D
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There is a false dichotomy between getting medical control of the virus and maintaining the economy. The economy will not recover properly until this virus is properly controlled. That lesson was learned in the Spanish flu pandemic. US cities which locked down hard and fast recovered sooner and better than those that prevaricated. The US is seeing some of that repeating itself now in Texas and Arizona. Our current Test and Trace is pitifully inadequate, it won't control anything other than Serco's bottom line. The problem with further opening up is that incremental opening up can lead to exponential growth in disease. There is too large a reservoir of virus in the community at present. It isn't coming from returning holidaymakers, it has been circulating for months.
In my opinion, opening schools is safer than pubs and restaurants. Much as I would love to go back to football matches, public crowds like that could be disastrous.
Don't necessary disagree with what you are trying to say.
I didn't think most countries or states implemented full lockdown measures for Spanish flu in the main. When I read up about it, I remember some certainly shut certain premises, banned crowds etc and implementation stuff like social distancing, quite different to a lockdown in my eyes...… Lockdowns are an interesting matter and history will tell us how effective lockdowns are.
We have done most of the stuff that was done for Spanish flu(to late perhaps, I don't disagree) and these have been tightened over time not loosen in thoery, unless people choose to ignore them.
Also an important factor when comparing Spanish flu with Covid, is that the death rate was higher with Spanish flu and it killed all ages(think there was an bias towards working population age and below iirc), so basically all elements of society were much more at risk, with no known cross protection from previous flus with T cells or antibodies.(and medical science was much worse, ie the treatment of such cases was really dodgy!!). Lots going on.
All these factors are not true with Covid, we need to protect the venerable in particular(don't dispute other ages are affected, even when 'recovered' but).
There is the balance as we are trashing the economy, cancer treatment, younger peoples lives(so under say 55s) and everything else imho. People who haven't had the virus(or will never have the virus or people who have had the virus) are going to die from the decisions made. As you would be aware there are hundreds of thousands of early referrals for cancer screening that has not happened, that is not good news and plenty of people will die early. We are looking at probably 1-2 million people lost jobs now(lots still on furloughed) and the knock on effects of that, to health.
I'm not really looking backwards at what has happened in this post and what could have been done. Wwe need to learn but looking at the future with social distancing measures in place.
A fine balance between medical, money, life and death and I suppose freedoms should be thrown into the mix as well, lets hope for the sake of all of us, the world and governments get this approximately correct.
I do know some opinions on here, have far too much covid bias or anti-government bias.
All depressing.