The cost-benefit on "shutting things with a vaccine literally being rolled out" is not the same as the cost-benefit on "shutting things with no idea when a vaccine will come, if ever." Can we please stop pretending the policy debate now is the same as then?
In the early stages of COVID, there was a reasonable arg to make that cases averted at very high cost were just cases delayed. The benefits of delay were therefore uncertain, reflecting our uncertainty about how treatments would evolve. That is no longer true.
For every infection in a high risk group which we avert in the next month or so, there is a high probability that said infection is then averted *forever* because the high risk indiv gets vaccinated. Therefore, restrictions have both a clear & obvious benefit and end point.
This is a strong argument for basically doing everything possible to bring down infection spread *now* because it doesn't mean shifting things to a few months down the road, it means preventing death and illness for good.
This should be so obvious it need not be said. Yet much of the government rhetoric, and the media's discussion of it, seems to proceed from the assumption that this is just the latest round of the same "virus prevention vs economic costs" debate we've been having since last March
It isn't. Sometime this year we are moving on from that debate. Everything we do *now* should be focussed on preventing avoidable deaths and suffering for the time it takes to get the vaccine shots into sufficient arms. There is no "but what about the LT costs?" counter. At all.
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