Just letting the virus run has huge, and long-lasting, economic impacts. Worse than an occasional, short, lockdown.
That's certainly an argument if it weren't also a straw man. There is nobody asking to allow any virus to run through the population, leaving large numbers of people dead or permanently disabled.
I won't quote your entire post, but it's not April anymore. There's no serious argument being made that our only tool is lockdown. We know that masks help. A lot. We know more about the relative risks of various activities within the economy. As one Public Health official put it: "It's more like a dimmer than an on/off switch". So you're inferring quite a bit about what's meant by "lockdown". In November 2020 it means something different than April 2020. Or at least, it should.
There's been no recorded death from COVID-19 to anyone under the age of 10 years old in the USA. It's safe to open daycare centers, preschools, and grade schools.
See my post above. It may be safe (though I think you are discounting the danger to the staff), but the impact of community spread makes it logistically difficult to keep those institutions operating.
Deaths and disability from COVID-19 for people aged 10 to 40 years is exceedingly small. People in this age group should be allowed to choose to go to school, work, socialize, and so on. We can certainly take precautions, make allowances for people that choose to stay home, and so on.
Yet another failure to account for asymptomatic spread from the less-vulnerable to the more vulnerable. And it's unclear that long-term health impacts (what you call "disability") is all that small. I've seen figures of 30%, but the fact is we simply won't know until we see the long-term health outcomes of the "recovered" population.
I'm seeing people like yourself think that there's only two options here, lock down or do nothing. We can take a scientific approach here. We know children are highly unlikely to be affected or spread COVID-19. We know young adults with no chronic medical condition are also quite safe. Risks increase with age and we can provide options for people to manage their risks. The risks are never zero because with every precaution taken against COVID-19 there's a risk for something else. There's certainly an economic cost to every precaution.
A lock down is to "flatten the curve", the total area under the curve remains the same. This means the same number of people dead or disabled just not all bunched up together where it threatens the economy. That's been the story from the beginning, it seems some people got the idea that a lock down could put an end to a virus. That's not how a lock down works.
You accuse the OP of a strawman, and present another yourself. Per my response above, there are experts who see this as a continuum rather than a binary choice. You also are stuck in the April mindset of a lockdown being solely to flatten the curve. What we really need to be doing (and to date, have done a piss-poor job of) is to get to the point of suppression, but also have enough testing and contact-tracing in place to prevent the inevitable outbreaks from overwhelming our ability to test-and-trace our way through to the point where a vaccine is a viable tool.
In short, we are back to lockdowns again because our first-wave lockdowns had inadequate follow-through. It was entirely predictable that if all we do is have a lockdown but then decline to invest in the other mitigation tools available, we would end up back to where a lockdown becomes the only viable tool again.
