Okay. Well put and well reasoned.

What about this: where does the governmental mandate to declare and enforce lockdowns end? Who decides what the criteria are, what the threshold for contagion or fatality is, or--given the extremely eclectic number of symptoms attributed to "long Covid"--what even defines an illness?

And what about the non-human world? Thirty million farm-bred mink were recently killed in Denmark in a failed attempt to contain a mutation of SARS-CoV-2 which had already jumped back into humans. Currently, from where I sit, I see three grey squirrels out my window--all fat, by squirrel standards, and clearly at risk. If it is discovered and (worse) announced that a mutation of this virus has appeared in urban squirrels, does humanity have the right to exterminate them all? Do we have a _mandate_ to exterminate them all? Does the mandate extend into the suburbs? And into the uninhabited forests, which could (and would) act as reservoirs for repopulation? I don't ask this as sarcasm; it's the actual next step along the road we're already on.

I wish I had that kind of faith in my government or equanimity about the current situation. Canada's healthcare system is in the envy of the world (and of yours truly), so I suppose it's no surprise that their reaction to Covid is more open and balanced. Here in the US, healthcare is, first and foremost, a business, and even grand social projects like 2020 are constructed accordingly. And this money-first focus has had obvious global ramifications. Operation Warp Speed was not conducted as a public health initiative--it was built up from a web of legislatively enforced financial obligations and risk-avoidance-guarantees with for-profit pharmaceutical companies. Yes, many other nations contributed to the vaccine effort on the scientific front, but it is beyond question that the US defined the terms of the project and largely funded it. And I can't help but suspect that finances are behind the absolute refusal of government (in this country, at least) to reevaluate the initial strategy of universal lockdown.

There's an obvious alternate strategy to universal lockdown: selective lockdown. I.e., voluntary isolation for elderly and vulnerable populations. I've seen it suggested a few times (only a few!) since March, and the response is always one of the following:

(1) Why should the elderly alone be punished? (They shouldn't; self-isolation is voluntary.) But if young people are allowed to do whatever they want, and the elderly are told that they're vulnerable, they will self-isolate rather than die, and so feel that they are being punished. (Are you saying that if the choice is to imprison everybody involuntarily, or just the elderly on a voluntary basis, the former is more fair?)

(2) It's impractical to isolate only the vulnerable. Their quarantine will almost inevitably be broken at some point, either by accident or deliberately, and at that point, it's the same as not protecting them at all. (This is the more reasonable argument, but it's based on an assumption that isolation is impossible, which invalidates the whole idea of isolating everybody in the first place.)

I would argue that there is no rational argument for universal lockdown. None whatsoever. It is an indefensible position when countered with the idea of voluntary self-isolation among those who are (or feel) vulnerable. You're right, there is no perfect solution. The problem is too large, the landscape of threats to human health is far too complex ever to be comprehended by any biological mind, or rationally reasoned about by any synthetic mind. The immune system evolved to solve this insoluble problem in a similarly incomprehensible way. We have encoded in our DNA nearly a billion years of problem-solving strategies related to individual _and_collective_ health. The strategies work not only on the personal scale, but on the scale of families, communities, nations and planets; and not only on the scale of specific viral illnesses, but on the scale of generations, civilizations and species. The idea that the optimization of health can be usefully regulated by the political machinations of a capitalist country like the US seems more than a little ridiculous to me. Human intervention in incomprehensible systems can only result in effectively random changes to that system. That's all a lockdown could ever hope to achieve. A flip of the coin makes things worse.

I appreciate the response.

I understand the motivation to reduce the load on the hospital system, but why was it not considered necessary to debate the strategy used to achieve this goal? The lockdown-until-vaccine strategy was imposed top-down instantaneously, as if it had a proven history, when in fact it has no history. It was merely the first idea suggested; subsequently, any attempt to question the wisdom of this strategy has been treated either as a lack of compassion or as an antipathy to science.

The animal immune system is not the enemy of science. It is the result of hundreds of millions of years of evolution--the same process of trial and error that pushes human science forward, except with a far longer history. The concept of vaccines is, in fact, predicated on an assumption of competence in the immune system. Is it scientific to accept, without proof, that human health is optimally maximized through a year of compulsory isolation followed by distribution of a barely-tested human-made vaccine? The animal immune system is, itself, an inventor of defenses against pathogens. But it only works if it can _see_ its enemy. Or, rather, enemies, as it necessarily balances its defenses against an entire ecosystem of pathogens simultaneously. By isolating our race not only from the pathogen we're currently obsessed with, but from _all_ pathogens, we are deluding our evolutionary defense mechanism into thinking that there are no longer _any_ enemies to defend against (other than dust mites and boredom). It's not difficult to imagine scenarios in which the load on our healthcare systems would be greatly magnified by this approach in unpredictable ways, at unpredictable times and timescales. Any competent scientific analysis of this situation would at least entertain the possibility of disastrous unforeseen consequences.

Debate should be welcomed, not shamed. I don't deny that vaccines have a place in modern medicine, but never before has a year-long global lockdown been attempted, and the lack of debate--the absolute intolerance of debate--about this unprecedentedly arrogant resort to science-by-compulsory-consent is terrifying to me.

I'm sorry for the unbalanced tone. It's difficult, I guess, to maintain a neutral tone when on the "wrong side" of a consensus. Difficult, but not impossible, and I didn't try hard enough.

How about: Is there a possibility that a year of compulsory isolation from almost all pathogens could some day result in a worse overloading of hospital capacity than Covid-19? The animal immune system depends upon exposure to an entire ecosystem of threats in order to develop balanced defenses--defenses which, over aeons of evolution, have attempted to ensure that tactics employed against one pathogen aren't overly detrimental to tactics employed against other pathogens, or to the host itself. Lockdowns necessarily confuse the immune system into thinking there are no pathogens to defend against (not even Covid-19), eliminating the natural defenses which got us this far, and leaving us one single hope: perfect man-made vaccines with no downstream effects on immune function. If the possibility of worse downstream effects exist, can the probability be estimated? Or, in reverse, was the probability that lockdowns are a superior strategy ever estimated or discussed?

I think these questions should have been the subject of intense debate in March, and put to referendum in any functioning democratic society.

Okay, point taken. What about the "debate question," though? Do you think these same tactics should be used the next time? That is, if another unrelated virus with the exact same lethality appears in two years, is another lockdown and another Operation Warp Speed still the solution?

That was the threat in March, yeah. Where did it actually happen? In any case, wouldn't it have been better to have spend our time and money increasing ICU capacity? We didn't, at all, anywhere. Are we going to lock down and wait for vaccine when the next one hits?

Maybe I was a bit too aggressive in pushing my viewpoint, but isn't defending a viewpoint the purpose of a debate? Actually, it's for two opposing viewpoints to be pushed and defended in turns. But, as you said, there is no debate. Holding viewpoint is, for some reason, a cancelable offense. I want to know why.

Why should I speak like a scientist when my whole point is that the world has been ruined by an unhealthy and premature over-reliance on science? I’d rather speak like a person. Will the world be a better place when we decide we’re finished with Covid? If so, will it be sufficiently better to repay us for the misery of 2020? If this is the last virus we ever have to face, the answer could be yes. But if this is the way we’re going to tackle every virus from now on, the answer is no. And if this is NOT how we’re going to face subsequent viruses, then why are we doing it now?

I agree that it’s a normal virus, which means there are many more which we haven’t found because we haven’t looked. So what do we do after we’re done with this one? Same again--a vaccine year for each, under a global lockdown? Or carry on like we have for the previous five hundred million years? Where is the proof that this Year of Science is better, smarter and more competent than the animal immune system, rather than a naive subversion of it?

Sorry, I was referring to the sides of the debate I wish could happen. The topic: was the last year of panic and paralysis justified?

Nobody on either side truly believes that there is anything singular about "the coronavirus." There are an uncountable number of viruses circulating among humans with the same or greater lethality and potential for illness. The definite pronoun in "the coronavirus" is there simply because SARS-CoV-2 is the one virus human society is talking about at the moment. There are also countless mutations of SARS-CoV-2 already in circulation, not counting the one mutation human society talking about. Thirty million minks were recently killed (er, "culled") in Denmark, in a futile attempt to prevent the evolution of "the" virus... even though it had already mutated, and the mutation had already spread back into humans.

There are consequences to obsessions. The current obsession with vaccines has disastrous consequences. "Science" has now burdened itself with the responsibility to reenact "Operation Warp Speed" for every virus that enters the global conversation. Is it worth it? If so, what, precisely, is worth it?

We’ve spent too much time doubling down on random decisions and now we’re bankrupt. We chose one virus out of an infinity of options, declared it to be an extinction-level event, and then threw good money after bad for a year. As a society, we need to be able to admit mistakes. Where is the science in this “science?” Where is the refinement of theory in the face of incompatible evidence? What is the theory, for that matter? Is it that lockdowns prevent pandemics?

We can’t continue to end all discussions with the meaningless mantra, “You’re saying that an old person’s life is worth less than a young person’s.”Nobody ever said that and pretending that they did has literally destroyed the world.

It honestly seems to me that the bitterness of both armies in the Climate Change Wars has spilled over in a literally unhealthy way into areas where those sentiments have no relevance. There are no epidemiologists who claim that the "science is settled" with respect to this virus; they'd be horrified by any suggestion that it is. But the phrase has become such a rallying cry that it has lost its original meaning and come to mean "all ideas are science, and all science is settled." It would be funny if it didn't have the potential to kill so many people in the next few weeks.

I wasn't claiming that "no obvious connection to China" meant that, definitively, so is no connection to China, just stating what would be an obvious assumption by anybody who tested positive for the virus if they weren't told in advance that it originated in China. I'm still inclined to believe that China is the source, but is it not also possible that the virus had been circulating for longer than the first guess? The guess-- that it jumped to humans in a wet market-- is nothing more than that: a guess. It will never be proved. Why must it be gospel forever, just because it was the first theory? Is nobody but me bothered by this immediate ossification of all initial theories as Science, and the relegation of all subsequent theories as Crackpot Delusions?

Ultimately, my whole gripe boils down to this: we're only ever given the numerator. For whatever reason, we're not to be trusted with the denominator. Again, it could be for innocent reasons, but it feels like a decision was made that, if the public were given the denominator, it would immediately create a fraction out of the pair, a fraction which would misleadingly minimize the scare-factor of the naked numerator, and possibly cost lives. But it works the other way too. And the result is statistics that have no more meaning than Dragonball Z power-levels.