Just to be clear, the epidemic only "burns out" when somewhere between 50-90% of the population has immunity. Almost certainly closer to 80%+ unless we discover

Just to be clear, the epidemic only "burns out" when somewhere between 50-90% of the population has immunity. Almost certainly closer to 80%+ unless we discover that a significant portion of the population is resistant to infection due to genetic differences or possible cross-immunity with other milder human CoVs. By suppressing the transmission of this virus, we have failed to build immunity in most of the population. As a result any serious lifting of suppression measures will lead to moderate-severe outbreaks. On balance, I believe that the most effective method is to resume life as normal, and focus on encouraging the at-risk to shelter, along with providing them appropriate government support. Whereas the approach we've taken has destroyed our economy in a very real sense, which will increase mortality even in the absence of a global food crisis. The suspension of elective surgeries on a broad basis was very clearly a mistake, but unfortunately it's the type of mistake that no-one will admit was a mistake. We postponed absolutely important surgeries as a result of this, even in areas like, for example, my county in Central California, which has very low prevalence of COVID-19. Here in California we "only" suspended elective surgeries for a month and now have a backlog that we're still working through. So, just to say it explicitly: the fear that "things will never be normal again" is unfounded, at least in those who are operating off a mental model wherein COVID-19 is 10x as deadly as we previously thought. The fact that we chose a strategy of indefinite postponement was our mistake. Because now people are beginning to realize that if we "go back to normal" then "the lockdown was for nothing". I consider this to just be a sunk cost fallacy, I believe quite frankly that ultimately the lockdown "was for nothing" (that is to say that, at the time it may have been justified based off the projected numbers, but with what we know now we should know that we only shot ourselves in the foot). TL;DR: I believe that we need to resume normal operation of society, and make strong efforts to protect the at-risk. Trying to indefinitely postpone exposure to COVID-19 is a loosing battle. We've adopted a strategy of indefinite containment/postponement that relies on hunkering down and waiting for a _temporally unbounded event_. Given that lockdown-associated damage increases the longer containment is maintained, we are trading off a linear component of damage for a speculated future improvement in outcomes due to vaccines/a game-changer treatment. That to me is eminently foolish. Most decision-making heuristics don't just try to blindly increase expected value (decrease expected loss) but also factor in uncertainy. In general it's acceptable to trade off a little EV for a lot more uncertainty. (Unfortunately in the case of the lockdown, I believe we incurred -EV along with far more uncertainty, for a net loss across all dimensions)