The stated objective of the lockdown was not to overwhelm the ICUs. As far as I know the ICUs in Sweden have not been overwhelmed. So how is that a failure?
As for the economic impact, given the amount of life support injections into the economy, I think the real economic impact of the shock is yet to be seen. Defaults are only starting to rise.
I have been willing to be frustrated with moving the goal post, but there is new information that mayors and governors know that the general public doesn't have a good way to know:
The low mortality rate and managed ICU capacity isn't the whole story. there is a large population of recovering and recovered that have serious complications, that seem random and are unproductive to our society. Blood clots resulting in amputations. 90 day recovery time periods. Other unknown and randomly targeted blood oxygen issues.
The mayors and governors and public health ministers are reacting to that in their own municipalities and countries. The outcomes are not equal, the variables have many different names between jurisdictions, and therefore the stats are not easily collectable. But for people on the front line and getting briefed by those on the front line, they see something horrible that they need to move the goal post to "cases" instead of just deaths and ICU capacity.
99% of the cases that last for months, like Nick Cordero, are from the early days of the pandemic where doctors mistakenly put people who didn't need mechanical respiration on ventilators, damaging healthy lungs and causing breathing dependence that doctors found difficult/impossible to wean from and all sorts of other complications, such as deep vein thrombosis (again, see Cordero's case).
The mean time between symptoms and death is two weeks (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...). Anyone with symptoms is in two weeks, three at the most, either going to be at home wondering what the fuss is about—the vast, vast, vast majority of cases—or dead.
If the complications are a serious problem, as you claim, then I have a few follow up questions:
1) You're making some significant claims, and should therefore have significant data and evidence to back up your claims. Over 3 million people in the US have tested positive for covid. What percentage of them needed to have a limb amputated? That should be easily verifiable. What percentage of them had a blood clot and serious damage? What percentage of them currently have persistent long term damage? If you're making the claim that these things are such a serious problem, you should have data that backs up how common the problem is, and how bad it is.
2) How different are the complications from the normal complications that the flu/pneumonia/etc. can give? Tens of thousands of people get the flu, have complications, and die every year. Tens of thousands of elderly people get the flu, and have long-term damage for the rest of their life. As a society we don't care about that at all. Are you saying covid does more damage, or has more complications? If so, where's the evidence comparing the level of damage/complications?
It's my theory at the moment that this "complication" talk is just another viral "meme" that's mostly driven/spread by people just repeating what other people said, which spreads like wildfire, but never has any actual data backing it up. Of course there are people that have had serious complications. But there's people that have had serious complications from every disease. And it says nothing about how common it is. For example, if 0.00001% of people that get covid have to have a limb amputated, yeah that's horrible, and yeah it'd be great if we could just snap our fingers and make that not happen, but is it really something to focus on?
Those are great questions, the crux of it is that having two flus going around simultaneously is just as bad as it being no different than complications with the flu. And then the possibility that its worse should be just enough to say "look over there and corroborate the concerns".
> Over 3 million people in the US have tested positive for covid. What percentage of them needed to have a limb amputated? That should be easily verifiable.
The stated objective of the lockdown was not to overwhelm the ICUs. As far as I know the ICUs in Sweden have not been overwhelmed. So how is that a failure?
As for the economic impact, given the amount of life support injections into the economy, I think the real economic impact of the shock is yet to be seen. Defaults are only starting to rise.