> About six weeks ago the media decided blanket lockdowns were the only reasonable solution. I think the big psychological driver was the situation in Italy an

> About six weeks ago the media decided blanket lockdowns were the only reasonable solution. I think the big psychological driver was the situation in Italy and Spain: The overwhelmed hospitals, the localized rationing of certain medical care, and front-line medical workers who were getting sick (and sometimes dying). I guess it turns out that nobody wants to watch their medical system collapse? > Any public health official who suggested maybe just the most vulnerable be isolated was met with scorn So how would you imagine this working? Healthy people in their 70s who live in standalone homes might be able to self-isolate. (I know a handful of highly-disciplined people who are planning to remain isolated until we get a vaccine, even if it takes until the fall 2021.) But people who live in multi-generational homes, or who rely on assistance, or who live in apartment buildings probably can't self-isolate. And how would we handle people in assisted living? Do the caregivers "live in" for a month-long shift? The death rates in the over-70 group are pretty bad (and even healthy people of that age usually have some pre-existing conditions), and the death rates in the over-80 group are ugly. For the population at large, it looks like ~0.2% of NYC is already dead, and ~20% of the population has antibodies. So we'd be looking at something like a 1% fatality rate, which would work out to over 2 million dead nationwide before we reached herd immunity. And that's not counting any long-term damage to survivors from blood clots, oxygen deprivation, or kidney damage (Wuhan is allegedly seeing an uptick in dialysis patients). I don't know how common or serious these complications are at a population level. > It will be clear in several more months that the Sweden strategy is the only way to minimize total harm and navigate this crisis. I wish I had a crystal ball, so that I could actually know what worked the best. You seem very certain that Sweden's on the right track. Some Asian countries seem to be focusing on minimizing gatherings, masking, contact tracing and isolation of the infected, which allows them to have a partially functioning economy. All of these solutions are awful in different ways. I'm just not convinced that the right answer is as clear as you make it out to be, certainly not without a lot more detail about how to successfully isolate people over 70 from an airborne virus.