days go by, the pressure builds, and the desire for relief and release grows and grows. He becomes more con.

In addition to losing fortunes and longing for a return to normal life, I think the psychological impact has been mostly ignored in the shadow of the gargantuan tragedy of all those deaths and physical traumas.

But that’s kind of a mistake, because we need to be trying extra hard to cut each other plenty of slack in times like this, and we won’t if we lose sight of how stressed, edgy, obsessive, and anxious this is making everyone, even those who are by any material measure perfectly comfortable. There’s an emotional Minsky cycle to parallel the financial one. Yeah, it’s anecdotal, but judging from my coworkers, my guess is that at least ten percent of people have moved ten percent of the way toward nervous breakdown, and there’s a doubling rate for that too, and let’s pray it isn’t too fast. People, please try harder to be excellent to each other.

On the other hand, quickly rising death counts are kind of terrifying, and so medium guy provisionally stays more pro, for a while.

Which is to say that reporting about the scary rate of the rising of those death counts is performing an important social function of balancing out countervailing pressures, and influencing public opinion to support current lockdown policies.

But when that rate falls a lot, reporting that fall means that function is no longer being performed, and the pent up – and still growing – pressures start to win the war.

Then what happens is that a complaint avalanche will get triggered on social media, ‘arguments’ – however badly evidenced or reasons – for why it’s safe and morally compulsory to end the lockdown now – will go viral, the “preference cascade” will both reveal and establish a new common knowledge, and, well, take a good, depressing look at our current leadership class and tell me if you think one man in a hundred of them has the spine and the balls to stand up to that.

I could imagine at the end of April maybe having more debate, or maybe it will be regional. I know some areas aren’t expecting the peak until after early May.

If Bronx zoo tigers in double cages catch the virus, why is anyone expecting the current lockdowns for humans to achieve anything other than a minor delay? Should we be locked down more securely than Bronx zoo tigers?

If hospital therapy leads to only a modest increase in survival probability once you factor in the positives from ventilators and negatives from antibiotic resistant hospital bacteria, what’s the point of paying the huge economics costs froM minor flattening of the curve?

According to commenter Rif A. Saurous, there is a 3-week delay between policy implementation and measured death rates. If true, that would seem to imply that lockdown policies could at least be rolled back to whatever they were 3 weeks prior (to 1 wk from now, so 2 weeks prior to today), no?