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I could sum up my thoughts as:
1. The whole thing's a damn nuisance, no doubt about that.
2. I'm in a low risk category so far as I can determine so self-interest says let's get things back to normal.
3. Morally however, well I'm not willing to sacrifice human life if it's being done unnecessarily. Propping up poor business or government economic decisions are not even slightly close to being an adequate justification. An actual justification would be the lack of a medically viable alternative or firm evidence that the death toll will in fact be minimal due to mitigations which will actually be implemented.
4. There are some good outcomes amidst the chaos and it's important that those aren't lost in a return to normal. Excessive trade to the point of undermining living standards and the environment, flying people huge distances so they can pick fruit, hot desking, having office workers all present in a physical office building 9 to 5 five days a week and not holding stock of critical products are examples of ideas that are either well past their use-by date or were never much good in the first place. There's an upside to the pandemic with it having brought some of that madness to an abrupt halt - now let's make sure it doesn't return.
5. If the facts change then my opinion will change. If someone can demonstrate a path that works then by all means let's adopt it. It's possible that some countries might be in the process of that but it needs time to be proven - a change of seasons and verification as to what, if any, ongoing health impacts have occurred.
I'm using the basic logic that conducting an irreversible experiment on anything real is always extremely high risk and something that is done only when there really is no choice. That applies whether we're talking about the entire population or something like a real skyscraper or the real power grid. You don't implement changes based on unproven theories in a real building full of people or the real national grid and it's not wise to do them to the entire population either. Rather, you do the calculations and work it out then you try it somewhere where failure won't matter too much - an empty building that's going to be demolished soon anyway, a small town's power supply, etc. If that all works, then you start scaling it up. If it doesn't work and something bad happens, well you don't want to find that out by ending up with a 100 storey building full of people coming down and ending up as a pile of rubble, the entire country blacked out or finding out that you just wiped 20 years of everyone's lifespan. Etc.
One thing that hopefully will come from this is a better understanding of risk. All of a sudden there should be a much better understanding that those very unlikely but extremely high impact things actually are worth being concerned about. A 1% chance that business as usual is wrecked, the situation we've got with the pandemic basically, actually is a lot more important than the 50% chance of a minor blip which sees a small decline or whatever. That point is commonly missed in discussion about catastrophic risk with the low probability used as an argument to dismiss the concern. In truth, well an unexploded bomb is far more concerning than a dripping tap no matter how unlikely that bomb is to go off.
All that said, well I do acknowledge that my comments are based on incomplete information and there's the problem. So are everyone else's unless there's an actual expert on the virus here with first hand knowledge. For the rest of us relying on what we're being told, well the problem is knowing what might be missing from that story either good or bad.
1. The whole thing's a damn nuisance, no doubt about that.
2. I'm in a low risk category so far as I can determine so self-interest says let's get things back to normal.
3. Morally however, well I'm not willing to sacrifice human life if it's being done unnecessarily. Propping up poor business or government economic decisions are not even slightly close to being an adequate justification. An actual justification would be the lack of a medically viable alternative or firm evidence that the death toll will in fact be minimal due to mitigations which will actually be implemented.
4. There are some good outcomes amidst the chaos and it's important that those aren't lost in a return to normal. Excessive trade to the point of undermining living standards and the environment, flying people huge distances so they can pick fruit, hot desking, having office workers all present in a physical office building 9 to 5 five days a week and not holding stock of critical products are examples of ideas that are either well past their use-by date or were never much good in the first place. There's an upside to the pandemic with it having brought some of that madness to an abrupt halt - now let's make sure it doesn't return.
5. If the facts change then my opinion will change. If someone can demonstrate a path that works then by all means let's adopt it. It's possible that some countries might be in the process of that but it needs time to be proven - a change of seasons and verification as to what, if any, ongoing health impacts have occurred.
I'm using the basic logic that conducting an irreversible experiment on anything real is always extremely high risk and something that is done only when there really is no choice. That applies whether we're talking about the entire population or something like a real skyscraper or the real power grid. You don't implement changes based on unproven theories in a real building full of people or the real national grid and it's not wise to do them to the entire population either. Rather, you do the calculations and work it out then you try it somewhere where failure won't matter too much - an empty building that's going to be demolished soon anyway, a small town's power supply, etc. If that all works, then you start scaling it up. If it doesn't work and something bad happens, well you don't want to find that out by ending up with a 100 storey building full of people coming down and ending up as a pile of rubble, the entire country blacked out or finding out that you just wiped 20 years of everyone's lifespan. Etc.
One thing that hopefully will come from this is a better understanding of risk. All of a sudden there should be a much better understanding that those very unlikely but extremely high impact things actually are worth being concerned about. A 1% chance that business as usual is wrecked, the situation we've got with the pandemic basically, actually is a lot more important than the 50% chance of a minor blip which sees a small decline or whatever. That point is commonly missed in discussion about catastrophic risk with the low probability used as an argument to dismiss the concern. In truth, well an unexploded bomb is far more concerning than a dripping tap no matter how unlikely that bomb is to go off.
All that said, well I do acknowledge that my comments are based on incomplete information and there's the problem. So are everyone else's unless there's an actual expert on the virus here with first hand knowledge. For the rest of us relying on what we're being told, well the problem is knowing what might be missing from that story either good or bad.
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